Paul Risse

And in that, I started to search for answers for the pain.

When you're 23 and you're trying to process the pain of your child, who's three years old at the time, and not being in her life every day, and you being the catalyst for a relationship ending.

And then, you know, your best friend being involved with your ex-wife while you are still married.

And then like trying not to like murder, like revenge, bitterness, sadness, like every single negative emotion that you could possibly imagine was for two years of my life.

That's what I was in.

And.

whenever i started taking mushrooms they started to show me things like reveal things to me and show me things about myself and uh you know as a christian that's something that the holy spirit does that it convicts you if you have a wrong thought and uh so i started being intentional about taking mushrooms and every time that i would take them uh it seemed like i would grow a little bit and

I mean, it was a mixed bag.

Sometimes there'd be entities that were encountered, but sometimes with a psychedelic experience, specifically with mushrooms, sometimes it's just psychological and you go super into your body and into your thoughts.

And then other times it's outward, like y'all's faces would be dripping off and there'd be like, you know, flowers coming out of the wall right now.

And, you know, you can sense what's real and not real.

But whenever I went inside myself for the first time eating mushrooms, it was... I...

in the story that I told myself about my divorce and, you know, putting blame on the other person, like I could no longer be the victim.

I like very clearly saw like every single negative thing that I had done and like that it was my fault.

And I had been trying for a couple of years to tell the story differently.

And, um, so it's like, it was, it was really, um,

It helped at that time, without me knowing Christ, it helped me process a lot of things on a very deep level.

And in hindsight, the things that I thought that I had transcended and was growing faster than, you know, someone else in awareness or psychological thought process of healing and all that, I had gotten really clever at repressing those things.

And I thought I was transcending them.

You know, I would say for the next 10 years from, I don't know, from 20 to 30, you know, I took mushrooms around a thousand times and tried DMT, 2CB, 2CI, MDMA, salvia, almost everything.