Begin Again Moments: Psychedelics
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What personal experience led Eleanor Mills to explore psilocybin?
Just before I was made redundant from the Sunday Times, I had been on a retreat in Jamaica where I'd taken some magic mushrooms. And during, it was a kind of therapeutic retreat. It wasn't just like taking them for larks. It was medicine. It was medicine.
It was seen as a medicine where you could learn from it.
It was a properly spiritual journey where you were going into taking the magic mushrooms, asking it some questions, and you do three heroic doses in a week. And they call them heroic doses because they want you to reach that point of healing. kind of singularity where your ego dissolves. Does that mean the amount? So it's quite a lot. A heroic dose is really going to be. So I took eight grams of psilocybin and, you know, then I know. And everyone was doing that too. So it was a lot. And what it did was it kind of, on the last day, they said, you know, take away, throw away everything you no longer need in your life and all kind of blow it up. And I had the sense of completely melting. When I took the mushrooms, I had the sense of completely kind of melting into a golden, it was like being, at the time I described this being like in a big bowl of golden cream.
And I felt like I'd been recharged by the universe with this kind of golden light.
What is a heroic dose of psilocybin and its intended effects?
And what I came out of the trip with was just this really strong sense of the possibility of renewal and reinvention at this point. And I came out of it with a sense that that was what I wanted to do, that I wanted to help people to catalyze that change.
Would you mind if I asked you a bit more about that retreat? Because I think there might be lots of people watching who have no idea about what Magic Mushrooms do, what a retreat would be like. Had you ever had experience of that before?
Well, I'd taken loads of ecstasy and stuff back in the 80s. Yeah, you know, back in the day.
Back in day.
Back in day. We all did our, like, jumping around. I did a lot of jumping around in fields. We were doing it together. Yeah, exactly. We were the rave generation. So, yeah, back in the 90s, I did my hands in the air. But not since then. Oh. work and everything not really and i'd always been scared of taking acid so we took e and that kind of thing but i'm not hallucinogenic no hallucinogens seemed a bit scary we were really brought up with you know we had xamo just say no didn't we on yes totally and then we had on on acid everyone said if you took acid you'd try and jump out of a window yeah you jump out of a window and think you could fly so i was like i don't think i want to do that so but you went from nothing to hero dose in jamaica
Yeah, I went with a friend who'd had really bad PTSD and she wanted to go because she'd read the Michael Pollan book, How to Change Your Mind, which is all about... And there's an amazing documentary, isn't there? Incredible documentary which people should watch on Netflix, which is basically the book kind of in film version. But he talks about the... What actually the neuroscience of what the psilocybin, which is the active bit of magic mushrooms, does in your brain. And I've talked to a lot of neuroscientists about it as a good journalist. And what they say about it is it's a bit like if you're going skiing and there were really deep ruts in the snow because it's all been carved up and there hadn't been snow for a while.
What the taking the psilocybin does is it kind of like a fresh fall of snow and it allows you to create new parts in your brain. That's brilliant. Which I think is a really clever way of describing it. It really stuck with me.
How did Eleanor describe her transformative experience on psilocybin?
And so it's very good for people. If you're on PTSD, you're kind of stuck in grooves or it's good for people who are anorexic or obsessive compulsive or depressed where their brain has got into deep grooves. And this just allows you, and when you see it under brain scanners, You can see new connections being made because it takes offline something, the default mode network, which is the front bit of your brain, which basically tries to control everything all the time.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What personal experience led Eleanor Mills to explore psilocybin?
0:00–1:19
2
What is a heroic dose of psilocybin and its intended effects?
1:19–3:17
3
How did Eleanor describe her transformative experience on psilocybin?
3:17–5:37
4
What insights did Eleanor gain about renewal and purpose after her trip?
5:37–11:16
5
What scientific evidence supports the therapeutic use of psychedelics?
11:16–13:01
6
How do psychedelics like psilocybin affect brain connectivity?
13:01–14:57
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Begin Again with Davina McCall
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