Episode 55 Jennifer Chesak (psilocybin for women – Full Transcript)

Hey, it’s Michelle with Medicine with the Medals. Today, it’s just one medal. Mark is not feeling well, but we’ve got a great show.

 

We have Jennifer Chesick. She is an author and a teacher, and she has written an incredible book about women and psilocybin. There is a really big difference between men and women taking psilocybin, and she has got the whole skinny on it.

 

So please welcome Jennifer Chesick. We’re so excited to have her. I’m Jennifer Chesick, and I am the author of the Psilocybin Handbook for Women.

 

I try to hold this up to the camera here, block my face. This came out in 2023, and I’ve been on book tour ever since. But as an author and a journalist and a fact checker and everything like that, I’ve had a big background in writing about women’s health.

 

And then I had also, as a journalist, been writing about psychedelics. And so it made perfect sense to merge the two into a book. And so that is why we’re here.

 

Very cool. Were you down in Miami? Were you at the convention down there? I think I met you. Oh, yeah.

 

What is it? Wonderland? Wonderland. Was that it? Yeah. I did.

 

Mark and I actually met you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very excited.

 

Yeah, I’m very, very excited. Looking forward to this conversation. So before we jump into your book and women and microdosing and what stands women apart from men as far as psilocybin goes, tell us about if you’re comfortable about what brought you to psilocybin.

 

Absolutely. I’m totally comfortable with that. So that’s probably the psychedelic that I’m most fascinated with.

 

I love that it’s a natural substance. It’s non-toxic. There’s a lot of safety.

 

As long as people use it safely, there’s a lot of safety there. So I feel like it’s the one that I’m most comfortable with as a psychedelic. And then just digging into the research, there are so many benefits.

 

And so I had been a little nervous to try it myself and hadn’t done that. And then as I had been writing about psychedelics more often and then landed a book deal, I was like, well, I can’t accurately write this book without doing my own journey, of course. And so I always really recognize that there can be a lot of fear out there in people, especially if you haven’t used a psychedelic before.

 

You’re very new to that. And I completely understand that. So that was part of the reason that I wanted to… How I wanted to approach the book was to express that I understand that we’re not going into this in a willy-nilly way because I didn’t either.

 

But I did my own journey with a guide, with a very skilled guide. And it was a two-day retreat. And it was one of the most profound experiences of my life.

 

I love to hear that. I love to hear that. And so then have you also had your own experience with microdosing psilocybin? Yeah, of course.

 

So obviously, microdosing is just a really small amount. And so you’re not actually in a altered state of mind. You’re not high, essentially, like you would be with a macrodose.

 

And so microdosing is something that people can do fairly regularly. I’ve done it more on a… Not necessarily following all the specific protocols, because there are some protocols out there that are microdosing schedules. And I don’t do it that frequently.

 

I’ve just done it on a much smaller scale, using my own intuition as to when do I feel like I really need microdosing and that sort of thing. But I’ve heard great results from people, whether they’re using it just sort of intuitively as to when they need it, or also if they are following these very specific protocols where you’re following those schedules with dosing for a while and then taking days off and taking weeks off and that sort of thing. I think that psilocybin… Because I feel the same way.

 

I mean, we are involved in all the medicines, and we speak of all of them. And my husband and I, between the two of us, we’ve definitely experienced all of them. Psilocybin is one of my favorite.

 

It is a medicine that we can do in our homes. It’s a medicine we can do ourselves. I agree, going with a guide when you’re doing the higher dose is always a good idea.

 

Working with somebody is a great idea, a coach, an integration coach, somebody who facilitates. But we tell people the same thing. I mean, microdosing becomes very intuitive.

 

And while I think it’s always a great idea to start with a regimen, a protocol, whether it’s Stamets four days on, three days off, Dr. Fadiman’s five days on, two days off, or whatever protocol you’re following, it becomes intuitive, very. It does, yeah. And I think those protocols are great.

 

What we really need, and people have been pushing me to create this, and I haven’t, but maybe will at some point, but I think we need a microdosing protocol that is specifically for the female body because of the way that hormones tend to interact with psilocybin and how the menstrual cycle and our stress axes overlap. And so a microdosing session can impact your menstrual cycle. Your menstrual cycle might impact your microdosing.

 

And so I think we really do need a very female-specific protocol. That is incredible. Let’s do it.

 

Let’s do it together. I’ll help you do it because I think that is amazing. And I think that it is really important.

 

I mean, men and women are different and it affects us differently. Our hormones are different, everything that’s happening. I’m 53.

 

I’m going through menopause right now. So psilocybin affects me differently today than it did five years ago when I was not going through menopause. So I agree with you.

 

I think it is very specific to each one. I mean, men have their own thing too. But so talk to me a little bit about how psilocybin affects women in particular and the menstrual cycle and say what beyond.

 

Yeah, I think it’s such a fascinating thing. And when I started to dig into this research, I wasn’t sure if I would find anything on how it may impact the menstrual cycle. But thankfully, some scientists out of Johns Hopkins have been studying this a little bit.

 

And I think they’ll continue their research. So this is a little bit of preliminary research. But what we know is that estrogen affects the binding at the serotonin receptor sites.

 

And when we use the psilocybin, that’s what’s happening is our serotonin receptors are being activated. And so when we think about what may be the potential interactions, these scientists out of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Natalie Gutasian and Dr. Sasha K. Narayan, they did some case studies. And what they learned is there’s three possible things that might be going on.

 

And they might overlap and go on at the same time. But what may be happening is that when we are using a macrodose especially, but probably to some extent microdosing too, we may get our periods earlier than when we would have expected them to come. And again, this just has to do with how the menstrual cycle works.

 

And then also, it may re-regulate a menstrual cycle. If someone’s had an irregular menstrual cycle for various reasons, that can happen through polycystic ovary syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, endometriosis, all of these things can sort of disrupt the menstrual cycle. And it may even bring back a menstrual cycle after a period of absence.

 

Now, I don’t mean when we’re getting into menopause, but I mean if we are still in our reproductive years or even in perimenopause and we’ve had some irregularity from, or I’m sorry, an absence of a period, especially from something like polycystic ovary syndrome, it may bring back the menstrual cycle after a time of an absence. So those three things are possible. And people always want to know how would this even be possible? Why would these mechanisms happen? Or why would this potentially happen? And so the mechanism there is that our menstrual cycles occur along what’s called the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis.

 

And that simply means that our brains are in communication with our ovaries. And that’s why we have the different phases of the menstrual cycle, like the follicular phase, then ovulation, then the luteal phase. Then we get our periods and it starts all over again, right? And so that’s the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis.

 

At the same time, we also have the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So that’s concerned with our stress response. And of course, everyone has this axis.

 

And when we activate those serotonin receptors through psilocybin use, that is occurring along that stress response axis. But by their names, you can tell that they overlap with the hypothalamus and the pituitary glands. So mostly they overlap in our brains.

 

And we know from just general experience with menstrual cycles that if we’re stressed out, that can impact our cycle. And then also, if we’re on our cycles, we might be a little bit more stressed sometimes. And if we’re getting our periods.

 

And so we know they overlap in general. And then researchers are saying it’s not a stretch to assume that if you are doing a psilocybin journey or microdosing, that that may have an impact on the menstrual cycle. Usually it seems like favorably.

 

Of course, we need more research on that. And then likewise, where we are at in our menstrual cycle may impact our experience on psilocybin, especially if we’re doing like a macro dose. So we don’t have a whole lot of research out there yet on like when is the proper timing within the menstrual cycle.

 

But we can turn to indigenous wisdom, which I think we need to do whenever we’re discussing psilocybin because that is it’s a sacred substance. And it’s why we have psilocybin is through indigenous wisdom. It’s why we have that in the mainstream culture, essentially.

 

And so I did talk to a wonderful woman. Her name is Michaela de la Mico. I’m sure a lot of people, if you’re interested in psilocybin, have been following Michaela de la Mico.

 

She’s on Instagram as Mama de la Mico. She’s great. But I interviewed her and she was so gracious with her time with me for the book.

 

But what she was saying is that it’s likely better if we are doing a macro dose closer to ovulation rather than when we get closer to our periods. And so again, this is also why we need a good micro dosing protocol that aligns with the menstrual cycle. But her reasoning is that as we get closer to our periods, our bodies become very energy depleted.

 

And we have more energy available to us during ovulation. And of course, psilocybin can be very energy depleting just by the nature of that. And this actually really dovetails with mainstream science too.

 

And I never want to pit one against the other. I just like that they can coexist and be beautiful, like indigenous wisdom with mainstream science. But it dovetails well, because again, when we get into that late luteal phase, as we’re moving towards our periods, our bodies become more insulin resistant.

 

And it’s because we’re shuttling all the nutrition towards the potential baby, you know? And so that is why we are energy depleted during that as we get into our periods. And we feel more petite. We have more cravings and things like that.

 

Additionally, a lot of people fast before doing a micro dosing journey. It might just be the day of that you fast. And that’s really inaccessible when you’re getting closer to your period again, because you need more nutrition then.

 

So yeah, I was really grateful for her wisdom. She also mentioned just with a protocol for micro dosing. Again, we don’t have a protocol that’s very specific to the female body.

 

But she did share some wisdom in that if you are planning to try a protocol to see how that affects your menstrual cycle, to do it for whatever, follow whatever protocol you’re gonna follow, whether that’s Stamets or Fatiman. Follow it for three months, just to see how you are reacting to that and maybe track your symptoms in a journal. Yeah, exactly.

 

So I’ve rambled on for a bit there. I’ll give it back to you. No, no, no, no, please.

 

I love this so much. I’m just mind blown right now. And I don’t really know why, because I’m a woman and I do psilocybin.

 

But I don’t know, I guess it’s probably because I’m in menopause and I haven’t had my period for a long time. And after I had my third baby who just turned 22, I got the Depo shot, which poison now, I didn’t realize at the time. And so I stopped having my period years ago, right? So I’m just mind blown right now.

 

And I think that, tell me if there’s been any research on premenopausal, postmenopausal or during menopause. Yeah, so I have some really good stuff to throw out there. There hasn’t been a lot of specific research, but we can draw some parallels based on what’s going on in the body with perimenopause and getting into menopause and all of that to kind of guide us on how psilocybin may be able to help with perimenopause, because I think there’s a lot of potential here.

 

So I like to think of three, actually four things. So the first is that psilocybin can help us with that perimenopausal depression that can crop up. And I’ll dig into each of these in detail.

 

I’m just giving you an overview. And then helping with female sexual dysfunction, which is a possibility there. Dealing with trauma, as we go into perimenopause, our trauma actually matters.

 

This is where it gets really fascinating to me. And then also the final thing, the fourth thing would be, if we’ve developed coping mechanisms or like behaviors that we don’t really want, that aren’t serving us anymore, whether that’s like using too many, too much wine, like substance use, like too much wine to numb ourselves from our emotions, because we have heightened emotions during perimenopause. I think psilocybin can be a really great tool to help us rethink our behaviors and then retrain ourselves to behave differently if we’ve got something we wanna change.

 

So I’ll dig into these in depth if that’s okay with you. Of course, I love to hear about this. And I think, yeah, please jump right into it.

 

All right, great. Yeah, so with depression, so even if you’ve never been diagnosed with depression before, as you get into perimenopause and we have this decline in estrogen, and actually our estrogen really fluctuates during that time, we think of it as just this like drop off, but there’s a lot of fluctuation and with progesterone too. But these changes can ramp up anxiety, even if you’ve never had anxiety before, and ramp up depression, even if you’ve never had depression before.

 

And so if you go to your doctor as a perimenopausal woman and you say, I’m suddenly like feeling a lot of depression and anxiety, and I just don’t really feel comfortable with my own head anymore, they’re going to give you a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or a similar medication. And these are just antidepressants. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

 

I never want to say, oh, we can only do psilocybin or we can only be on our antidepressants and that one is worse than the other. That’s not the case. I think that SSRIs are great medications.

 

They have a lot of benefits for people. And I never want to encourage anyone to go off of a medication without working with their doctor and to safely do that, if it’s even safe for you to do that. But what I do like to point out is that SSRIs are not our only options when we go to our doctors and say, hey, this is what’s going on.

 

They’re like, hey, here’s a prescription. It’s not your only option. And so the difference between psilocybin and an SSRI would be, of course, like SSRIs, you have to take every day for them to work.

 

They have a lot of side effects. One also being female sexual dysfunction can crop up during that time. And with psilocybin, we know that there aren’t these same side effects that are occurring with SSRIs.

 

So that’s one thing. And again, you have to take SSRIs regularly. Whereas with psilocybin, you can do these microdosing protocols if you’re planning to microdose.

 

But you can also macrodose just very sporadically. Like a lot of people will macrodose once a year, maybe every six months, that sort of thing. And it has a lasting effect on depression.

 

We’re seeing that through different studies that it may last like three months, six months, up to a year, just depending on the different factors going on there in the various studies. And then the other thing, too, that’s kind of a difference between SSRIs and psilocybin is that SSRIs work by blunting your mood. So not only are they blunting your lows, which is what we’re going for, but they’re also kind of blunting your highs.

 

And I have a concern with that. If you’re in perimenopausal, you’re not able to lean into your joys as much. Psilocybin, we’ve learned through research, it doesn’t blunt mood.

 

Actually, this is a really cool thing, is it makes you feel more OK with both your highs and your lows, which is actually really kind of cool. So yeah, I’m a proponent of what are all of our options, not just SSRIs. So that’s one thing.

 

And that relates to the depression component. And then I did mention female sexual dysfunction. So female sexual dysfunction is another side effect that can occur in perimenopause.

 

It can occur really at any time in a person assigned female at birth in their lifetime. And in fact, it’s interesting with if you’re in your reproductive years, the percentage of people who have female sexual dysfunction is about 40%, 45%. In perimenopause menopause, it goes up to 80%, 85% of women have some type of female sexual dysfunction.

 

And that can encompass many different things. It might be vaginal dryness. It might be pain with intercourse, low libido, inability to orgasm.

 

All of these things can constitute female sexual dysfunction. So it’s a wide variety of things. But of course, it’s very prevalent in perimenopause and menopause.

 

And we’re learning through research now that there’s probably some potential for psilocybin to help with female sexual dysfunction. We know through survey results that people who report using psilocybin also report having more satisfied sex lives, which is a cool thing. There might be a few things going on there.

 

Now, I don’t necessarily think that psilocybin is some sort of aphrodisiac, like we’re thinking of like chocolate or oysters, if those things even actually legitimately work, I don’t know. But psilocybin is not like you’re going to take it and be like, yeah, I’m feeling really sexy right now. It’s not that.

 

There are a couple of other things that could be going on. There are two things that are protective, that are somewhat protective against female sexual dysfunction. Now, no guarantees, but one of those is having intimate partner communication.

 

And the other is having a positive body image. So I’m going to start with the positive body image thing first. So we are studying psilocybin for things like eating disorders right now.

 

And we’re getting really good clinical trial results, especially for something like anorexia. And when you have an eating disorder present, there is some rigidity in a part of the brain called the angular gyrus. And what we’re seeing through psilocybin research is that psilocybin may lessen some of that rigidity and help you rethink your body image, which is actually really kind of cool.

 

And so obviously that applies to eating disorders, but even if we have a negative body image, we may be able to work on that through psilocybin use and therapy related to that and everything included. So that’s one aspect where psilocybin may be able to help with helping with female sexual dysfunction is helping us with our body image. Secondly is the idea of this intimate partner communication.

 

So now this doesn’t mean that you have to do psilocybin with your partner and like plan to have sex or anything like that. But what it may do for you is break down some walls that you may have for yourself and then you feel more confident being more communicative and intimate with your partner in a different way. Psilocybin has this potential to make us feel more connected in general to the universe at large, to the people that we know and love, to nature, to the animals, all of that sort of thing.

 

And that connection is like a real amazing feeling I can share from my own personal experience. I went off and did my own psilocybin journey without my husband wasn’t there. We’ve been married for a long time.

 

And I came back home and I felt just like I had already loved him obviously, but I just felt like this love grew exponentially and I felt safer and more connected somehow. It’s not like he had changed in any way, but I had gone off and changed myself. And that was a really important thing.

 

And again, it was just like bringing down these walls, but I felt such this strong connection. I still feel that. So that’s a beautiful thing.

 

Psilocybin allows that perception, right? I always tell everybody, it’s when you come back from a journey or if you’re microdosing, but a journey of any of these medicines, but yes, psilocybin, it’s not that your life has changed, but your perception of it has changed. And now you’re looking at it, not from here, but maybe from up here. And when that perception changes, anything is possible.

 

Everything. Everything is possible. So beautiful.

 

Yes, absolutely. If I have two more things to cover related to menopause, one is the trauma component, and then one is the behavior change. So with trauma, what we know is that if you’ve had adverse childhood experiences or what researchers call ACEs for short, these can be anything from like childhood sexual abuse, just abuse and neglect in general, living in poverty, living with systemic racism in your community, living through a natural disaster, some other type of tragedy, incarcerated parents, all of these things can be an adverse childhood experience.

 

There’s so many things, bullying, you know? Sure. And if you’ve had four or more ACEs, and by the way, I’m sorry, I think it’s one in six adults has had four or more adverse childhood experiences. So that’s a lot of trauma out there.

 

But if you’ve had four or more adverse childhood experiences, you are more likely to have worsened perimenopause menopause symptoms, which is just so fascinating, but it has to do with the way that these adverse childhood experiences, when they occur, they physically change our stress response, and that has lasting impacts into adulthood. What we’re learning through research is that psilocybin actually helps us have a lessened psychological response to these traumas that we had in childhood. And so it’s possible that if we go and do these like macro doses, or we’re working on trauma and through microdosing as well, that that lessens that psychological response.

 

And then we come back to the table of menopause and having these symptoms, and they may be lessened because we fixed our stress response to some extent, which is so fascinating. I’m just like, wow, mind blown on that one. Totally.

 

But it makes total sense, you know? Yeah. And then the final thing is, I mentioned behavior change. So we’re seeing psilocybin be studied for things like alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, smoking cessation, all of these things.

 

And so again, in perimenopause, we may start coping by numbing out with alcohol, numbing out with other substances, even with food to a certain extent, like high carbohydrate foods can be a very numbing thing. And so we can tend to do that as we get into perimenopause, where we have these heightened emotional changes that are going on because of our hormone shifts. And so if we’ve started to develop addictions or compulsions like that, psilocybin has a lot of potential to help us work on those.

 

And it just simply has to do with the way that helps us change our old pathways in our brain, and sort of just a mechanism to help us with a lot of really good behavior change. Now, it’s not a magic bullet. We call it magic mushrooms, but it’s not completely magical.

 

You do have to do the work where you do a journey or you’re microdosing, and then you’re also doing a lot of personal work through integration, which is that process of learning from your psilocybin experiences, things like that to make that work. But I see a lot of potential there for helping us make those behavior changes, especially if we’ve got behaviors that are just not serving us in menopause. Well, as I was gonna say, letting go of those things that are no longer serving us.

 

I think that that is one of the biggest gifts of any psychedelic journey, if you do the work afterwards, like you said, it’s integration is, the journey is the smallest part of it, right? It’s the work afterwards and before that is where the work really is. So I love that you say the things that are no longer serving you, because that is exactly what happens. And do you think that that has to do with really finding this true self-love? Absolutely, yeah.

 

I think there are a few things going on and we can turn to the research again. So like dig into why does this even work? Like why does psilocybin even help us with these things? So researchers have this model that they came up with to help kind of explain why psychedelics can help us change our minds essentially. And so they call it the REBUS model, R-E-B-U-S, and it stands for Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics.

 

It’s a kind of a wonky little acronym there. But REBUS model. Have you heard of it? REBUS model, I have not.

 

Okay, this is fascinating. I just wrote it down though, so I’m going to be researching it. Okay, so I love it.

 

But what they’re essentially saying is when we’re young, when we’re kids and we haven’t formulated our full identities or like how the world around us operates, our minds are really flexible and because that hasn’t solidified yet. As we get into adulthood, then those things become much more solidified. Obviously, we can still work on our identities forever, but there becomes some rigidity there with our, again, beliefs about ourselves.

 

And sometimes we have negative beliefs and beliefs about how the world around us operates. That becomes really rigid. So we think about it when we become adults, our minds are almost like this frozen pond.

 

Now, if you were to try to take a new belief, maybe it’s a belief about yourself, you’re trying to change it. You try to drop it on a frozen pond, like think about it as a rock that you’re dropping on a frozen pond. It goes thunk, it doesn’t really gain entry.

 

But if we’re on a psychedelic, this is where the relaxed belief comes in. Now we can think of that pond as just being water. You take that rock, you drop it in, it gains entry, causes a nice little ripple effect.

 

So why does this occur? Like why do our brains just become so rigid? Again, really fascinating. But what happens is it’s almost like our minds form this belief hierarchy. So I like to relate it to being a corporation.

 

If you think about a corporate structure, you’ve got your CEOs at the top. So imagine that there’s like some CEO beliefs and they don’t want to listen to any newer beliefs coming in, any new employees that are trying to climb the ladder. They’re like, no, we don’t need to listen to you.

 

Go away. And when we’re on a psychedelic, that hierarchy disappears and all beliefs can become equal. So it gives a chance for the new beliefs that you’re trying to gain entry into your mind to kind of climb up that corporate ladder.

 

And I just love that that’s the CEO thing is my little weird analogy for explaining it. I had another therapist I was talking to at one point and she had a really great analogy for it too. But if we think about a ski slope, right? And you’re a skier and you go down the same paths in your mind that you always go down, right? Because you’re gonna follow the nicely groomed ski path that’s there for you.

 

Well, if you’re trying to create a new pathway belief system and change behaviors, you need to go off-roading a little bit with the skis, right? And so psilocybin helps you more easily create new pathways in that snow. And then the more you use those pathways, so again, if you’re trying to abstain from alcohol, the more you do that, the more that pathway becomes like the one that’s the nicely groomed pathway that you feel safe and comfortable going down. And that’s also just a really beautiful analogy for helping us to understand how psilocybin may help us.

 

And again, and just going back to that, what you were just reiterating is that it’s so important to do the integration after. Because if you just do the journey or you’re just microdosing and you aren’t really thinking about what’s going on in your life and working on that, then there’s not a huge benefit. It’s more that you’re actually leaning into, hey, I wanna change these things.

 

I feel and psilocybin is a tool to help you do that, but you also have to do the work. Yeah, and it’s about what I tell clients is it’s not about getting up every morning and taking a pill the same time every day, the same way, the way you do pharmaceuticals. And I don’t have anything against Western medicine at all either.

 

I believe there’s a time and a place and not everybody can do psychedelics and I get it. What I have come to believe is that maybe these SSRIs and different medications are prescribed for too long, right? Maybe they’re supposed to be for a certain amount of time and what happens is this goes by and then another one goes by and it’s just too long. But I think that what really starts to happen also is you are seeing these things that are no longer serving you in a different way, just like you said, because these neural pathways are being recreated or like I like your way of saying it.

 

It’s really incredible the way that it happens. I always describe to people, I was in a 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous for 20 years before I came to plant medicine six years ago. And it was like there was one way of doing things and I learned a lot.

 

I learned a lot. I learned a lot of beautiful lessons in my 20 years in AA. But I felt after a certain amount of time, there has to be more.

 

They’re missing something. There has to be more. It has to go deeper.

 

And the way that I would describe that to people is I would say, it’s like I’m standing up next to a wall and I’m this close to it and all I see is yellow. But the further that I get back from it, oh, now it’s this and now I see this and I can see this and it becomes something totally different. That’s what happened to me the first, I mean, my first was ayahuasca, but it’s the same thing.

 

It can happen with psilocybin. It’s the way that it happens. Yeah, absolutely.

 

I think one of the beautiful things too about psilocybin and how we can think about recovery too is that, again, 12-step programs can be really great, but they often only allow for one way of going about things, which is you must be totally sober and not everyone is ready for that and not everyone actually needs that depending on very specific circumstances with your situation, obviously. Some people absolutely need to be completely sober. You know, I understand that, but I feel like psilocybin when it comes to recovery can help meet you where you are and if you’re not really ready to give up alcohol completely or aren’t planning to do that, maybe you can just change your behavior with alcohol in some way.

 

Now, again, that’s not for everyone. It’s just a possibility for some situations related to sobriety or recovery. I agree and I think now, you know, almost seven years later, I think, and I do not go to AA meetings anymore, I still haven’t had a drink in 27 years, but it’s just not a part of my life because here’s the way that I think about it.

 

When I went in and really healed those traumas at a cellular level and did deep, deep, deep work and not that there’s not more to heal, there is, but when I was doing this, total recovery is possible. I’m going to say the thing that nobody says in an AA meeting, total recovery is possible. Not that it can’t come back.

 

Addictions can come back. If I’m not continuing a spiritual path and doing the work, the work, which is similar to AA work. If I’m not doing the work, then I can easily get trampled by something that happens in my life and be back drinking again.

 

Of course. Okay, so I want to go back really quick to the indigenous because we love, we support the indigenous. We believe that you have to.

 

I mean, it’s, you know, psilocybin’s grown all over the world. It grows. It’s not grown.

 

It is grown. It just grows, but it’s still a sacred medicine. So at Mama Dose, we, 6% of all of our sales go to support the Chawanawa tribe out of Brazil.

 

They go to Costa Rica to own jungle medicine to serve their beautiful medicine, ayahuasca, which is where we go and sit with them there. But they’re all about, you know, it’s all about all these medicines and giving back to the indigenous because this is not Western medicine. It’s not.

 

Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second because I love that you touched on that. I think it’s so important.

 

How do you explain this to people? How do you talk about this? I think it’s really important to understand why did the U.S. even get access to psilocybin? How did that even happen? That’s an interesting origin story and it’s not a pretty one. So Maria Sabina was a healer in Mexico. That’s just the simplest way to say it.

 

That’s not the actual title. She was a healer in a village in Mexico and this fella named Gordon Wasson, I think he was a banking executive at like JP Morgan or whatever. And he thought of himself as an amateur mycologist.

 

Interestingly, his wife was the better mycologist, but we never hear about her. Oh, that’s funny. Imagine that, right? He went down to this village and met Maria Sabina.

 

And he decided that he really wanted to partake in a psilocybin journey, but that was not allowed for the white man. And so he lied to her and he said, hey, my son is missing and I need to find him. This journey will help me.

 

So she allowed him to participate with the contingency that he would not share her location or share her name with anyone. Well, what did he do? Not only did he lie to her, but then he went back to the US and then immediately wrote a big news or a magazine article for it that was national, right? And so everyone learned about Maria Sabina and psilocybin. And then all these tourists started to flock to this village, including famous people like John Lennon and Walt Disney, at least allegedly.

 

And this town was overrun with tourists and people in the village did not love this and they blamed Maria Sabina and her home was burned down. Her son was murdered and she died in poverty because of this situation, really because of this man, in my opinion. And so it’s a huge violation of consent and honor with this community.

 

But again, psilocybin goes back thousands and thousands of years in indigenous communities. And so that indigenous wisdom is just so incredibly important to how we think about psilocybin now. And so I know we have this whole resurgence of research.

 

It began kind of in the middle of the last century and then kind of halted during the war on drugs. And now it’s back. We have to really honor where psilocybin comes from.

 

And again, it comes from these indigenous communities who really taught other people how to use it. And so it’s important to bridge the two. When we talk about science, we need to be talking about indigenous wisdom as well, because as a wise woman in, she’s a therapist, Natalie.

 

Oh, I’m not going to think of her name right now, but she’s in the book. But she mentioned this concept of, it’s called a two-eyed seeing concept that comes from indigenous wisdom. And it’s this man who kind of created it where it’s like we need to be bridging science with indigenous wisdom because they are both relevant.

 

We think about science as this process of doing something over and over again to reproduce the same results or learn something new through clinical trials and just experiments and things like that. That’s what exactly indigenous wisdom has done for centuries, where they’ve been using psilocybin with different practices, learning what works, what doesn’t. And that is part of what we bring to the table when we’re even thinking about psilocybin, because it’s where we get concepts of like set and setting and integration from are these ceremonial practices that indigenous communities participated in and brought to our culture? I mean, you know, where we kind of borrowed it from them, essentially, I should say.

 

And it’s just so important. I think that that’s probably, this is what my husband and I, Mark and I become fearful about with these medicines becoming legalized or becoming more westernized, I should say. And they’re talking about putting ayahuasca in a pill.

 

And, you know, you know what’s going to happen, psilocybin. I mean, we just know. So that is where we do get fearful is the indigenous part of it is going to be lost.

 

And it is such an important part of it. I think it really is. And I think if we’re going on retreats where we’re going to an indigenous community, which a lot of people are doing, going to Mexico, going to Jamaica, you know, going to South America, all over.

 

If you are working with an indigenous practitioner, you definitely need to be honoring what their rules are for ceremony and things like that. And one of those rules is that pertains to the female body is you don’t journey when you’re on your period. And so a lot of people will pay a lot of money and go on these retreats, not realizing I’m going to get my period when I’m there and they’re not going to let me participate and they’re going to get angry, right? Just be aware of that and listen to indigenous practices.

 

It is there for a reason, because again, they have this history of use and learning. But yeah, I agree. I worry about these things too.

 

I don’t want that indigenous wisdom or culture to get lost because it does speak to how we use psilocybin. And it’s so important. I mentioned set and setting.

 

So set is your mindset going into a psilocybin journey. Setting is what’s around, who’s around you, what’s around you. Are you in nature? Are you inside? Do you feel safe? All of that.

 

And these things are so important for psilocybin practice and safety with psilocybin practice for any psychedelic, really. And so, you know, I’m really glad to see these things being talked about in studies like set and setting and integration are always talked about. And so we get a lot of that information from indigenous wisdom.

 

And I just really want to make sure we’re keeping that alive. I love, I love, love, love that you say that. We feel exactly the same way.

 

I’ll tell you a funny story really quick. And so we, like I said, we go down to OM and we actually hold psilocybin ceremonies there as well. This is not psilocybin, it’s ayahuasca.

 

But they do, they have very strict, not all the tribes, but some of them have very strict rules on women being on their moon, right, during ceremony. And so we have just come back and my daughter was down there. She’s 27 and she had, they were going to sit with the Noki Koi tribe who is also from Brazil.

 

And they bring their medicine, ayahuasca with them. And they are very strict about it. And they are very strict and say that, you know, anybody that is on their moon cannot drink.

 

Well, what happens is people are coming all the way to Costa Rica. They don’t know these rules. And so now they get there and they can’t.

 

So they were bringing the women somewhere separate who were on their periods, on their moons, as they say. And, you know, they would let them do a different kind of ceremony. Well, now they will let them drink the medicine, but just a very small amount of it.

 

So they are very strict about these things. And the leader of the Noki Koi tribe, his other rule is, which is not just theirs, this is in general, is there’s no sex or masturbation three days prior to any of these ceremonies. He says that when you go up to him to drink the medicine, he will know and visualize in his mind you having sex or masturbating.

 

So that better give you enough fear not to do it. Right. But the reason that they do this about the women and their period is because women become too powerful.

 

They become too powerful. There’s too much power, which is just so old school and funny. You know, it’s just so funny.

 

It’s just, but I get it. We are powerful. And when we are period, it’s, you know, we do become more powerful.

 

So just a funny story. So my daughter was down there a couple of weeks ago and she got her period in the middle of the ceremony. Yeah.

 

She was like, what do I do? But it’s, you know, these indigenous tribes are, they teach us so much. I do. It’s really beautiful.

 

It is. It’s really important. Well, I love talking to you.

 

I would love to have you back and talk some more. And I think that you’re really onto something here with coming up with a, some kind of regiment for women. Yeah.

 

I, I guess I need to get on that. Right. 2025 is here.

 

I got to be amazing. And adding some, some sort of, of, you know, functional mushrooms in there that, that help with different things. We’re getting ready at Mama Dose to, to introduce four of the functional mushrooms because they’re so important.

 

When we talk to people about microdosing or macrodosing, we also talk to them about those functional mushrooms and how important they are to take and how, you know, I mean, it changes your life. Even if you don’t know it, it does. It changes everything.

 

Yeah. What are the, what are the functional, can you tell me what the functional mushrooms that you like to use? So we use lion’s mane and lots of it. We don’t do just a little bit.

 

I mean, 500 milligrams a day and, you know, big doses of, of lion’s mane and cordyceps. And then we do a, we do a turkey tail. Okay.

 

Yeah. I love it. Yeah.

 

Yeah. And then we’re going to do a blend. That’s what Mark and I do.

 

And we get the big tinctures, but we’re going to offer them to, to people because we recommend them so much. So we thought, you know, we should start doing our own and sourcing them and making them. So, well, let’s talk about your book again, really quick.

 

Where can we find it? Where can we find you? Yeah. So the book is sold anywhere books are sold. You can get the book.

 

If you are, if you’re wanting a signed, like a personalized signed copy, if you go to my Instagram at Jen Chesick, that’s J E N C H E S A K. I’m sure you’ll have it in the show notes, but you can find in my bio link and it will take you to the website for a bookshop that’s local here in Nashville. And I will pop in and personally sign the book and, you know, write, write a little message and it’ll get sent out to you. So if you do want a signed copy for yourself or for someone else, you can, you can order through that way.

 

But again, anywhere books are sold and I’m on all the social media channels as at Jen Chesick, as I mentioned, that’s the same handle for everything. And if people have questions for me, I always try to answer them in a DM. Of course, I’m not a doctor, but I don’t even play one on TV or anything.

 

Yeah. I mean, you’re very knowledgeable, very knowledgeable. Yeah.

 

Just like to say, I can’t give medical advice, but I can direct you to the right places and the right research and all of that. Absolutely. And you’re in Nashville.

 

We forgot to touch on this. I love Nashville. Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that.

 

I’m originally from Nashville. I went to Belmont. My daughter went to Belmont.

 

So what do you do? What do you teach at Belmont? I actually teach in the media studies program and publishing. So I teach copy editing and then like these media studies classes where I teach about what’s real news, what’s fake news. How do you tell the difference? Just giving people that real media literacy is so important.

 

And then some nonfiction writing classes too. My jam, you know, writing. I get it.

 

I get it. Well, you’re a very cool lady. I really look forward to talking to you again.

 

If you ever wanted to, you know, collaborate on something in the future. You know, we would just love we believe in microdosing. We believe in mushrooms.

 

We believe in all these medicines. But, you know, psilocybin is really home to us. We love psilocybin.

 

Yes, me too. Clearly. Yeah.

 

Well, thank you so much. It was absolutely a pleasure talking with you. And I just appreciate you.

 

I appreciate the work you’re doing and the message that you’re getting out there. And just thank you.

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