Kate Muir: Mushrooms, midlife and me

There is a lead facilitator and two helpers – or wise women or shamans – for this hard-core psychedelic and therapeutic experience, and eight more women sitting on large cushions around the room: a neuroscientist, a hairdresser, a psychotherapist, a horse whisperer, a writer, a yoga teacher, a midwife and a full-time mum of two. Some are on a return trip; others are neophytes like me. We are a mixed bag of nationalities and cultures – German, Dutch, English, Scottish, African, Indian. We are in our 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. We are here hoping to change the trajectory of our lives, to look into the future with elation, to excavate and heal a past that we still cannot fathom.

To aid us in this all-night task, we will be taking, under strict guidance, a large dose of the psychedelic plant medicine psilocybin. Our magic-mushroom mix includes three different strains: Amazon, Golden Teacher and Jack Frost. What will they do to us?

Now that I’m beyond my own midlife crisis, which included a divorce, leaving my job, and a menopause so dastardly that I eventually became a women’s health campaigner, wrote a book, and made two Channel 4 documentaries on the topic, I have come here to explore my unconscious, but I’m secretly terrified I’m going to have a bad trip, a total horror-movie experience. While we’ve been told to mentally foreground the issues we want to explore, which we discussed in a one-on-one session with the lead facilitator, I’m panicking that I will fall into a psychedelic pit and think about snakes, of which I have a serious, long-time phobia. But everyone in this psychedelic circle is reassuringly friendly.

We’ve been told to detox beforehand, to not eat too much or drink alcohol, as the large dose of mushrooms could make an unlucky few throw up. Sitting around sipping herbal tea, I get to know some of the women’s stories. Once people know I write about women’s health and the menopause for a living, I become a safe repository of the unrepeatable. While the women in the circle know I’m a writer, they also know that I’m reporting directly my own experiences, not theirs. These women are here for self-healing and multi-dimensional reasons beyond: spiritual longing, unresolved grief, repressed memories, oppressive marriages, secret addictions, parental shadows, entangled relationships, depression, anxiety, gender curiosity. Some are simply seeking a vision of pure joy.

Our facilitator tells me about her own psychedelic plant medicine journey, which included ayahuasca and psilocybin and helped her heal from past trauma. ‘The more I drank medicine and sat with the different plants, the more I learned,” she says. “It was a decade of deep work, pulling off every layer I could get my hands on like an onion, every skin that I could shed.”

I begin to feel better about the snake phobia, safe in this circle of enquiring minds, and start hoping for the psychedelic enlightenment I’ve read about in academic studies until I go for a walk up the hill beforehand with the neuroscientist, who has taken this trip previously.

“What’s it like?” I ask her.

The neuroscientist makes a happy-sad face.

“It’s five years of therapy in one night,” she says.

Perhaps the hard stuff is not going to be some snake-based trip but eviscerating my unconscious. Peeling the onion. But I’m hoping the trip will be exhilarating, too; an experience. I’ve taken magic mushrooms a few times before, once when I was 15 and got on the back of my friend’s motorbike as the high kicked in, with no regard whatsoever for our survival. Since then I’ve had a few honey-pickled shrooms partying at home with friends, which made everything hilariously joyous and the moon enormous. But that was very much recreational, in lower doses, and a long time ago. The yurt experience, I hoped, would be much more profound, done with powerful group intention, female intention and therapeutic in some as yet unknown way.

My positive experience of the major brain changes caused by taking body-identical HRT – a copy of my own natural hormones oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone – has made me fascinated by the work on the mind of chemical messengers, drugs and plant medicines. I followed up on my own brain resurrection by reading the neuroscience on the extraordinary mental changes caused by hormones – or the lack of them – around menopause, as well as throughout the menstrual cycle, and this made me more open to looking into the science of psychedelics and eventually brought me here, to experimenting with mushrooms myself, some 30 years after my early trips. HRT had given me back my words, my memory, but what about the vision? How else could I explore my brain?

The truth is that humans have known of these powers since the dawn of time. From the ayahuasca plant medicine ceremonies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon to my own hairy, short, damp Highland ancestors grubbing up magic mushrooms for ceremonies in stone circles, humans have always used psychedelics for healing and spiritual purposes.

Now the science officially confirms that psilocybin’s chemical structure and action on the brain is in fact similar to those of the “feel good” hormone serotonin – but often better. A 2023 meta-analysis of psilocybin-depression trials showed “promising potential for the treatment of depression, among other conditions,” and mentioned that “some of the benefits include a rapid and exponential improvement in depressive symptoms and an increased sense of wellbeing that can last for months after the treatment, as well as a greater development of introspective capacity.”

For ordinary psychonauts like myself, the big psychedelic trip is, of course, as fashionable nowadays as it is illegal. That’s why I can’t tell you which European country I’m in, or the name of our wise and wonderful facilitator, who, it turns out, has prepared a visionary playlist that will move us from dreamscape to dreamscape throughout the long night. As we prepare for that ritual, she tells us that a lot of women come to her for plant medicine at midlife, on either side of menopause. “I feel like there’s a recalibration as we move into our wisdom years,” she says. “There’s a sense of emergency. A deep questioning. ‘Wow, I’ve got how long left?’ So many of these women are digging out this other person who has been very quiet and… oh my God!” She laughs.

She goes on to talk about the mushrooms being “plant teachers” that we can learn from, but I’m in sceptical mode at this point, cynical about the so-called wisdom of shrooms. I am of strict Scottish Presbyterian DNA – instinctively I don’t dabble in the otherworldly. But I’m melting a bit, and the promising science has got me hooked. In the spirit of enquiry, I dutifully make a list in a notebook of some questions I want to ask myself – or perhaps the shroom, the goddess, the “plant teacher” – on the journey. Perhaps mine are typical midlife clichés: parental estrangement and death, a broken relationship, guilt and nagging self-criticism. In all, there’s a sense of the unsaid and the unheard thrumming beneath my surface. I’ve done normal psychotherapy around these losses and changes, which was revelatory and useful. I’ve done anger and exhumed my dark other half. Now I want to heal and feel happier, not only to intellectually dissect the reasons behind what happened but to understand it emotionally.

So here goes: how can I now understand my relationship with my mum, Ella, who died 10 years ago after a long haul through Alzheimer’s disease, her pain sometimes frighteningly self-medicated by alcohol? I’ve largely shut away this part of my past because it’s a pile-on of grief, guilt, anger, loss and detachment, and I don’t feel I can do anything useful about it. I did my duty as an only child visiting Ella regularly in Glasgow, hugging her, making sure she was looked after by a sympathetic carer and eventually in a good nursing home, but I never felt real love or connection with her as she diminished. Just an empty sadness.

I remember my mum being warm, loving, witty when I was a child, but she worked hard, and from the age of eight I was alone in the house after school. My teenage years were somewhat rebellious, in deep conflict with my parents’ safe and narrow values. I left for university at 17 and I kept on moving. I returned to Glasgow a few times a year to visit my parents. But we weren’t close.

I am 60, and my parents were late breeders for their time; my mum had me at 38 and was easily the oldest mother at the school gate. They were from a different generation. They led unbelievably tough lives themselves: my dad’s sister was in and out of a mental hospital for 25 years; my mum’s sister, Irene, died of tetanus from a barbed-wire cut when she was three; her dad lost his necktie-making business in the Depression and became an alcoholic; and my mum, who was bright, gave up going to business college to support her father and her mother, who by then had multiple sclerosis. It wasn’t Happy Families. Alongside raising me and working, she had to check in daily on her alcoholic father. When we visited him, my grandfather was alone and often blootered, and the tenement smelled of burnt kettle. He used to entertain me as a child by getting his blue budgie Joey drunk on beer, too. The budgie would stagger drunk down my grandpa’s big nose. Wrong, but very funny.

After my grandfather died, and once all that chaos and pain and working and caring for others was behind my parents, they found safety. They were the generation that believed in soldiering on, putting the past behind them. Talking therapy would never have been considered. I deeply respect their resilience – I just wish we had spoken about it all. Instead, I helped them buy a nice two-bedroom flat with white carpets in the suburb of Bearsden. They deserved this calm. But I didn’t want my world to be like theirs. I wanted mine to be bigger, less beige, less boring. I wanted to take risks and keep moving. And to do that, I had to disconnect as a dutiful daughter.

And yet in many ways, I am exactly like them. So the next thing I want to ask the shrooms is: can I ever loosen that uptight, moral grip on my psyche and let my emotions surface in more honesty?

As our facilitator says, “Every single person is going to go through their own extraordinary experiences. Some people are reconnecting and clearing sexual trauma, other people are able to look at the dynamics with their parenting relationships for the first time.” She has seen everything over the years. “I’ve seen people reconcile lost relationships. I’ve seen people grieve huge losses, like that of a child. I’ve seen people deal with a lot of body issues, confront their physical being, deal with bulimia and anorexia.”

So let the ceremony begin.

It’s almost nine o’clock in the late summer evening in the vast yurt in the clearing in the woods, and we’re about to lose track of time and space for at least six hours. We’ll sleep here together on duvets on the floor afterwards until dawn. There is a firelight from a stove, the smell of sage and incense burning. There’s an opening talk that takes us deep into earthly wisdom, the roots of plant medicine, then some breath work. Two women assisting the facilitator get out bendy pipes, like drinking straws, and we go up one by one to the front to have hapé – powder from a sacred Amazonian tobacco plant – blown up our noses. It rushes straight into my central cortex like 10 espressos at once, bringing a sense of heightened aliveness. Now we are cleansed, very awake, and ready to return to what seems to be a sort of altar for a small ceremonial cup of mushrooms chopped up in cacao. It’s disgusting. I become a bit knackered, having not slept properly due to rampant snake paranoia the night before and, despite the hapé hit, I have a bit of a doze on my cushion, as we start in silence.

When I wake up half an hour later, it’s kicking off for everyone except the neuroscientist and me. A couple of people are crawling and groaning and throwing up discreetly in plastic buckets, but they don’t seem to mind. Old hands at this. I observe how each woman seems sealed in a bubble of her own consciousness; some are rocking and speaking, one is crying, one looks ecstatic. Another is seeing things in the fire we cannot see. I have a tiny inkling of being stoned as I look round all the women and can visualise their stories – their grief, their anger, their dawning perception. One woman’s cloud looks like a storm brewing, as her long grey hair lashes around. It’s all flooding out for them, release and relief. But I’m still being an uptight journalist, an observer not a participant. I’m still thinking about what the facilitator said: “I just find it extraordinary and very heart-opening, this healing of the collective feminine. There’s something about women coming together, being in the circle, collectively healing and holding each other in a way that society does not encourage or allow.”

I like that, but as I mull it over, I wonder if I’ll ever let go and be a part of that collective healing, or if I’ll always be slightly separate, a reporter, that being my instinct.

The facilitator comes over to me and the still-sober neuroscientist who looks like she might be having an equally dull, mechanical time. “I think you need an extra dose,” she says. We knock back some more shrooms and cacao – and we’re off. The tent walls light up, radiant orange and red, and I discover in delight that I get to choose the colours and where they go. I make the roof of the yurt pulsate green and turquoise, like the sea and landscape on the Scottish island of Gigha where I go on holiday. I eventually realise, as I should have from the beginning, that I am in control of this trip. There are no snakes. I’m deciding which doors to open in my mind, which to keep closed. I can now choose to play around in the psychedelic colourfield, to penetrate my consciousness as gently or as deeply as I want. As a bonus, I can still stand and walk around and go for a pee and drink water. There’s this blood-vibrating drumming throughout my body, as every cell is individually possessed by the psilocybin, but I also feel strong and rooted. I’m used to cold-water shock and a big serotonin hit afterwards from swimming, and I can feel this building to be a much bigger mind–body high.

I’m utterly suffused with love for my children, and my partner Cameron, and I bask in that for a while. I can’t say I have the answers to all my questions yet, but right now, I think this trip is pure dead brilliant, as we say in Glasgow. And then, with that thought, I am transported back to Glasgow. I am six years old, holding my mum’s hand in the audience above a vast, empty circus ring at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow. It is the first time I have been to a circus. There is a new, weird smell of elephant dung, and of horse dung from the white and grey ponies with red feather plumes that have left the ring. But now the circus is over, and the famous dancing waters are about to start.

Fifty-foot-high fountains spring miraculously from the floor, with changing-coloured spotlights playing on the columns of splashing water: orange, green, turquoise, pink. We have a tiny black-and-white telly at home, so this is truly my first multicoloured psychedelic experience. There is even a small but noisy orchestra, violins and cellos vibrating. Music thrumming through our bodies. I’ve never seen a real orchestra before. The circus, the elephants, the fountains, the music, the colours – it’s the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me in my six-year-old life, and my mum has brought me here. It is brilliant. My mum is brilliant. I hold her hand tighter. My mum has opened this big door to the bigger world out there, and taken me through it with her.

The morning after our psychedelic trip, we wake up bleary and ecstatic in the yurt, eat a huge breakfast of sourdough toast and eggs and farmyard butter, and write up what happened in our journals, filling a surprising number of pages, reporting back from the strange lands we’d visited that night. Then we all return to the circle and debrief together, part of the integration and recalling process, so we can continue to explore what we have unearthed long after we have returned to the real world. Everyone feels they have learned something previously hidden about themselves, or found deep release in letting go of grief. I have uncovered and relived the magical circus memory, which I later fact-checked to be largely true, a beautiful story I for some reason had hidden from myself.

Aside from the healing power of reconnecting with a series of earlier, happier, surreal moments with my parents, I also have a strong sense for the first time that whatever has happened in the past, I am in the right place in life at the right time, doing something useful in the world. That feeling has remained with me, months afterwards, stabilisers on my emotional bike.

Overwhelmingly, there was a sense of self-compassion rather than self-criticism felt by all the other women, too, and a camaraderie among us – we’d seen each other at our maddest, most vulnerable, most naked. Some of us had taken our clothes off, others had danced in the forest. I was in the latter group. I can tell you no more, but in the early hours of the morning we had all danced ourselves to euphoric exhaustion, on a search for the soul, for a new purpose, for essence.

Extracted from Kate Muir’s latest book, How To Have a Magnificent Midlife Crisis, published on 5 June by Gallery at £16.99