The first hallucination arrived shortly after Peggy Van de Plassche finished her serving of dried psilocybin mushrooms, pulled down her eye mask, and laid back on a Japanese-style futon. “I saw a man standing above me,” she recalled. “He was a shaman and he was pulling snakes and rats from all over my body.”
Van de Plassche, a former banker and venture capital investor, was at a luxury resort in British Columbia’s Okanagan region where she was experimenting with a large dose of psychedelic mushrooms for the first time. Although it was her inaugural “journey”—as wellness gurus call mushroom trips—the symbolism behind the vision was immediately clear to her: “It was all the self-hatred and self-loathing I have for myself.”
With each creature’s exorcism, she gained a surer sense of her self-worth, apart from her professional achievements. It was a radical concept for the 45-year-old high achiever, who told Fortune , “I had always measured my self-worth in terms of what I bring to the table.”
That was two years ago. At the time, the French-born Van de Plassche sat on several corporate boards in her adopted home of Toronto, including startups Impak Finance and FrontFundr, and was a director at a major government-run agency that seeks foreign investing in Canada. Among other things, discovering that self-esteem was fundamentally poor changed the way she relates to people as a leader, she said. Under the mushroom’s chemical spell, she learned to have a better relationship with herself, which also gave her more patience for the executives she oversaw and fellow board members. For instance, directors tended to derail meeting discussions by talking about their past achievements and stroking their own egos, Van De Plassche said. Instead of being outwardly aggravated, she found compassion and learned how to gently redirect the conversation. Where she was once prone to being more confrontational at work (and beyond), a trait she said she sees as typically French, she has mellowed out. She has even published a book about microdosing, inspired by the changes psilocybin has brought to her life. Peggy Van de Plassche Van De Plassche knows […]
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