Big Read Helen Down, 51, has been feeling apathetic and listless for the last few years. She travelled to the Netherlands to take part in a women-only psychedelic retreat
Writer Helen Down, 51, says taking mushroom truffles at a retreat changed her perspective on the menopause It’s a Tuesday afternoon in a Utrecht forest. I’m lying on a mattress in a sun-dappled studio, part of a group about to embark on a journey where our bodies remain stationary, but our minds travel to other places, other times.
Soon, some of us are thrashing around, reliving the trauma of childbirth. Some are screaming on behalf of their oppressed female ancestors. One is muttering ‘f**king men’. All of us are crying. Sobbing. Howling, in fact. And yet some of us are also laughing. Life-affirming, uncontrollable hysterics. Every human emotion is being felt in this group of nine brave women.
We’re at the inaugural women’s-only programme at Beckley – a five-day science-backed psilocybin assisted therapy retreat – where we’ve come together to heal old wounds and gain new insights by taking transformative doses of mushroom “medicine”. The drug is illegal and catergorised as class A in the UK, and only permitted for consumption in truffle form here in the Netherlands.
With issues ranging from neurodiversity to burnout to grief, some have chosen a women’s-only retreat in order to feel fully heard. Others, including yours truly, are here to address issues specific to women. Be it motherhood-induced loss of identity or infertility, it’s easier to speak of such concerns in the company of women. And so it is with the menopause, which I’m currently navigating, at the age of 51. I’ve just munched my way through an alarmingly large portion of magic mushroom truffles, safe in the knowledge that I’ll be watched over by Beckley’s five unflappable, altruistic facilitators.
I’m sick of being gaslit by perimenopause . Hot flushes – that definitive, almost cliched signifier of the menopause – are a curse I’ve been lucky to swerve. But in their absence, it’s hard to know whether my pervasive ennui, which started sneaking into my life about five […]
I took magic mushrooms for the menopause – they restored my joy
