magic mushroom religion utah he first time Stephanie Brinkerhoff tried psilocybin, she was a Mormon mother of three and desperate for help. She was struggling with migraines and chronic fatigue, and the antidepressants she had been on for years weren’t working, she felt. After listening to a series of podcasts about psychedelics , and learning about their reported mental health benefits, she presented her research to her Bishop, who didn’t dissuade her.
“He was just kind of like, ‘OK, like, I trust you,’” says Brinkerhoff, who looks a lot like Sally Draper from Mad Men , all grown up. “‘If this is something that you’re approaching for therapeutic reasons, and it feels very spiritual to you and you prayed about it and whatever… Then, good luck.’”
Still, Brinkerhoff, who had never so much as tasted coffee at the time, was nervous. “It was like this really big deal to be like, OK, I’m going to partake of an illegal substance,” she recalls.
In 2021, she swallowed her first dose of magic mushrooms with an alleged medicine woman she found on Retreat.Guru . “I went in blind,” Brinkerhoff admits, expecting the mushrooms to iron out the kinks in her brain and nothing more.
Instead, Brinkerhoff says, she met God. But whereas the God of her childhood was a remote “deity in the sky,” she says, a “parent figure” who could both protect and punish her, the God she encountered on mushrooms was radically different. The divine felt more embodied and earth-based, she says — synonymous, in fact, with “life.”
“It made me realize that everything that organized religion was claiming to give to me wasn’t actually coming from the religion,” Brinkerhoff reflects. “Once that clicked for me, everything fell apart.”
Within three months, Brinkerhoff had left the Church of Latter-day Saints, an organization she now describes as having committed “soul theft” for robbing her of the intuition and sovereignty she credits the mushrooms with returning. Editor’s picks
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