080 | The Rematriation of Psychedelics: Centering Women, Mothers & Indigenous Wisdom
“A lot of people are really concerned about having a bad trip when they eat mushrooms. For me, after I ate the mushrooms, I realized that my whole life before was the bad trip. And I was finally in a space where I felt comfortable, safe, and okay with being me.”
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My guest today is Mikaela de la Myco. I was drawn to the way she presents herself as a mother in the psychedelic space through her platform, Mama de la Myco. I had every intention in having a conversation with her about psychedelic parenting. However, I threw out all my questions out the window and followed Mikaela’s energy; it was clear that Mikaela had so much to share with us about centering mothers, women, and indigenous voices in the psychedelic movement.
She lends us a perspective around how the psychedelic mainstream movement is falling short, and the reality of how indigenous people are treated in the psychedelic industry. In addition, we talk about how mushrooms are helping mothers through the challenges of the postpartum period, and how psychedelics might be useful for families.
Mikaela is currently pouring into the Mushrooms and Moms survey with support from Dr. Jim Fadiman and the Microdosing Institute. This project is surveying mothers and birthing people who consumed psilocybin mushrooms throughout their motherhood and parenting journey in order to accumulate a body of evidence for effects of psilocybin on birthing people, women and their children. If you’re a mother or birthing person, please consider contributing to this, linked in the show notes.
Topics Covered:
The intersection of medicine woman, psychedelic mom and sacred hoe
What is MushWomb?
What is a sacred hoe?
Rematriating psychedelics, earth and social resources
The reality of how indigenous people are treated in the psychedelic industry
Grassroots efforts to preserve indigenous wisdom
How mushrooms are helping moms through the postpartum period
Can psychedelics be for teenagers and families?
How Mikaela overcame alcoholism with the help of mushrooms
What is being discovered through the Mushrooms and Moms Survey
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LISTEN
Things Mentioned in This Episode
Show Links:
Where to Find Mikaela de la Myco:
About Mikaela de la Myco:
Mikaela de la Myco comes from a blended ancestry. Her peoples come from the hills of southern italy, the caribbean and the deserts and mountains of mexico.
In her everyday life, she is a mother, an entheogen educator, a womb care practitioner and acts as a community ceremony facilitator in occupied Kumeyaay & Luiseno territory, also known as San Diego, CA.
She passionately serves all people in ancestral healing ways with special focus in serving creatives, families, bleeding people, folks within the birthing continuum and people navigating conscious contraception.
Mikaela organizes quarterly ceremonies so people can journey through the dark amenta to uncover ancestral messages, rewrite trauma wounds and make meaning with mushroom and other earth medicines.
Her platform, Mama de la Myco is a creative space at the intersection of medicine woman, psychedelic mother and sacred hoe. Mikaela de la Myco has made the commitment to rematriate entheogens, do ma'at always and prove to the world that psychedelics are for families.
Looking for a professional coach to support you on your psychedelic path?
Look no further! Along with being the host of the Modern Psychedelics Podcast, Lana is a 3x certified professional coach who works with people on the psychedelic path.
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[00:00:00]
Lana Pribic: Hello everyone. I'm here with the beautiful Michaela de la Myco. Welcome to the show. So nice to have you here today.
MIkaela de la Myco: It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, we're going to get into some good stuff today that we haven't talked too much about on the show yet. But before we dive in, would you like to just introduce yourself to our listeners?
MIkaela de la Myco: Sure, I would love to, so much. My name is Michaela and I am a daughter. I'm a mother. I'm a mushwomb educator community organizer. Someone who's been, um, alchemizing their experience living in the body that I'm in to just further an area of the entheogenic field that a lot of people don't want to look at are a little timid about pursuing research in I'm really interested in creating at the intersection of medicine woman, psychedelic mom, and sacred hoe.
So I [00:01:00] certainly always believe that this path can be one that's pleasure filled, sensory rich, movement based, and very much embodied. And my work really Is centered and rooted in the rematriation of entheogenic practice, which means to give responsibility and rightful stewardship to the mothers and the matriarchs of our communities.
So I'm really here to just be a conduit for my ancestors the people who come before me, the land that I live on here and all the lands that I come from so that we can spread a good word and share a good message. So thank you so much for having me, and I'm really honored to be able to share with your audience today.
Lana Pribic: Beautiful. We warmly welcome you and receive you. I wanna ask you about a few words that you use because when I look at just like your presence online and your body of work, you have certain words that you use that I've never seen before. And I would love to just Yeah. Get [00:02:00] your input on what really these words mean for you.
So the first one's really mushwomb. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, so mushwomb was really developed out of creative effort to put into words the intersection of my lines of work. So I'm initiated into a wound care lineage. And my teacher, Star Lily Sister Nova Birge, brought me in when I was about 21 years old, and carried me through tutelage, many years of study, and I'm still in her tutelage to this day.
And my, my focus, intention, The area of the body that I'm most interested in tending to caring for learning about is the womb. And that's been, you've been carrying me for the last almost 10 years. And as I began my journey with the womb, I was really inspired and found so much healing in.
Relations with [00:03:00] mushrooms and my mushroom experiences and found that those two healing ways were coming together and like coalescing at the same time in my life. And so I see an indiscriminate like co relationship between the realm of. Diving into the womb space to understand and to seek answers and then diving into the mycelial network and tapping into the unconscious and I feel like they're both realms that run parallel each other.
And as I started to create, I became pregnant. 20. Five, and I was asked to come speak on clubhouse and clubhouse was a cool space that a lot of us during COVID, you know. Met a lot of psychedelic community, which is really wonderful because a lot of the stuff is censored. A lot of the stuff we couldn't talk about in other spaces.
So I was invited to come and hold a room in [00:04:00] clubhouse. And I was really considering what might be a space that I want to create for others in our community that I wasn't seeing. And. The name Mushroom Temple came together in that way because I wanted to invite matriarchs and people that work with womb and people that have wombs and people that were in the psychedelic space because there wasn't like a femme psychedelic space in Clubhouse yet.
And that was also an effort to, as I mentioned, censorship, like work through that and try to survive. Being silenced because, in a lot of the social media platforms, you can't just outright say psilocybin mushrooms or psychedelics they'll get flagged or shadow banned.
So it's also like our community's way of adapting to, to tyranny essentially and the drug war and like what we are allowed to do and be in this world. So I think Mushroom came together in a beautiful way out of like necessity and creativity and it pretty much colors everything that [00:05:00] I there are many meanings and many reasons for mushwomb, but I've been really protective over the phrase.
I've recently trademarked it because, I've been seeing people use it in ways that don't align. With its values. And for me, mushroom is accessible. Mushroom is benefits brown people. Mushroom is benefiting the earth. Mushroom is indigenous in its own way. And it really looks to subvert systems of control.
And so when I see people try to use that term to sell high priced, offerings and people that don't support brown folks in the space, the movement, I get. Yeah, I get a little fierce in my bones because mushroom belongs to us all. And I just want to keep it safe. Yeah, mushroom consciousness is just that place, that origin of where everything gets created in this world.
And yeah, thank you for asking about that. Yeah.
Lana Pribic: gonna [00:06:00] perfectly set the stage for, yeah, just later on in this interview, I want to chat about the interconnection between the womb and the mushroom. thAnk you for setting that the other, I have two more words that I want to get your perspective on. Sacred hoe. What do you mean by that?
Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: So around the time that I started engaging with The sacred mushroom. I previous in my previous lives. I was initiated into intimacy at a really young age, and that's just my history with sexual assault and molestation and trauma that is so shared by so many young people. And so that initiation, yeah, was given to me at like age six is like when Adults started coming on to me and my own family members misusing their power and trust.
And so I just walked. With a bit of openness and interest and intimacy and [00:07:00] sensuality, because it comes to me so quickly in my life. And I was growing up in Christian schools and Catholic and Christian churches, and there, there wasn't a lot of education for me.
The abstinence model was really prevalent and so anything existing outside of that didn't really get any shine or any education. In like eighth grade when people, we're talking about. The miracle of life and virginity and things like God and started maybe even talking about, harassment, sexual assault and stuff.
It really hit me. I didn't realize that had happened to me or that's what I was, I had experienced. experience as a young person. And I began experimenting at a really young age and was like, considered in ways promiscuous, right? And I expressed like my love, my tenderness, my desire to be close to people through sexuality.
And it got me in a whole mess of trouble. And I didn't know how to harness like this incredible power because that's really what it is, it's this insane tool of Yeah, running [00:08:00] pleasure through the body, moving through altered states of consciousness. Like I really do find that orgasm and arousal is like an altered state of consciousness for sure.
And I needed guidance. I really needed someone to be the banks to this river because there was a lot flowing and I found a Western Tantra teacher and he was teaching about like sacred sex and things like that. And so I started. Working for him, and I studied with him for years, and I started taking my own clients at the ripe age of 19, and I was in that position for about three years, and I learned a tremendous amount about when I say sacred hoe someone who's wielding this power in a way that can be extremely healing to not only the self, but other people.
There's a lot of People that I used to see, and a lot of people in this world that don't have access to tenderness, they don't have access to intimacy, closeness, softness especially men in this world [00:09:00] their bodies are often asked and required to be exploited at all times. Your value is based on how much you can make for us and not your inherent worth.
And I was just sitting face to face with Men that have just never been vulnerable with anyone. And I realized like what in what an esteemed position I'm in, like what a role this is to be played in this world. And why isn't there more protection, more safety? More visibility for people that feel called to support emotionally support people that that are so needing intimacy and care.
We use words in, in my field like, you know, sex work, sex worker and sacred intimate is another word I've heard. which I love. My sisters have taught me that word. Intimacy care provider. And for me, sacred hoe is that. And not only hoe in the sense of what it is as it's like sexual service connotation, but [00:10:00] also what a hoe is in the garden.
So we use garden hoes all the time. And hoes in the garden They help us uplift soil and loosen it and nitrify it and mix and work through that top layer and fertilize. It's for birth and seeds to be planted. And so I really like that ho means more than just someone who operates in sexuality, but also someone who unearths things, uplifts, and neutrifies the spaces that they're in.
That's a little bit of what sacred ho is. In the ways that I'm using it.
Lana Pribic: I love that. Cause yeah, when I read your bio, I really flagged that I was like, Oh wow, that's a very unique term. And I'm just noticing as you're sharing with. With us, how the words that we use and the words that we choose to use, especially someone like you, who is so purposeful with her words, I can already tell from just talking to you for 12 minutes just how much the words that [00:11:00] we use have behind them, how our stories are really behind the words that we use.
So thank you for letting us get to know you a little more. And the last one was rematriation. What do you mean by that?
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah rematriation's an important concept that I feel like everyone outside of, inside of, and all around the world Might know and understand and I hope if it's their first time hearing it that I'm glad that it's coming to them because Rematriation is birthed out of the indigenous sovereignty movement the indigenous food sovereignty movement the lands back movement the important work that it is to return land and not just resources because I think resource certainly denotes like some kind of Desired value that can be extracted like a natural resource, right?
But I'm really much kind of tapping into [00:12:00] setting the pace, the tone of how we live life with the earth. And I think like the distinction that often gets made around protecting land and the earth and the waters is like, Oh we're humans on this planet. And we're really not like we're humans with the planet.
We're humans in the planet, we are humans alongside of and all encompassed by all of the other aspects of our non human relatives, the plant kingdom and the fungus and, ancestors and things. So, you know, Rematriation is There's action, certainly, which is like, returning land and allowing Indigenous people, and not just allowing, but recognizing the inherent right of all living people to have access to clean water and food and a place to live.
And. Rematriating means to hand it all back, hand it all back to systems that center [00:13:00] mothers and center and center women as leaders, as people in councils that have, that are held in high esteem. And what's unfortunate is that the predominant System of thought is that women are second class citizens and children are third class citizens, and that we have these particular roles to play in space that is often dictated by someone that cares very little, actually, for the health and the well being of soil, the health and the well being of animals, the health and the well being of having clean water.
And It's very much part of an environmental desire to create justice again and to imagine a system where we can duplicate this kind of feeling in any space. [00:14:00] Where like women and mothers can be not just organizing, but also compensated. And cared for and nourished and sustained so that they can be free to think and feel and raise children and not have to like hustle and struggle just to exist and to survive.
So I think what would be, an action step in rematriation could be like stipending the first few years of a mother's life so that they can stay with their child. Like setting up a system that tells mothers that it's okay to be here and that we do care about you and we care about your relationship with the next generation.
And that's not what's happening. That's like an action step and I. Like a consciousness step, for sure, is recognizing that the earth is alive. It's so hard to try to help people understand that. I think people are getting really [00:15:00] excited about the idea that earth is alive. But that plants have feelings and relationships.
That plants also, they also enjoy humans like paying attention to them and if anyone is interested in understanding rematriation in this indigenous worldview, I would highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass is such an incredible
And it's very humbling and I think what I'll leave on the rematriation part is that I think people are under the understanding that Human beings are some kind of like disease on the planet and that without us, the whole world would just be better.
And Braiding Sweetgrass really does talk about how with humans and more than human relatives Plants we thrive together, like the plants benefit by our attention and by our care and our tenderness and are tending to [00:16:00] them and they take care of us, too. So I think it the consciousness shift is really like, we're not a problem here.
It's the way that we've been thinking and acting. That's the issue. Human beings are not the issue, but the way that we've been thinking and the way that we act on the earth because of the way that we think is. largely the problem. Remitration is as much like a thing to do as like a way to be as well.
Lana Pribic: Love that. I love the way you've laid that out. I've definitely been recommended that book before. So thank you for reminding me. I'm going to add it to my maybe holiday reading list as
MIkaela de la Myco: a long book, so check out the audio. You can listen to it while you're, editing your videos and stuff, whatever you need to do to get that information. But it's, we do need to listen to Indigenous women. We do need to center their voices right now.
Lana Pribic: Yes, especially in the space that we are in the world of psychedelics,
MIkaela de la Myco: Let me tell you. Yep.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. I almost want to say, please tell [00:17:00] me, but now I'm like looking at my questions that I have for you and I want to stick with them, but I'm going to say, please tell me. Yeah. Let's
MIkaela de la Myco: I'll just give you the tea. I'll just give you the tea real quick. So I do travel around and I do go to different conferences. And I do check out what's going on. And what I'm seeing just a lot of is Inviting the Indigenous women to come and do the opening ceremony with the abalone shell and the little feather and the sage and they say the little prayer.
And then you know, and then they walk away and then that's the end, is not enough. Acknowledging the land that you're on is not enough. Integrating Indigenous women voices and like the way that these conversations get laid out is very important. Steering committees. Organizers like and organizers knowing how to treat elders if they're invited we need to provide food for the elders.
We need to provide water for the elders. Like, how do we treat elders? If we do get to a [00:18:00] point where psychedelic conferences will start to invite and bring the bridges over, to different tribal leaders. How are they, are their hotels taken care of? Do they have translators? Do they have people that are, tending to their every need?
That's the bare minimum when working with an elder. And it's tough because I think we get sometimes to a point where, yes okay, we're willing to hear the, indigenous woman speak, but then we don't have funding for them. We're going to ask them to come out on their own dollar.
And I'm like Indigenous and Black people and Brown people are disproportionately economically impacted. These trips need to be sponsored. And I'll, go look at lineups. And I'm like, dude, you don't have a single Black or Indigenous person in this whole lineup. And they're like well, what you see is who applied.
And I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to go speak at your conference. Let me go apply, you know, accept me. And then I would say, okay, cool. So Is there a travel stipend? Is there any kind of could I get a booth? And they're like we don't have a budget for a stipend. And you have to pay for a booth.
We can give you a discount. I [00:19:00] was like, dude, how are you going to expect disproportionately socioeconomically impacted people to be able to go pay to play, go pay to speak. Like you're lucky enough that these people are even willing to share their message with you and willing to help you steer and willing to help you see the things that you're not seeing.
But people don't put their money in and place that value on indigenous voices right now like they're willing to do it to the point that feels comfortable for them. And I think the last thing that I'll say is they're really down for the window dressing They're down for what it looks like to have the elders here, on the front of, the posters and the website and look at, we work with these people.
And what I've had the unfortunate experience of knowing is that not all of those elders get paid, not all of those elders Like they're just being used to look good as an organization the benefits aren't actually going back to them and they're not actually given a platform to speak in any way that disrupts, [00:20:00] that is seen as disruptive.
And I've had the privilege of calling people to come and. And bring panels together of all Indigenous women to come speak at conferences and they're going off. They're not happy with what they're seeing in our space. They're very disturbed by the commodification, how little people know and how little people honor Indigenous lifeways.
And so if we just had the opportunity to hear what they would have to say. And to learn the ways that they would tell us we need to be doing the whole train would slow down and they don't want that because as long as indigenous people are here is as long as people will have to fight. To get their way. So it's it's been beautiful, but that's pretty much the tea is either they're not getting invited to come to speak. And if they are, it's in this place that feels safe for the organizers and they're not getting compensated for their time. That is so valuable. That's just a little bit of, some of what we're missing [00:21:00] in the space and what I absolutely know needs to change because they're not going to want to keep coming out if there's nothing for them here.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately the conferences are major sources of information in the psychedelic industry. I actually haven't been to one myself. I don't know if that's so bad to admit, but I haven't. Just cause yeah, the industry space kinda. It just feels wrong to me but that is where a lot of people do get their information and I'm curious if you have seen any spaces maybe outside of the conferences that are doing a better job of centering their voices.
MIkaela de la Myco: And not only are conferences a major place for people to get information, it's where people connect with one another, and it's where a lot of the funding goes. It's where a lot of the money in psychedelics gets spent. Places like the ones that happen in Miami, they're working on a 2 million [00:22:00] budget. I'm like, you couldn't invite one elder? Damn, like, how much money do you need to just think about this, you know? So, um, yeah, are there spaces that are centering Indigenous voices that are outside of the conference space? Absolutely. There's a lot going on in the United States. There's a lot of grassroots organizations that are coming together to preserve these ways of life on smaller scales, which is really beautiful.
And it's a little hard because you need to weed your way through and Find out which ones are in integrity and things, but I'm just to name a few for your American audiences. I'm getting to the root. They're based out here in Northern California. There were a 501 C through federally recognized church that really pours into and cares so deeply for the elders that they bring in from Mexico to help lead ceremony.
I absolutely love that one. Other teachers that I absolutely love Britney Jade Wilson. She, we'll call her Britney Jade, but she runs the original instruction school. So she's international lives in Peru and [00:23:00] really pours into a ton of other families and is also a mother too. I would love to, if people feel like they want to get connected to the rematriation of Indigens we're a really dope network there's a lot of people in this work, and so I would love to connect folks with those people, because we're out here, we don't get a lot of radio play, because we don't have the big bucks running in, but we're certainly impacting positively in the world and in the communities that we serve would love to tap anyone into, to those if they were interested.
Lana Pribic: yeah, absolutely. We'll definitely post those in the show notes and yeah, so much gratitude for all of the grassroots, the heart led. Platforms and spaces and people who are in the space. Yeah, my, my platform personally is very, I don't want to say anti industry but if you look through my, if you look through my episodes there's I don't know if there's a single industry person on there
MIkaela de la Myco: I'm so here for that. Thank you. It's very [00:24:00] refreshing.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. And I was just reflecting on it yesterday. I was like, it's probably definitely slowing down my growth as a platform to say no to, the big players who want to come on my podcast, but it just doesn't feel right. Like I've
MIkaela de la Myco: in integrity for
Lana Pribic: Yeah, I yeah, I've worked in the industry before and I saw how it is and it just yeah.
And I don't actually think, I'm actually curious to hear your perspective on this. I think that the more grassroots and even underground spaces are where like the real magic and transformation happens and it's not talked about so much, and I love shy shining light on that.
MIkaela de la Myco: The underground and the mycelial web from which all these breathing bodies are coming up to the surface now is Has been like the bed, the nutrient rich bed that like every person for many decades has been pouring into and creating systems and decentralizing. And we're just so [00:25:00] smart and so cool and kind, and there's a lot of goodness in the underground.
And there's also a lot of pain and a lot of shadow. Like we've had to bring a lot of things up to the surface about. Just harms being caused and having to work within our community to try to rectify some of those things. And so it comes with all of those, that range of experience, and, yeah, I would say it's just viva la underground. My sister always says viva la underground
Lana Pribic: I love that.
MIkaela de la Myco: yeah, long live it because it is the mother. It's the mother of all of this. I, as I said, come from a wound care background. And so traditional midwifery is like the underground of obstetrics, and like where you is.
We watched the changing of the hands of power at the turn of the 20th century from traditional midwifery to, white coats in the hospital that didn't even know how to birth a baby without drugs. And we, they would run a lot of campaigns against grandmothers and traditional midwives of many decades.
Centuries of knowledge as like witch doctors and people that were not [00:26:00] responsible enough or licensed and all of this licensure stuff and, standardization. I think it's just we're watching like another iteration of when traditional ways of life get this commercial interest and then gets run through these systems of refinement.
And, in ways I'm grateful that We're considering some like basic standards and basic like codes of conduct for practitioners and people who journey other people because it was a bit of the Wild West for a while, but I feel like also licensure. Happening for people with no previous experiences is also really permissioning people to like make shit up on the fly and there is, even if it's not through a formal educational institution, a tremendous amount of value in systems that are presently here and.
With peyote traditions, with [00:27:00] ayahuasca traditions, there's no licensure for that, and yet years and years of very carefully tended to ceremonial ways of life that we don't want to lose just because it's not seen as valuable because it's folk. So I also come from a folk herbalism background of my mom and my mom's mom and my mom's dad's mom and everyone in our family is a plant keeper in a way and.
tHose people are not looked at as any kind of valuable at all in a hospital setting, but could set a bone, could birth a baby, could, heal the sick and do all kinds of incredible things with just what's here. So I'm really very much here. For people having access and people having their own relationship to medicine and it's our birthright to be able to learn in our kitchens, for my son at 4 years old to be able [00:28:00] to have conversations in their home about, mushrooms and medicine and ceremony and to be raised in it because if we move all psychedelic literacy through this like industry standardization, higher education model, only people with access to higher education is going to be able to know or feel worth or feel worthy enough to know and to share and, that's just not, that's just not the way it is anywhere else and, we could do so much better for the next generations if we move the information laterally across the generations from heads of families, aunties, uncles, grandparents, friends of families, all educating the children.
So as they grow up there, they just, they be known by, 10, 11 years old, like what mushrooms are and can have that choice for themselves as they grow up. And, it just moves more smoothly, more laterally, and there's less of this massive divide [00:29:00] in. Who knows and who doesn't. I'd love to keep psychedelics folk.
I'd love to remitriate. I'd love to keep it close to the ground because mushrooms for me and a lot of these medicines for me is like from the prince to the pauper. You know what I mean? It's like for every person, like they grow in the cracks on the sidewalk. They're very humble medicine. So it would be nice to see.
I was a person who was in a really low spot. so much. I was perceived as a sex worker, and I really needed that to, to heal, and to, and someone to listen to me. And I think we're dealing with so many a culture where we think that people are throwaway, and It's amazing because mushrooms, they don't think anything can be thrown away.
Everything gets recycled through them. So I would love yeah, I would love to watch the industry take some notes from the community. And [00:30:00] fund send that money into infrastructures that are already here and neutrify systems that are already doing really incredible things because they're not going to set the model and standard that's been tested for so long.
We have that. And maybe there's a bridge, but that's Even midwives and hospitals don't always talk to each other, which is very unfortunate.
Lana Pribic: Yeah. I guess we have to be the bridge. Don't we?
MIkaela de la Myco: aS a biracial person, as a person who comes from so many different ancestral lines we've had to learn how to find some peace in the meeting points. So there's peace at the meeting points, but there's a lot of discussion that needs to happen and a lot of hard conversations that need to happen.
And it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Just being a mother and having a toddler and having to have hard conversations with my child and practicing all of these incredible skills [00:31:00] that we need to do as community within, the. The stage of the family home, which is really cool.
So that's, that's part of the reason I really just wish mothers were just more at the helm of this movement. It's like a lot of absentee dads or people that have never even raised a child or, you know what I mean? Like people would just Such extreme privilege that they feel so far out of the human experience leading the way in something that like requires so much sensitivity and nuance and kindness, so it's yeah, they're going to do what they want to do, but if they're going to do what they want to do, they better let us do what we need to do
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: in order to keep what we got going, because it's beautiful down here.
It's just such a special thing down here. Just watching people transform is like the most important thing I see.
Lana Pribic: In the mushroom, in the underground mushroom. I love it. Yeah. You mentioned how the mushrooms were really there for you at a time when you needed them. [00:32:00] What can you share with us about Just your story with how and when you started engaging with psychedelics and medicine.
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, a lot of people know me as like a psychedelic mom educator. So I was like also feeling really called to talk about just like mushrooms were so instrumental and delivering me through the postpartum experience because I feel like Through the survey that we've been collecting, almost at this point 300 submissions, which is really incredible.
I'm just so surprised how many moms are eating mushrooms like that's so incredible. And I would say about 67 percent of all of the women and birthing people who started eating mushrooms as moms started in the postpartum period. This tells you a lot about the need of the postpartum period. That's a dark space sometimes.
Especially when it's unsupported. Just wanted to make sure I [00:33:00] mentioned that because it's just very telling of that space that people can feel a little bit desperate and a little bit like, I don't know who I am anymore. And I. Have maybe gone through something that was really unfortunate traumatic or scary and don't know how to support myself through it.
So I think that guides a lot of people to reach to mushroom during that time. For me in particular, mushroom was my second psychedelic. I. I guess of the classical psychedelics. I tried LSD first, which I do have a really loving affinity for LSD. It serves different purposes and it has a very different character than mushrooms does.
But it was my first classic psychedelic experience. I had already had MDMA in my teen years. And so MDMA, I also have a loving affinity with too. I feel like all those chemicals really liberated parts of my psyche that I needed support with my central nervous system, my serotonin, like my feelings of trust and [00:34:00] safety were all yeah, we're not very well intact when I found those substances, but yeah, I, my LSD journey was beautiful and I really found myself wanting to put my hands in soil and wanting to get back to my body because I was so like, Elevated and and I've been this very windy, airy space that I felt very ungrounded and I'd been volunteering at the community garden and I just went and I started picking tomatoes and gardening my little garden plot was like, wow.
Okay. What if I can maybe find something that. Brings me these insights, but with the sensation that I'm still in my body, and if not just in my body inhabiting it, but like very deep in my body, and like the cells of my body. Mushrooms was introduced to me. And after I, I ate I. I consumed them, I just found home.
I found that wow, the insights are here. That feeling of safety and comfort is [00:35:00] here. And also I feel very much in my body. I feel in my room. I feel here and I feel good. And it was wonderful. And I always tell people, this is I think the best way that I could really describe who I was and after mushrooms like a lot of people are really concerned about having a bad trip when they eat mushrooms.
Especially if they're new, they're like, what if I have a bad trip? And for me, after I ate the mushrooms, I realized that my whole life before was the bad trip. And I was finally in a space where I felt comfortable, safe, and okay with being me. And I was bullied pretty harshly growing up. My, my negative self talk was very loud very loud.
And I lost my father. And so I just felt this kind of like sense of just pain and anguish about my circumstances in life. And just this, the childhood [00:36:00] that was robbed from me and feeling very isolated because I was different and weird and I didn't make a lot of friends growing up and yeah, there were I've been a bit reclusive and I tried on so many different personalities and none of them really felt right at all.
They did not feel like I knew myself whatsoever. And after I started like developing my personality with the mushroom and asking them like what I. What am I even? What was I destined to be? And what is the purpose of my life? Yeah, I was, in my very early twenties, I think that's a lot of people find themselves asking that question.
And I, I really feel for the next generation of teenagers right now. There's so much disillusion and influence from the outside. There's just so much turmoil in the world. And that's such a big question is like, what is the purpose of my life and all of this? And That's why I deeply and so wholeheartedly also advocate for psychedelics for teenagers and mushrooms for [00:37:00] teenagers because I feel like if I would have been in a safe container and been gifted all of these insights and skills at that age, I would have made such different decisions with my life as a young person and would have abused my body and my spirit so much less.
And I think that's like the next step in this. This edgy conversation around psychedelics are for families is yes, we're all maybe working through the idea that mushrooms are. Being administered to children through the placenta of their mothers, right? We're dealing with the idea that mothers are gestating children while they're on mushrooms and eating it, and it's in their breast milk, and oh my gosh there's trace amounts of psilocybin in the breast milk, and can we even imagine a world where kids are starting to be formed by this the influence of this medicine and chemical in their system? I really want to push so deeply that we're gonna be having conversations about children, like kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, depression, [00:38:00] anxiety, and I'm like, we don't need kids on Adderall. We don't need kids on Ritalin either. And I tend to some teenagers in my community and they're really beautiful people and they really benefit from those experiences and even smaller doses and that's actually part of our ancestral ways of life.
There wasn't really like this hard distinction around this is the right time or the wrong time. I also just want to offer that because The way that psilocybin mushrooms is being marketed is like some kind of, panacea it'll just fix everything. If you're depressed, it'll help it.
If you're anxious, it'll help you. It's the ADHD, right? It's like all this stuff after the fact, but for me what I've learned through just These communities, it's a lot of these communities that have the access to this medicine and it's like deeply ingrained in part of the culture don't have these things and you wonder why, and in ways, I've come to understand [00:39:00] through my own motherhood journey that access and relationship to psilocybin mushrooms can be a preventative measure and help deeply like the consciousness, so that when these struggles and when these situations come up we have invested somatic skills and a nervous system to tend to these things when they do come.
Back to the motherhood piece, it's I had a relationship with mushrooms going into motherhood. I became pregnant many years after I had that first mushroom journey, where I realized the meaning of my life, which was very helpful to know. And just some sideline, information, but
Lana Pribic: I'm like, what's, tell us, what's the meaning of your life?
MIkaela de la Myco: Oh, yeah the instruction was super clear. Everyone's oh, don't look in the mirror when you're on mushrooms because I don't know. I don't know why they say that, but people say, don't look in the mirror. It's so helpful, by the way.
Lana Pribic: I've had beautiful experiences personally [00:40:00] looking in
MIkaela de la Myco: And as a daughter of Oshun, I'm like, mirror work is like how we do anything pretty much. So yeah. And a daughter of Hetaru as well. So yeah, it, the spirituality parts, a whole other conversation for sure. But yeah, I looked in the mirror, I was alone in my room and I just looked at myself and certainly it was the first time I ever looked at.
Myself in the mirror in a loving way. I think it was always like really masked by some other kind of talk that was really destructive. And so I looked at myself in the mirror and there was such a clear message that that I told myself like, you're an artist.
You're an artist. And it's funny because I'd done art classes, I was in AP studio art, like I'm a watercolorist, I'm a poet, like I sing I have that in my family line, like we're all writers and we're dancers and we're singers and stuff.
But I just never really realized like the implications of what that means. Being an artist, I think sometimes it makes you weird and different, and that people don't understand what you're seeing, and you might see things in a different kind of [00:41:00] way, and you express that, and some people don't get it, and some people do get it, and I just didn't understand why I was not being perceived by any of my peers.
And I realized, oh, no, you're just like some weirdo artist that sees things in a different way. But that's okay. It's okay to be like a creative and like you must be connected to your creativity if you're ever going to do anything in your life that's worth doing anything. You'll never be happy unless you're creating every single day in some way.
So I'm glad that I got to just Honor that and everything I do in my life now is out of my creative effort and moving into that motherhood space after having learned that lesson and wasn't without, obvious, like the rollercoaster of, and I'm still a human and I'm still making mistakes and I still have an alcohol problem and it didn't just fix everything overnight.
Like I just got insights. And then, And then I would have to work at them and I would still have to practice them and hold myself very accountable and make mistakes and, try not to [00:42:00] punish myself so much for that. And recognize that I have a reason that I was leaning on alcohol.
There was a reason for that, but I hadn't really asked the right question. I hadn't really examined myself deeply enough to understand why. And so when I came into. My pregnancy journey. I was just talking about how mushrooms are preventative measure. And I really want to speak to that because I think a lot of people, they wait to have mushrooms because they want to be in the right point in their life.
And, maybe being pregnant is not the time they want to wait until after the baby's born and they're done breastfeeding and all of that. And I do want to respect all of people's choices. And that's why we're doing this research because I just want people to know like what impacts at different points.
Is being made and I firstly really wanted to tackle my alcoholism during my pregnancy because I was living in an alcoholic household and that was [00:43:00] extremely detrimental. And I know that some of your listeners probably had parents that were addicted and, but the chaos that creates for a family is intense and
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: think alcoholism in family life is very normalized. The wine mom, and I think sometimes it's just this understood Oh, my parents, they drink coffee every morning and then they have a cigarette and then they drink, and alcohol in the evenings and like when we have family parties, all the grownups are drunk and that's super.
Not off center from what happens in a lot of people's households, especially in, yeah, especially in communities that are like disproportionately impacted by trauma. And so I lived that and I just didn't want to bring that to my family. I didn't want to bring that to my son. I didn't want my son to have to bear the burden of having to take care of me because I was too drunk, like I had to do sometimes for my parents.
And that was something I asked the mushroom to help me with. I said, please, [00:44:00] can you show me like, I'm ready to listen. I'm ready to know. Why do I drink the way that I do? And what am I running away from? And what am I running to? And how do I work through the thing so that I don't have to carry it with me?
And I microdosed throughout my pregnancy. And not just with that intention in mind, but with the permission of an abuela, which was really important. And it's hard for people to get permission from traditional Elders. It's very hard, unless you're in community with elders or you know someone who knows an elder and you can ask them direct questions, and every elder has a different answer.
It's who you get lined up with truly, but I'm really grateful that I got lined up with this one teacher and she gave me the blessing and she does me for my first time as a pregnant person. And I'm really happy that I got that because it kind of permission me to continue. She also gave me the teaching that in their community children as young as three years old are eating mushrooms.
So there's not really some hard line of like how young is too young, there's just like a continuum of [00:45:00] relationship because there's trust in the medicine. Yeah, that alcoholism piece was, I guess the question that I needed to ask myself was, am I in a space physically around people that I don't feel comfortable around? And if so, why do I feel like I have to be here? And so I started making different choices around socializing and I was like, Oh, maybe I don't need to socialize with this kind of group of people. And mushrooms actually pulled me deeper into myself in some ways, isolated myself a little bit because I was like, I guess the people that I've been spending the last six years of my life with are, like, not in this frame of reference.
They're not in growing babies right now. They're doing their 20s thing, and I needed to pull into a different value system, which was important to me. And once I moved into a space where I felt comfortable, I didn't actually feel the desire to drink. It was like a very environmental factor.
And also my social anxiety I feel awkward and weird because I don't want to be here, so I guess I'll just get drunk [00:46:00] with everyone else. So that I could feel comfortable with y'all. That was very meaningful and very helpful. And as far as the preventative measure, mushrooms really supported me in facing my birth experience.
And that is a very scary experience. And also people facing postpartum. Because is a big thing, we wanted to have an unmedicated birth at home, and so that's a huge undertaking, the physical body knows what to do, but I was a cesarean section, so I was like one generation out of birthing at home, and I think the further along you get in the trail of mothers that all gave birth in particular ways, the more of a train that you have to slow down in order to have birth in your own way.
Even menstruating, if, your mom and your aunts and have menstruated in similar ways, it could also show how your body might present in, in, in menstruation, even as you go into menopause, they can also be in some ways predictive. And [00:47:00] in my third trimester, I started dealing with this kind of irrational fear that I would lose my baby during birth.
And that if anything were to happen to them at that point that it would be devastating and I also just want to bring visibility in the motherhood space around miscarriage and stillbirth and abortion and pregnancy release because certainly not all pregnancies end in life birth. So I'm just put that out there and that these medicines also can be really supportive during.
All of those different phases of what comes after pregnancy. So I was dealing with that and I was dealing with that idea that if anything were to happen at this time, it would be terrible and sad. And maybe I wouldn't have the skills to cope or deal with it. And I needed to grieve that I needed to feel like the fullness of that emotion in order for the charge to release, because it seemed to me that if I was [00:48:00] carrying that Fear that I would have carried it right into the birth room and I would have been thinking about it the whole time and paranoid and scared and I'm four years out from my birth and I just watched my birth video recently and was like, huh, that was a very different me.
I wasn't scared, but the reason why I wasn't scared was because in my third trimester, I ate three grams of mushrooms. And I was with a group of my sisters and friends, and one of them was my doula. And we got in a situation where I was faced with that very real sensation that maybe I'd miscarried.
And I got to grieve and I got to feel and I got to explore, examine and release and cry and have that emotional catharsis that the brain really needs in order to feel complete with the process. And I created birth art about it. I. I examined it. I shared that story with my [00:49:00] midwives and I understood why I was feeling that way and explored, in my journey, like cultural myths, I think that also really colored the way that I feel.
And. Without getting too much into detail about all the things that I saw, I just walked out of that experience feeling less charged. I had the opportunity to forgive. I had the opportunity to say, it's okay, and it's no one's fault, and I forgive, and I'm really grateful for this experience, and it's okay.
And coming out of it, my baby was just fine. And so when I went into the birth room, I was like, I've already cried a thousand tears for this, so I have nothing to fear. And it was beautiful, and he came out in a beautiful way, and I'm so happy that I was able to process and work through all of that.
Alive and well, three grams of mushrooms at three months at three third trimester. It's just really incredible to me that we're really getting into these [00:50:00] discussions around is it safe? Like, how are we still stuck there? Like it was instrumental. In the happiness and it was instrumental in the safety of my birth and it gave me everything that I needed in order to do this very hard thing and when I was in my postpartum period, just to shout out to the postpartum moms or anyone who's gone through postpartum stress, anxiety, depression it's a very dark and heavy time because.
Our world, to bring back rematriation, like we just don't have infrastructure for postpartum mothers. A lot of women go back to work at six weeks. That's terrifying. We're still so wide open. Some of us are still bleeding. You know what I mean? Some of us have had cesarean sections, 40 percent rate of cesarean section in this country and in the United States.
So that kind of recovery is way more intense and people still got to go work their minimum wage jobs where, [00:51:00] is it even worthwhile? You're paying just as much for the childcare. It's you're breaking even to stay away from your kid. It's what an insane system.
What an insane system. And the pressures that is, the crying baby, the lack of hands on deck, the laundry that's piling up, the not even being able to cook or feed oneself. No wonder there's so much suffering. And then the extreme expression of hormonal shift without like proper rites of passage to close those bones and to tell the body that it did such a beautiful thing and to thank every, every muscle in the body and tell all that relaxing to now you can come back into place again and get all the organs back into its right position.
There's just so much. That we're missing in postpartum care. It's no wonder so many people struggle during this time. It's not an individual issue. When you see it on such a massive scale, it's never an individual issue at that point. [00:52:00] And that is also to say that most of the people coming to me and talking about their postpartum experiences had very challenging birth experiences. So all the pressures already compounded by the postpartum pressure with the unresolved trauma of a very insane and hard to grapple with birth experience where things just fell out of control. And the birth principles just went out the window because there was some kind of perceived emergency.
Maybe there wasn't or, pressure from the outside to act in ways that go against the mother obstetric violence. Like we're dealing with compound trauma. And intensified by the postpartum period, that's already so hard. For me, compassionate measures can look like offering postpartum mothers the opportunity to soften into a mushroom experience, and to feel safe and tended [00:53:00] to, and to be able to look at and examine the contents of their birth experience, to tell their birth story.
To release, to cry, to grieve who they were, who they are now, to offer proper rites of passage and proper postpartum care. Yes, psilocybin is getting in the breast milk. And Let's just please serve moms because we barely can do that properly. That's just the edge of rematriation that I'm like really speaking to.
Rematriating psychedelics means like mothers get access to mushrooms. In a kind way, and they were certainly instrumental. I had my first journey as a new mom at five weeks, and that was also extremely impactful. And my son is a beautiful, sweet, intelligent, and kind compassionate. Being that I feel is very much grown out of the mushroom experiences that I've had.
There's a lot of research. There's a lot of study that's been [00:54:00] circulating in the grassroots and just trying to prove like white man's paperwork in this way, things that we've known for such a long time, but I've got to say like indigenous people, we're a master record keepers anyway.
This isn't like Scientific and not of our own genius. You know what I mean? This, I think this whole process that we've been undergoing with the with the survey is like very it feels very at home because indigenous people are smart. Indigenous people are master record keepers, like creating some of the most.
Accurate calendar systems and counting systems and ways of understanding the natural world and charting the stars. And like, how can we even imagine saying that this ability to be genius [00:55:00] is only relinquished to the Western mind. That's so far from the truth. Rematriating entheogens also means that The way that mothers think, the way that mothers organize time, the way that women stretch and bend like the natural world is why we're all here. Yeah, I'm excited for that research to be made public because we've learned a lot and I'm just one of many stories of people that have benefited from having a relationship with embiogens in a mother's body.
Lana Pribic: Yeah, thank you so much for just validating the experience of birthing and motherhood and yeah, existing in the system in this world for so many people listening who I'm sure can relate to so many of the struggles that you pointed out and for, yeah, just sharing your experience and Your [00:56:00] story and your way of doing things just so vulnerably, even when I'm sure it sounds really radical to a lot of people in our Western world to hear that.
A pregnant person has taken psilocybin mushrooms or is taking psilocybin mushrooms while breastfeeding and to that piece, I would just encourage people listening to, look up and research and understand and study that indigenous people have been consuming ayahuasca and mushrooms while pregnant while breastfeeding and that it's actually nothing There's nothing radical about it.
It's just radical in the system that we live in. I
MIkaela de la Myco: evidence and I want people to know both like my 52 page ebook like goes into what's presently available in the scientific literature and what is the indigenous worldview around. ayahuasca, [00:57:00] peyote gumbo mushrooms, even LSD. So it's like there's a lot there and like my desire and like my deepest hope is that like I'm coming from this place of coming from this place of the people in the community and like what we know.
Is valuable and can contribute to the larger body of knowledge. James Fadiman did incredible things with his citizen science research on micro dosing. And now everyone talks about the James Fadiman protocol. It came out of grassroots research and survey work with 10, 000 people. We deserve to be heard.
I don't want to have to jump through hoops to be seen as like relevant or like worthy. To be included in the conversation because what we're learning here is so valuable and so much gives to the empirical knowledge that we have and it cannot be ignored anymore. So I just want to create with the community something that [00:58:00] could not be ignored and it is so disgusting that indigenous people and the thousands of years of knowledge is getting ignored.
But I'm like praying that in this generation and in the next generations to come that there's like an inherent, like respect and understanding of what indigenous people have known forever and that we can do so through arts and creativity and storytelling. So let the mother speak and you'll learn a thing or two, psychedelic movement.
I'm just going to say that,
Lana Pribic: love that. That's going to be the title for this episode. I love it.
MIkaela de la Myco: listen to your mama, go home.
Lana Pribic: Yes. Let's end on your mushrooms and mom survey. Can you tell us a little bit about that and just, yeah, what you're learning? Through that.
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, absolutely. So it came together because I'm homies with a cool organization called the microdosing Institute and I've done some education from them in the past and they were saying that [00:59:00] they're working with this great kind of a psychedelic doula in the UK and she's been recording and tending to people in the postpartum period, working through their experience with mushrooms, introducing them to mushrooms, working them.
Through different protocols and things and supporting them during the, postpartum time and Naomi is her name. And so she was doing, on phone calls, writing things down. That's how things were done for a while with tending to psychedelic moms. I've talked to thousands of moms, right?
And there's not so log of all the progress and things. It's like very grassroots. We're all just having conversations and talking. And she was relaying information with James Fadiman because James Fadiman is writing a book and he's writing a book on most asked questions about microdosing and they want to do a chapter on.
Motherhood, breastfeeding, and postpartum, and all the things that we're all so curious about. And so they were tag teaming and microdosing institute got me into the loop and said, Hey, Michaela's in the States too. Maybe y'all should meet, [01:00:00] maybe y'all should connect and see if we can move this.
And I was like, Oh you're all writing, all these conversations down. And that's amazing. And I wonder, could there be a way to make this information gathering a little bit more passive, a little bit more so we could reach more people, at farther reach of people we don't even know can like submit to this.
So I was like, can we come up with some questions and devise some kind of a survey and see if we can make this. Place for people to tell their stories. And so we developed the questions. We had to continue doing tinkering with what we really wanted to know. We wanted to know about breastfeeding.
We wanted to know about pregnancy and at the birth experience and not just about microdosing, but we were really curious about the range of experience. Are you high dosing? Are taking small doses? And then we've been learning just so much about what mothers have been doing.
Doing with mushrooms and it's not just microdosing and it's not just microdosing postpartum. It's looking like a variety of things. There's mother cultivators, there's mother [01:01:00] educators, there's mother craft people that are making mushrooms products for other mothers. Like it's just this whole wide network of people that are not just consuming medicine, but They are being guided and doing beautiful things.
So some of the things that we were wanting to know is largely what is the state of their children? What state are the kids in? Because I think that's what people are most concerned about is like negatively impacting cognitive function in children, right? Developmental delays. And this is what I talk about in the e book is that's like kind of what we're talking about.
Is it toxicity? Is it safe? Is it toxic? At what point is it toxic, so that's what we wanted to know largely, was like, what is the well being of the progeny of these mushroom moms? What are we seeing and maybe beyond what's the safety, but like what benefits have you been, seeing in your child [01:02:00] and compared to other children and what benefits are you seeing in yourself as a mom, as you raise your child, because there was obviously a reason these mothers came mother saying things like more patients.
More willing to play, kinder, less stressed my, my bandwidth is much wider. My ability to communicate, and I'm going to get a little woo on here, but telepathically communicate with our kids. Like use body language to communicate and use subtle gestures to be able to tell our kids what we mean, to get into that space of non verbal with them, especially for the little kids like that are pre verbal.
We need to learn what they're saying. And so moms now are like looking at their kids and I know what this baby needs pre language, which is incredible. Like babies deserve that. Yeah. Feelings of closeness with their child. Being able to process their birth experiences have been so incredible walking away from addictive patterns.
We've [01:03:00] been seeing so much benefit for the families, so much benefit for the mothers, so much benefit for the parent and children benefit from that. Children benefit from a well parent, and I think the survey could have just ended there, honestly. But it didn't. It went into what are you perceiving about your child?
What personality constructs does your child have inherently within them? What skills are you seeing in your kid? And one thing that's really interesting that I'm like, I'm very excited about is that a lot of the mothers are reporting that their children's linguistic skills are very high.
Like their verbal they're very adept at communicating through language and the, their vocabularies and their ability to articulate themselves. Pretty sharp. And so I just go back to my early days of dosing and like my psychedelic grandpa at the time was Terence McKenna and Terence McKenna talks a lot about the stone ape hypothesis and like [01:04:00] the generation of very early human hominid to the brain capacity in which like the modern human operates at and what got developed.
And he always talks about the development of the linguistic centers of the brain. Which is really cool, because we're watching the mushroom moms also talk about, Wow, my kids like, linguistic capabilities are incredible, and I'm like that's what Terrence was talking about, was that,
Lana Pribic: It's
MIkaela de la Myco: Maybe it allows us,
Lana Pribic: the stone ape theory as soon as you mentioned the linguistic thing too. Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: I, it took me a second to be like, why am I reading this so much, and what is this reminding me of? And the it's interesting correlation, not causation, but I think it's a very interesting correlation. I just want to be really humble with any of the claims that we end up making through this.
We are going to release the study. It's ongoing. So it's still here. We're still. Receiving submissions. We have about 300 now. My goal is 5500. So if [01:05:00] anyone has friends, parents, other families, friends of friends, a social media platform that has any significant following in this demographic feel free to share it out.
It's open for anyone to submit and we're going to release that as a gift to all the mothers. On Mother's Day of 2024 as just that piece offering that like through storytelling, we certainly will not be ignored. And our stories are really valuable in the greater empirical knowledge that we have around mushrooms and motherhood and psychedelics and rematriating and theogens.
And at the end of the day, if we're doing all of this work, what is the point if we are not benefiting who will inherit the earth? And that doesn't mean you've got to have your own kids. There's children afoot. There's always a kid in the supermarket. There's always a kid in the neighborhood that needs [01:06:00] good role models, good people to lean on.
You know what I mean? There's kids all over the world that are suffering dearly right now. There's kids all over the world that are suffering so much and I just shakes me to my core to see how privileged so many of us are. And there's so many kids in our neighborhood that we don't even know is suffering and I really just wish I would have had a friend growing up that just could really see me as inherently valuable.
And I think every kid deserves that. So if the kids around have well adults. We're going to be okay. Yeah, thank you so much for letting me share about the survey because I really I care about the state of the next generations to come because they're inheriting a lot of challenges and they just deserve to have the skills and the tools in order to meet the challenges that they are.
They are here to face, we've left them a very messy home that they're going to need to be so smart and so kind and so thoughtful and really [01:07:00] cooperative to be able to work through. So just praying for the future of our planet. bEcause we can't be running like this with selfish kids.
We can't be running like this with selfish people, it we need justice. And we need lots of cooperation. That's why I'm so passionate about Rematriating and entheogens Because it is the, this is not just some industry that is having a boom right now. That we're just going to get into something else later.
For so many of us, this is our way of life. This is what made us and this is like what we will literally die to protect.
Lana Pribic: Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: Thank you.
Lana Pribic: Thank you. Oh. Yeah.
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, you're welcome.
Lana Pribic: Beautiful. And full circle moment back to the rematriating. For my dear listeners listening. If you're a mushroom mama, please go and [01:08:00] fill out the mushrooms and mom survey. We'll link it in the show notes. Let's contribute to this movement and this knowledge and this passion that Michaela is driving for us.
Thank you so much for sharing with us and for all the work that you're doing and for yeah, just your value system and the values that you are living from and sharing with the world. It's really special and you're really special and I see you and I bless you and I thank you.
MIkaela de la Myco: Thank you, Lana. Yeah, no, this has been really special. I don't think I've actually ever cried on a podcast before. So thank you for the safe space to be able to do that. I think as someone who takes care of my community, I don't get held very much. So I really appreciate it. And yeah, this is very meaningful.
work that you're doing. So I just yeah, I see you too. And I also value what you're bringing to this space. And I hope that we can stay connected and keep weaving these threads together. It's a beautiful [01:09:00] tapestry that we're all making together. Axé o Mateo. Thanks.
Lana Pribic: And what does that mean? Can you share with us?
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, Axé. Yeah, Ashe is to give power. It's comes from Africa Mama land. And it is, it's to breed life. It is like the Ashe. It is the power that runs through all things. And when we speak Ashe, it's to speak life into something. It's to speak life into people. And Ometheo comes, And Nahuatl is one of the indigenous languages of Mexico and Ometeo is the consciousness that kind of governs the realm that we live in, this realm of duality that is like the creator in a way.
Yeah, to give power to the creator is to just curtail just the only reason I have the opportunity to be here is because of my ancestors and because of. All of the wisdom systems. I've had the gift of like just learning and tertiary relationship with so a sham what they're like, [01:10:00] I give thanks and I give power to the creator.
Lana Pribic: Beautiful. Ashe. I love
MIkaela de la Myco: I'll share. Mm hmm.
Lana Pribic: Can you share with people where they can find you, connect with you, if there's any opportunities to work with you or to support you?
MIkaela de la Myco: Yeah, absolutely. I have a website. I pour into it. I'm an artist as you have already listened. Yeah, my, my website is a space of, yeah music and writing and video and a place for people to learn for free. You can find that at mushwom. love. And there at mushwom. love is like my TikTok is linked.
My email is linked. My Instagram is linked. I'm very accessible. It's amazing. I'm super accessible. And there's always things that I'm creating in my community through, different organizational structures like the Tapped Out Coalition, that's bringing a lot of awareness around sensual harm in the psychedelic space.
I teach and help co [01:11:00] create a container. It's a 12 week training called EcoSensual, which is to train and help support. People within the psychedelic community around sensual harm protecting self and other people. And that's really meaningful because our foundational healing ways through herbalism.
If you're interested in psychedelics, herbalism and advocacy work and getting that robust kind of training from indigenous people, ecosensual is really special and I do have a pop up platform on IG, like a sacred hoe on there. And so I love to teach. I love to teach through sensuality.
I think it's really fun. It really is it's the thirst trap that like helps you remember the wisdom. So I just be trying to come with the thirst, but like drop a little bit of that knowledge and make it fun to learn. So yeah, I'm I take one on one. People, I host ceremonies four times a year, and they're pretty humble they're really sweet they're very accessible community oriented and if you would like to stay in the loop, please hit up my email list it's at the bottom of my website and [01:12:00] if you like to this message, feel free to email me or DM me.
I love being in the realm of my people. I don't hire anyone to answer my emails for me. There's no automated messages. Like I'm a human being that just wants to be here for my people. So reach out. I'll be there.
Lana Pribic: Amazing. Amazing. I'm so grateful for Jennifer for introducing me to you and telling me I got to talk to you. She was definitely right about that. It's been such an honor to talk to you. And yeah, I have a feeling we'll definitely be in touch beyond just this podcast.
MIkaela de la Myco: I certainly hope so. Thank you so much.
Lana Pribic: Thank you so much. Love in your heart.
Thank you. Thanks for listening, everyone. And we'll catch you in the next episode. Perfect.
