Hello dear readers. I am aware that I have sorely neglected this poor website but no longer will that be the case! Be ready for a lot of upcoming changes and updates to this website - because I am going to marry the content between my Welcome to Mushroomland Substack newsletter and this site which is also meant to serve as the website for my Podcast. That being said, I appreciate your patience as it took me a whole year to create this episode! I have the video version of this on YouTube below; but the transcript is below for those who are (like me) more of the reader type.
I used to be terrified of magic mushrooms. My rationale behind the fear was that I had a really scary trip in my teens. Garden gnomes and paintings on the way to the bathroom talking to me and insulting me; that kind of thing.
The reason why I am prefacing Episode 3 of the Rachel Z Project with this introduction is because I am now no longer afraid of magic - period. And as myself and my shaman husband prepare for our next heroic vision quest with now 14g of Penis Envy Mushrooms, I wanted to take a step back, have some bubbles with you and tell you the story of how I got into Mushroomland. It has been approximately one year since I broke through.
The Mayan Calendar and 2012
The story of how I broke through into Mushroomland actually begins in 2012 when myself and Kevin were still living at Kevin’s dad’s place. Remember - according to the ancient Mayan calendar the world ended in 2012. At this time, Kevin had started to delve into DMT. We also went on a trip to the Mayan Pyramids in Mexico, specifically Chichen Itza which I fondly dubbed as “Chicken Pizza”. All joking aside, Chichen Itza was and is known as the “City of the Water Sorcerers”. This trip was also before your phone was also your camera; and so those pictures exist on an old digital camera or laptop - someWHERE.
Regardless of the lack of said photo proof; we managed to tap into the natural energy of the mother signal on the grid of the earth. I now know that the Mayans were an ancient tribe of Atlantis - but that is a story for a future time.
When we returned from that vacation, I went back to my regularly scheduled Martix life. Correction - regular scheduled ARCHONO-Matrix life. After all, there is a natural grid, an organic matrix that is not to be confused with the overlay that is laid on top of it. What I mean by my initial comment is that I went back to competing in Fitness and working my way up in the corporate world as a digital project manager. But remember what I said about the organic grid versus the overlay or archonic matrix - we will return to that soon.
Kevin, however, had started to really shift in consciousness. My memory here of specific timelines fail me at this time, but I do know that Kevin had started to work more deeply with the magic of psychedelics; specifically DMT. I was honestly not quite sure what I thought of the whole thing at the time; only that the concept scared me a bit. But Kevin has always supported me and never clipped my wings, so I always made an effort to do the same even though I didn’t quite understand.
DMT and Taming your Shadow Dragon
I will admit some of my shadow stuff here. Due to the general consensus of society thinking of DMT as a “drug” as well as being something on the more .. mystical and unexplained side; I had some old guilt and religious programming that caused me to demonize the whole thing. Furthermore, this was wrapped up into how religious my father is, being a past Sunday school teacher and attending an all-girls Catholic high school run by nuns. I also had a girlhood belief that I was protected by angels. I still believe that; although my NLP and inner standing of what angels are has been updated. These will all be lessons in the Warrior Class where you can figure out what storyline you are playing out.
Going back to Kevin and DMT. I knew in my heart that he was starting to become a shaman as he was assisting guiding fellow beings into the magic; but I never interfered. As the years went on, we would get into sporadic fights over it because I felt like Kevin was no longer interested in the matrix hustle that I was still so involved in. I wanted to start a podcast, was also still competing and being a digital project manager at the same time. As many of you know, I tend to have about 5 million projects going on at the same time - I attribute this to my Gemini moon. To see Kevin take a step back made me panic that I was losing my husband.
In fact, my husband was trying to help me find myself again.
The main challenge with working with DMT (or any psychedelic magical substance) is that language can only go so far to describe the absolute mystical and incomprehensible experience that one would have on it.
“What is actually happening?”
When you are journeying is a loaded question. This is why ART and poetry and cinema and comic books and STORIES exist. In telling a story, it is a way of describing truths of the universe without explicitly calling it out. Going forward, what I am hoping to organize within this emerging psychedelic renaissance is to gather shared intel and start to create new words, new symbols and ways to describe the experience. Actually not even the experience - everything.
This is why myself and Kevin from a magic mushroom perspective do not subscribe to the terms of “microdose” or to have “retreats”. Both of these terms limit the possibilities of what something so ancient and sacred can offer.
I am going off on a tangent, so let me get back to the main storyline. A couple of years passed and my career trajectory as a digital project manager really took off. I worked primarily in the automobile industry with FCA Chrysler as well as the Hospital in Diabetes and in AR/VR and animation projects for the pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, because I love doing a million things at once, I was still competing in fitness and bikini and training girls for shows. However, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with what the fitness industry was becoming as well as that mindset adding to my already abusive relationship with my body.
NUT and the Goddesses
My first episode of the Rachel Z Project was all about why I said goodbye to competing in fitness, so I will ensure I have a link to that if you are interested. There were a number of other events that occurred; from marrying the love of my life in 2015, adopting my fur baby Wolfie, my baby sister moving to Toronto et cetera.
Eventually, I gathered enough courage to ask Kevin to try DMT. I will preface something very important here.
YOU have to be the one to want to approach the breakthrough and the experience.
It cannot be forced on you, it is an energetic thing.
That being said, I have not ever broken through completely on DMT… I have only been in the “waiting room” area. But my experience on this DMT trip is relevant because it relates very acutely to now. The ancient Egyptian sky goddess Nut came to me, floating with me over a dreamy celestial grid. There are many stories about NUT, our divine mother goddess; but I will include that in my Goddess series because she deserves that attention. Nut told me to…
“Kill all your idols.”
No one is deserving of the pedestal that this reality enforces on you through slippery linguistic programming. No one but you is worthy of worship, of sacrifice, of that attention of accolades. Within you is the goddess that you seek.
We have been served up many false idols in our culture. Beyonce. Lady Gaga. Madonna. Britney Spears. J.Lo…. whomever. I am not taking away from the talent that these ladies have; I am only saying that much of the attention we spend worshiping false idols is energy that is better served in working on your own goddess powers.
There are goddess names long forgotten in the mists of time and sacred aspects of the divine feminine energy ignored and despised because of ignorance and fear.
I am prefacing this takeaway from the DMT trip because it directly relates to the first time I broke through on Magic Mushrooms. The soma brew that enabled me to break through this reality was a combination of 6g of Albino Penis Envy + 2g of Golden Teachers. Every magic mushroom has its own personality to it, and APES are actually known as being “stronger”. Prior to this, myself and Kevin had been working with 6g of Orissas or 6g of Golden Teachers. This provided a magical experience but I did not break through.
Quick disclaimer here: If you would like to approach a ceremony with us, your first ceremony would likely be around 4-5g with a more gentle mushroom teacher. It would be specific to your past experiences and needs. The amount that one “needs” to break through can vary.
Okay, so lets get into the story of how I broke through.
Set and Setting with Ceremony
I like to think of mushrooms or psychedelics as the spice in Dune. An ancient living magical artifact our ancestors used for space travel for eternity. Just like a spaceship, navigation is key - otherwise you can be taken down some pretty crazy waters.
And crazy waters are fine, but usually you want to be prepared for that. One of the warrior runes is an arrow; representing aiming for a target. Better to aim for the moon and miss, you will end up among the stars… compare this to not having a target at all and shooting out into oblivion. At that point, your experience could be anything.. And remember magic, just like astrology, is agnostic. It is YOU that dictates the flavor. With magic mushies, the set and setting is incredibly important. To quote the hermetic law of magic - as above, so below, as within, so without.
Hence, we have tapestries with art around our sacred space. Hours before the ceremony, I will sage and clear the space as well as bless our soma brew and the journey. We will lay out alchemical arrays and symbols and time the journey astrologically depending on the goal. I have a shadowscapes Tarot deck that I will do a 1-3 card pull for to guide the experience. If there is a specific question that I have, I will write it down and place next to the intention candles lit.
This has been such an interesting experience for me, to recall just what happened when I first broke through. I have a unicorn tapestry on the wall, a gift from my younger sister called
“Protector of Realms”
Usually on magic mushrooms, at least for me, there tends to be a type of challenge or a lesson to be learned before getting into the psychedelic party. This trip was the literal trip for me, because I remember screaming at Kevin “you broke it!” - in reference to reality.
Then I found myself in this strange endless loop of feeling like I was late for work, or that I was behind on a deadline. It is really hard for me to describe here because it's like being put into a puzzle. Halo does this in their game design of levels, where it just seems like a loop, but the key is to pay attention and to figure out what the lesson is to move on. At first I started to panic because I had completely forgotten that I had taken magic mushrooms.
Then something came over me. It’s taken me a long time - actually a whole year - to find the right word to describe it.
“Surrender.”
I accepted that this insane loop was just my reality now, and I didn’t give a fuck about the deadlines.
In that moment of release; everything exploded.
In a split second I felt everyone who had ever lived on this beautiful planet; every hope, every missed opportunity, every heartbreak, every dream, every bit of anger and despair and shame. And then through it all; in spite of the sometimes overwhelming pain, grief, suffering… there is LOVE. A powerful love that permeates and is eternal. There is a deep strength of the human experience; and we chose to come here to experience everything that is fully possible.
We have a birthright bestowed upon us from our solar father and our mother earth.
And we owe it to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters on this planet to play the game of life at the highest level we can.
What is REAL is completely dependent on YOU.
We are the masters of our universe; and that birthright has been taken away from us because of the LIES:
That the experts know more than what you do about your own experiences.
That value comes from monetary value.
That you have to play small so that you don’t offend or disturb for fear of punishment.
That you had to give up on your dreams.
The truth is that you are sovereign, you are free, and you are a creator being.
There is so much more here, but I cannot begin to cover it with mere language or even this video. Hence my need to create a new musical called “Atlantis Electric Circus” and finish my graphic novel “The Dragon Warriors”... because art is how we communicate the ineffable.
After the initial surrender, the WHOA moment, fireworks, ego death and full on transformation I remember looking at Kevin and saying “I get it.”
All of those years from when Kevin broke through, I finally got it.
We cried together for a very long time.
It’s really something when someone really SEES you. For who you truly are. He waited for me. He waited for me, patiently waiting, for me to breakthrough and to get it. What our mission is here. To find the others.. Like us :)
On the other side of that breakthrough was the dreamland of my childhood; a fairy land of magic and space to dance… a beautiful Mushroomland. The journey takes approximately 8 hours so, that huge firework explosion is only a small part of the whole story but I think the most important one here to leave you as I close this episode.
It has been about one year since that incredible transformative experience and so I am now finally ready to do what I came into this lifetime to do. Welcome to Mushroomland.
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