Psychedelic trips aren’t just for hippies anymore. These days, everyone from moms to CEOs and entrepreneurs are turning to magic mushrooms to improve their mental health and boost their businesses.
British Columbia-based husband and wife team Gary Logan and Rob Glover say they offer a unique experience to CEOs, athletes and even celebrities: guided psychedelic mushroom tours.
The couple founded Journeyman Collective, a luxury psilocybin retreat, after Logan’s mother, who lived with them for three and a half years until her death, suggested they try a guided psilocybin mushroom experience with the help of a shaman to help with grief.
“Robert graciously stepped forward and went ahead,” Logan told CNBC Make It, and after Glover’s experience, “the sadness disappeared. He found joy and happiness. He seemed to get back on his feet and regain his sense of purpose,” Logan said.
Soon after, Logan decided to have a shamanic experience for his birthday, and he says it was the best gift he’d ever given himself.
After their guided experience, Logan and Rob “both had a similar vision for magic mushrooms and taking people on a journey,” Logan told Make It magazine, “and we talked to the medicine man, and he helped us develop a program and educated us on how to take people on a journey.”
Luxury Psilocybin Retreat for Executives
Founded in 2018, Journeyman Collective offers a variety of options, including four-day individual retreats, communal experiences for couples or business partners, and group retreats for three to four people, according to the TJC website.
Prices for the experience start at $15,000, and Logan stresses to potential participants that it’s a “self-improvement investment” in their inner self, their health and the happiness of themselves and those around them.
“You can go hiking, there’s a saltwater pool, a hot tub, a plunge pool in the winter. Overall it creates an expanded awareness for people,” Glover told CEO Magazine in 2023.
The retreat will take place in an 8,000-square-foot home and participants will be served a curated menu. The food will be primarily vegetarian and prepared by Logan himself using organic ingredients.
But of course, the real attraction is the psilocybin and the rituals in which patients take the mushrooms. “There are two rituals, two days of integration, and we work on the mental, spiritual, emotional and physical aspects of what it means to be human. So we’re teaching them how to live with their medicine and how to continue to live with their medicine after they’re released,” Glover says.
“When you work with us, we’re with you the whole time – from the time you wake up until the time you go to sleep.”
The experience begins long before customers step foot into the luxury resort: Applicants must share their medical history.
“Participants usually meet with us at least twice on a Zoom call, so we have a pretty good intuition before the retreat about whether we can work with them,” Glover says.
“Again, this is for personal development. This is not a clinical setting,” he added. Neither Glover nor Logan are physicians, “so this is not a recreational setting.”
Following the retreat, the couple will keep in touch with their clients for three months to check in. “Again, this is through Zoom calls and interactions to help people apply what they’ve learned,” Glover told CEO Magazine.
Glover said most people attend a retreat every three years, though some may do it as often as once a year, but that’s less common.
“Creating better leaders”
But what do experts gain from this experience?
“They’re approaching their business with more passion and purpose, and the profits will come naturally as a result,” Glover told the New York Post earlier this year.
Glover said one client claims that after his TJC experience, he completed a task that would normally take eight hours in just one or two hours: “He was able to work more effectively and efficiently, people were more self-aware, and the result was better leaders.”
“I think they’re developing the ability to stay present in the moment. They’re not multitasking, they’re completing tasks,” Logan says of her clients.
“They’re more creative in writing business plans, creating new businesses and expanding existing businesses. They’re also more courageous,” Glover added.
“Sometimes people have had business ideas on the back burner, and after this experience, those ideas they’ve had on the back burner come to the forefront and they actually start implementing some of the old ideas they’ve had for a while.”
Research may help explain why TJC clients leave feeling changed: In a recent intensive study at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers found that psilocybin’s effects can make people’s thinking more flexible and change the way they respond to a range of emotions, particularly negative ones.
This “gives people who are in a maladaptive state due to depression or other illnesses an opportunity to reset and create new patterns of thinking, behavior and mood,” Dr. Joshua Siegel, professor at NYU Langone Health’s Center for Psychedelic Medicine, told CNBC Make It last month. Dr. Siegel, formerly of Washington University in St. Louis, helped conduct the study.
It’s important to note that the participants in this study weren’t ingesting hallucinogenic mushrooms, but rather ingesting psilocybin in its purest form, and they were also given high doses of psilocybin.
Clinical trials of psychedelics exclude people who have a history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or who are at high risk for developing those illnesses because they have direct relatives with them, Siegel said. Even if you have no personal or family history of these illnesses, there is still a risk that taking psychedelics will trigger psychotic or manic episodes.
Siegel urges anyone considering psychedelic therapy to seek professional help in a “controlled setting with a trained therapist in a safe environment.”
Want to master your money this fall? Enroll in CNBC’s new online course. We’ll teach you actionable strategies to master your budget, reduce your debt, and grow your assets. Get started today and be confident and successful. Use code EARLYBIRD to get an introductory discount of 30% off for the back-to-school season. Discount extended through September 30, 2024.
Plus, sign up for the CNBC Make It newsletter to get tips and tricks to succeed in work, money and life.