Lifestyle I’m sitting under tent canvas, eye-mask on, swaddled like a newborn in a linen blanket. There is a woman singing a Jamaican folk song somewhere in the distance and the air is perfumed with sage and incense. Time and space are abstract concepts and I’m overwhelmed by a deep feeling of surrender.
I think I might be sobbing. Welcome to Jamaica’s Good Hope Estate, a 200-acre former plantation which is now also the home to the Beckley Foundation’s psilocybin retreats. Contrary to what my editors think, I’m not here for a Caribbean jolly but rather to experience firsthand the work they are doing to discover the therapeutic benefits of magic mushrooms .
The Beckley Foundation has long been a pioneer in the field. When the rest of the world was experimenting recreationally with mushrooms and LSD in the Sixties, Beckley’s founder, eccentric aristocrat Amanda Fielding , recognised the powerful benefits of psychedelics for healing trauma, creative blocks and treating depression — a potent natural alternative to the sometimes-lazy prescription of SSRIs in modern medicine. Of course, psilocybin ceremonies have been happening for millennia, from the earliest cavemen to the Aztecs.
And while underground versions have been going in the West for decades, what sets the Beckley retreats apart is this reverence for their sacred origins — case in point, all guests are encouraged to describe the mushrooms as ‘the medicine’ rather than a drug. It helps that the retreat.
