The Healing Power of Fungi

Do you know the power of mycology and the healing power of fungi?

“I hope this resonance of gratitude spreads, like waves meeting other waves and transforming little by little, opening the eyes to beauty,” says Louie Schwartzberg, remind us that gratitude and nature can illuminate the love we sometimes forget to see around us. Most of us don’t think of mushrooms for pharmaceuticals or the healing power of fungi, but it is a real thing!

From Fantastic Fungi to Moving Art, Louie’s work has always explored the healing power of nature. “This made me weep with joy over the beauty and intricacy of this world. A feeling I’ve always had within me, but do not often enough take the time to nurture. Gratitude has the power to heal,” wrote one viewer.

Mushrooms for Health and Mushrooms for Wellness?

If you’ve ever experienced a traumatic event as a child, then you can sympathize with Bett Williams. As a teenager, Williams had a transformative experience during the first time she ever took psilocybin mushrooms. But when she shared the miraculous story with her boss, she was fired from her job. The situation spiraled downwards from there, and Williams avoided psilocybin entirely for the next few years of her life. But something called her back again. 

 It all started with Williams’s desire to heal herself. She met with high-psilocybin Afro-futurist artist collectives and Mazatec indigenous elders. She started writing a book and opening herself up to the healing power of psilocybin and plant intelligence. Titled The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey, Williams’ memoir shares her journey as she learns about fungi’s indigenous roots, and how it eventually came to transform her life. There really is something to the healing power of fungi!

 “It was my desire to honor the psilocybin mushrooms as the Mazatec do, not as a pharmaceutical helper, a pleasure drug, or even a tool of self-discovery in the Western psychological sense,” Williams says. “I wanted to honor them as a holy sacrament.”

 Williams is now an author, mushroom farmer, public speaker, and podcaster. Her podcast, No Cures, Only Alchemy, focuses on the intersection between psychedelics and culture.

 Ultimately, the memoir is a celebration of life and what it truly means to choose healing. It’s not easy to come back from the darkness, and Williams shares every wild adventure with readers on her journey to the light. “Plant medicines truly can connect people, bridge gaps, and build a vast mycelial network,” she observes.