After arrival in Denver, I attended the Shroomski Magazine art show, where I bought a crocheted Amanita Muscaria mushroom cap that would become my mascot for the entire conference. From the moment I entered the convention center doors, I felt welcome. All the people with mushroom hats gravitated towards each other. When strangers stopped to say hello just because they’d seen me earlier or to tell me they liked my hat, conversation flowed effortlessly toward the same revelation: psychedelics aren’t simply chemicals; they’re catalysts that remind us of what truly runs the world. Love.
That message hit early at the screening of Wild Magic, a documentary crew’s LSD-infused road trip across America. For 13 weeks, the filmmakers microdosed 30–50 mcg every dawn, vowing to “make a movie that was psychedelic—not a movie about psychedelics.” They claimed not to have found the subjects, but that the subjects found them—including transient families and individuals who, despite everything, sang that “life is all about love and kindness.” Their question to each interviewee—”What is magic to you?”—echoed in the theater like a mantra. The movie was inspirational, uplifting, poignant, profound, and joyous.
The next day, I went to the Immersion Room to hear East Forest’s “Sounds for the Psychedelic Practitioner.” What I discovered was Leland Holgate Sr.’s (The Willful Warrior) “Welcome Home Method,” a peer-reviewed breathwork-and-music practice designed for spinal-injury patients, yet potent for everyone. Lying in front of $85,000 speakers, I felt waves of energy move like warm water from my scalp to my tingling fingertips and toes, exactly when he predicted they would.
“5,000 more neural pathways run from ear to brain than eye to brain,” he reminded us; “music is medicine.” He urged us not to fill our brains with TV, and instead, to listen to music. He suggested that “everyone should love and give more… Share as much love as you’re able to.” I stayed to hear Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. I returned every single day to experience this breathwork journey. I brought a new friend on day two, and we breathed together through Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Surges of euphoria rippled through my body—gentle, loving, familiar, home. It was absolute bliss.
Emerging from the Immersion Room, I wandered into the expo hall, where a different kind of exploration awaited. Booths brimmed with tools, technologies, and tinctures—all promising new ways to heal. HiDow was selling TENS/EMS units, while Clix Therapy offered magical heating pads that activate with the click of a button. The Other team sat down with a few people, including Stephanie Wang, the founder of KA!, who introduced us to the healing power of Kanna—an empathogenic plant from South Africa known as a natural anti-depressant, anti-anxiety, aphrodisiac, and heart-opener, calming the system while brightening your mood. (Maybe I should try a kanna-date instead of a canna-date.) She told us that in 2013, she had a life-changing journey with Kanna. On a ceremonial dose, she “had never felt such a deep sense of acceptance, and belonging, and love. And also just a visceral understanding and knowing that everything around us is love, and I couldn’t have a single negative thought.” That experience propelled her mission to raise consciousness in the world. Phoebe McPherson of Fun Guy, another Kanna brand making delicious chai-flavored gummies, added: “Sceletium, as an industry, is growing so quickly in the United States and much of it is thanks to the word of mouth from psychonauts and others working to help the masses feel good and feel better.”
From afar, I was immediately drawn to a beautiful gradient of purple and pink—the colors of Violette, a sacred social network for seekers, healers, and psychonauts. There I met its founder, Nikos Phelps. I was originally intrigued by Violette’s “sacred romance” feature—having wasted so much time and energy sifting through “normies” on dating apps. As someone fed up with the NYC dating scene, I would absolutely love to have a more conscious option. Violette promises to be more than just a dating app; it’s also a place for soul-aligned community and collaborative opportunities rooted in purpose. Nikos implied that Violette was designed with love at its core. Not just romantic love, but the kind that fosters belonging, collaboration, and deep human connection. “Because you deserve to find your people, and be deeply seen when you do.”
At a chronic pain talk led by Lorien Chavez from the Chacruna Institute, I heard how the speaker’s mucosal lining had deteriorated from constant fight-or-flight responses. She used ayahuasca and psilocybin not to escape pain but to “re-carve” neural highways. Pain teaches purpose if we listen. Psychedelics provide the neuroplastic window—to choose new routes. Her words landed personally. Hearing her, I realized my body isn’t an adversary; it’s a classroom.
Of all sessions, the “Love & Psychedelics: Intimacy to Break-Ups” panel felt closest to home—I was nodding throughout. Therapist Tommaso Barba warned that psychedelic experiences can take down your “protectors.” MDMA makes you more empathetic, can expose complex truths, and can press fast-forward on romance, flooding roots with fertilizer before they anchor.
“Love is a skill, not a feeling,” he said, “something you develop through conversations, doing dishes, conflicts.” Annie Lalla framed break-ups as graduations; psychedelics can help keep the poetry of the relationship intact if introduced ethically. Integration—sober conversations, boundaries, quotidian tasks—must follow any cosmic connection.
Musicologist Stephanie Karzon Abrams traced a lineage from campfire drums to Ibiza’s Amnesia club to Burning Man’s sound camps, dubbing dance floors “spaces of expanded consciousness.” On the following panel “Between Ecstasy and Escapism: Raving as a Contemporary Ritual,” DJ/Healer Taylor Bratches called raving a “contemporary ritual of release”— a place where trauma survivors rehearse freedom in their own skin. Growing up shy, she said, dancing was revolutionary. I feel that truth weekly.
Echelon, acrylic on canvas, 2023 by Sean ZennerSerendipity threaded every corridor: running into a breathwork teacher from Mexico; discovering Leland knew my first DMT-breath teacher; being dubbed “the Carrie Bradshaw of Psychedelics” by a pink-glitter-eyeshadowed stranger. Each meeting felt orchestrated by the same mycelial network Paul Stamets says binds forests—the one scientists now suspect psilocybin merely reminds us we inhabit.
Throughout the week, people spoke about love being what psychedelics taught them most. People who have never tried them suddenly experience life in a completely different way because they can finally see the light and the love that connection between humans, animals, and nature creates. Anyone who’s experienced trauma would more likely than not benefit from a therapeutic psychedelic experience. I left for the airport in wonder. Full of joy. Full of love! Full of appreciation for all the people doing what I believe to be some of the most important work in the world. The work that makes people feel better in their bodies, their minds, their hearts, everywhere. What a gift to be able to share stories, studies, breath, and experience with thousands of people who want to learn and make the world a better place through these learnings. My heart is absolutely bursting.
They even had a canine therapy room!I found myself telling complete strangers the story of my chronic pain, and receiving true compassion from everyone. I felt safe and vulnerable enough to share. The people there truly care about the wellbeing of others. Coming from a place of love is the only way to heal. When you’ve been stuck in a fear response for so long, your body adapts and accepts that fear as reality. When many of us are in pain, we all suffer. Collective trauma is so abundant—it always has been throughout history, and especially right now. That’s why this work is so important. Imagine a world where love ruled instead of fear.
Kyle Heroy, COO of Toadwood Labs in Portland, Oregon, reflected, “I went to MAPS thinking I’d maybe find a little peace—what I found was a galaxy. Healers, wizards, shamans, beautiful strangers who saw through the noise and held up a mirror to my soul. And somehow, in the quiet between us, I found family. My Star Tribe. People who reminded me how to love myself—gently, honestly, and without shame. I showed up broken. They didn’t fix me—they found me. And in that, I found hope. Real, cosmic, hold-you-when-you-cry hope.”
We gave out the spring issue of The Other Magazine to everyone we talked to, including Omar Khan of Soltara Healing Center.The contrast hit hardest back in New York. Coming home from the Coney Island Mermaid Parade just 12 hours after landing, a stranger’s “Hey baby, what’s up baby,” pierced my post-conference glow. While eye contact and connection at the conference were abundant, eye contact on these sidewalks can misfire. Yet even that tension clarifies the mission: to import the conference’s radical openness into places where fear still governs public space. Love is easy in a room full of like-minded seekers; the real test is offering it to the hurried commuter, the skeptical cop, the version of myself bracing for catcalls.
On the plane home, Spotify’s Discover Weekly served the perfect dreamy, nostalgic soundtrack my heart requested, and I wrote: Psychedelics are a tool; love is the medicine. Several days of lectures distilled to that single, cellular truth. It’s not dosage but duration in altered states that rewires us; it’s not ecstatic peak but careful integration that cements change. When we unlearn fear, maitri (generous compassion), bhakti (selfless devotion), shringara (rapturous intimacy), and kama (body-love) can coexist—and eventually culminate in atma prema: I am love.
I return to Brooklyn lighter, glowing, yes—but also tasked. The psychedelic renaissance isn’t a spectator’s sport; it’s a participatory spell. My next steps are humble: practice the Welcome Home Method, treat my pain as a teacher, dance without apology, and remember that every stranger might be part of my mycelial family. If reality is “stranger than we can think,” as Wild Magic suggests, then maybe the strangest—and most revolutionary—thought is simply this: a civilization powered by love is not naïve; it is overdue.
This article was originally published in our Summer 2025 Issue.
