A Microdosing Consultant’s transformation story
A deeply personal conversation led by mycelium, psilocybin mushrooms, and psychedelic journeying
Until recently, job titles didn’t include ‘microdosing’. In 2024 it’s a thing, and I’m all for it. In this conversation with Donna1, a South African Microdosing Consultant and Psychedelic Sitter, I learned how psychedelics are opening up new career options, and how microdosing is like the gentle cousin of macro2-dose journeying. Donna shares deeply personal insight into her transformative experiences with psilocybin mushrooms, and how she’s using these learnings to serve others.3
I hope you enjoy the chat as much as I did 🍄❤️
Reading time: 15 min (grab a cuppa)
This is a raw transcript slightly edited for length and clarity.
Jess: Mushroom folk often talk about mycelium guiding them and connecting via mushrooms. You and I were connected by mycelium. Sometimes this kind of language can seem a bit woolly to outsiders… how would you explain the connection?
Donna: If you've ever watched Fantastic Fungi, you’ll know that mycelium is like the internet of the planet, sending messages from tree to tree. When we ingest the fruit bodies of psilocybe mushrooms, we have similar neural networks activated in our brains. Additionally, on an ethereal level, we start to connect with other people. Someone might wake up one morning and have the thought, “I want to do a journey”, and sure enough in the following days or weeks they will hear about someone who facilitates journeys. It's an incredible multi-layered connectivity that I have grown to love.
J: This connectivity is partly why I'm so obsessed with mushrooms. On a personal note, I suffer from depression and anxiety, and psilocybin has helped me feel more connected to myself, to nature and to other people. Also, my mycelial mushroom tour is quite literally connecting me from one person to the next, which is pretty cool.
D: Fantastic. So great. Ask and you shall receive!
J: Let’s start with an intro: Who are you, and what do you do?
D: I'm a 57-year-old mother of three adult kids. After completing high school, I went straight into working in hotels and then advertising, and then met and married my husband and became a bookkeeper in his business. I did about 25 years of intense, hands-on mothering. As my youngest was finishing school, I faced the challenge of having to relocate my ageing parents closer to me. This necessitated separating my mother (who has dementia) and my father, already in his mid-80s, and not coping with taking care of her. I facilitated their move to Cape Town and transitioned into a different kind of carer—of ageing parents, instead of growing children.
J: Is this where your journey of caring started to overlap with mushrooms?
D: My first mushroom journey was in 2016. It was an incredible experience that allowed me to feel what it was like for my mother to be in this world with her dementia. It was as if I’d climbed into her brain and looked out into the world from her perspective. It was a very powerful experience which changed the way I related to her and communicated with her from then onwards. My second mushroom journey was in 2018, the year my parents arrived, and the big message was, ‘This is the work you've been waiting for’. All my life I'd wanted to help people, but never knew how. There was a big ‘aha’ moment during that second journey: ‘You are going to work with mushrooms’.
“My second mushroom journey was in 2018, the year my parents arrived, and the big message was, ‘This is the work you've been waiting for’. All my life I'd wanted to help people, but never knew how. There was a big ‘aha’ moment during that second journey: ‘You are going to work with mushrooms’. ”
D: I then called up Monica Cromhout who is at the heart of the mushroom world in South Africa. Now in her mid-70s, she discovered magic mushrooms at the age of 64 and was told in her first journey, which she did on her own in her back garden, that she had to open her door to mycelium and mushrooms. She accepted me to train as a facilitator, and for 18 months I worked at Somaland as a ‘watcher’. In January of 2020 I started facilitating private journeys independently.
J: 2020 was during the pandemic—quite a hectic time to start journeying with people…
D: Many people were traumatised. Whether you call it trauma with a ‘small T’ or a ‘capital T’ as Gabor Maté puts it, people didn't know where this was all headed. Were our family members going to be safe? Were our businesses going to survive? What was this really all about?
J: How did journeying work lead to microdosing work?
D: I decided to look into microdosing as an alternative method of working with psilocybin and invested in Paul Austin’s Third Wave microdosing course. By that stage, I’d connected with a supplier of sacrament for the journeys. I started by measuring out microdose capsules and then ran a little experiment where I invited 13 people to join me for eight weeks of microdosing. By taking part in the research they obtained the microdoses from me for free but in return I requested a one-on-one session to find out how it had worked for them. At the end of eight weeks, every single person said, “Wow, that was incredible”. They reported things like, “We’re sleeping better, we’re less anxious, we're doom-scrolling less, we’re feeling a bit more optimistic, we have a cheerier outlook on where all this uncertainty is headed” etc. I knew then that I was onto something.
D: In January of 2021 my dad passed away, and I needed to be fully present in the process of grieving. I have always suffered from mild depression and had quite severe post-natal depression in the early 2000s, at which point I'd been prescribed anti-depressants. Rather than opt for another prescription for anti-depressants I decided to microdose, meticulously and strictly. For the year of 2021, I became my own experiment, doing eight weeks of microdosing, followed by two weeks off as per the Fadiman Protocol of microdosing psychedelics.
D: Around the same time a friend of mine knew a homoeopath who was looking for somebody he could send patients to for microdosing and journeying. When I heard his name, I realised it was my homoeopath who I hadn’t seen for a few years—there’s the mycelial network connecting again! He started to send his patients to me: people who were suffering from depression, people who had substance abuse issues, etc. Slowly but surely my microdosing practice started to develop.
“Rather than opt for another prescription for anti-depressants I decided to microdose, meticulously and strictly. For the year of 2021, I became my own experiment, doing eight weeks of microdosing, followed by two weeks off as per the Fadiman Protocol of microdosing psychedelics.”
J: How would you compare the process and benefits of microdosing to journeying?
D: I love that microdosing is a very gentle process compared to journeys. After every journey, my depression would clear for about six months before I’d start to feel a bit gnarly and not so happy again. I would do another journey and that would cure my depression again. I started using journeys as an anti-depressant.
D: There was a journey in me to deal with the grief of losing my dad, which I did four months after he died. Raw grief can be so visceral but we don't allow ourselves to express this as a Western culture, particularly in South Africa. During that journey I allowed those guttural sounds to crawl out of my body. Deep in my journey, I heard this noise and was like, “What the hell is that??”. It took me a while to realise it was my own voice making those animal sounds. It was a very intense process.
D: After developing the microdosing protocol I took a gap from journeys, as I noticed that microdosing was doing the same thing: keeping the depression manageable. Ironically, microdosing enabled me to sit in the fire of my feelings—whether it was glory, sadness, or the terrible devastation of loss. Everything that is written and researched about psilocybin ‘heroic’ doses, also applies to microdosing. Not in the same way but to the same degree, albeit much gentler, a little bit slower and more drawn out.
“Microdosing enabled me to sit in the fire of my feelings – whether it was glory, sadness, or the terrible devastation of loss. Everything that is written and researched about psilocybin ‘heroic’ doses, also applies to microdosing.”
J: So it’s helped you personally, and now you’re able to serve others?
D: I feel like I’ve found a way to be of service; to help people in a meaningful way. The practice is very small; only two days a week. I've never advertised, it all happens through word of mouth. I never get too busy and I’m never idle. It's just a magical, beautiful thing that I've landed myself in. I love the people that I meet. They're sitting in a chair across my desk and often they start crying as they're telling me their story. I've got this little joke, “I'm so sorry it's that chair that makes people cry”, and they will crack up laughing.
J: How would you refer to yourself? Do you have a ‘job’ title for this work?
D: I’m a Microdosing Consultant and a Psychedelic Sitter. I make it very clear at the beginning of every journey I facilitate, that I’m not a guru, I'm not a medicine woman, I'm not a shaman, I’m not a counsellor, I’m not special. I’m just somebody who has had experience sitting with people’s psychedelic experiences and getting them safely to the other side. There are lots of people selling microdoses, but few who walk the path with you. I create a connection so that if my clients have questions, I’m a text away. People feel very good about this, knowing they’re in good hands. At the end of the day, I am a housewife. People walk into my home and have a big sigh of relief. They say things like, “Well I was expecting a barefoot, dreadlocked person”—not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of person at all, but it’s interesting what people associate with this kind of work. I'm nothing like that; I'm pretty straight down-the-line and people like that.
“I make it very clear at the beginning of the journey that I’m not a guru, I'm not a medicine woman, I'm not a shaman, I’m not a counsellor, I’m not special. I’m just somebody who has had experience sitting with people’s psychedelic experiences and getting them safely to the other side.”
J: Do you work with anyone and everyone, or only with people who are already exploring therapeutic avenues?
D: When it comes to journeys, I prefer to work with people who are in therapy already, or that have a therapist that they can do integration with afterwards. I think it’s important, and one of the missing links in the mushroom industry in South Africa. Microdosing on the other hand, is for anyone and everyone who might be interested.
J: You’ve brought me to one of my big questions for you... Practitioners who are ‘sitting’, holding space or consulting have varying levels of experience with psychedelic journeying, and often little-to-zero formal therapeutic training or education. Globally, institutions are adding protocol and ethics codes to trip-sitting4. The American Psychedelic Practitioners Association, or APPA, is establishing professional guidelines and accreditation standards for psychedelic therapists5, while places like DoubleBlind and Psychedelic Support offer training on best practices and consent. But in South Africa, there is no school for this stuff (yet!). We’re in the era of the ‘school of experience’. What are your thoughts on this? What qualifies someone to hold space for another during their trip?
D: I belong to a huge network of people who do similar facilitation of journeys. We use each other as sounding boards and share experiences and knowledge freely amongst us (in a WhatsApp group). There are also a few trainings facilitated by the Psychedelic Society of South Africa, for example, a workshop they held in 2023 called Holding Space. I'm very excited that there is finally something a bit more formal that’s available, but it’s early days. What makes for a good sitter is somebody who's willing to leave their ego outside of the room. To be completely in service and present for another person. When I sit for someone, it’s not about me at all. I am there to make sure that they are safe, well-held and I'm holding space.
J: Are there other lived experiences that can be helpful when trip-sitting?
D: Yes—being a parent has been fantastic training for being a sitter. When kids fall and hurt themselves, they look straight at the parent to gauge the severity of the fall. I learnt to calmly reply, “Oh, did you have a fall? That's okay. Let's have a look at the knee”. My youngest child nearly drowned in the swimming pool—I dived in and pulled him out. I was panicked, but looked at him and I said, “Wow, you didn't even breathe underwater!” I take that same quality of calm into my facilitation so that even in the journeyers’ hairiest moments, I can remain calm and hold space for them.
J: You're sharing some wonderful stories which I think can help people understand these concepts better, which can feel quite foreign to them. I have friends and family with little frame of reference for psychedelic journeying, and this world can feel inaccessible and even a bit scary! Using this kind of storytelling could help to make it feel more accessible to people, as well as knowing that there are ‘everyday’ folk like yourself—a relatable housewife—doing the work.
J: People tend to get into psychedelics in varying ways. There’s the party scene where many had their first magic mushroom trip. There is access via ancient practices of traditional medicine, like sangoma6 culture in South Africa, or via ancestral knowledge. There’s a world of mysticism and spiritualism... and in recent years, the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ reported in mainstream media, underpinned by big pharma and academia publishing scientific results of the benefits of psychedelic-assisted therapy and how these compounds affect our brains at a neural level. Any one of these areas could be an entry point for people. How do you think people navigate the science and the mysticism?
D: I think you can appreciate the science and the mysticism. I’m not necessarily religious or spiritual, but have come from a mystical background; I've always been a seeker on a path. I love the fact that there are polar opposites and that they are coming together in beautiful ways. Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind talks about the ephemeral experience that cannot be described in words and that there is this ‘other world’ that exists. I love that I can talk to people who come from either side of the spectrum, and there is space for both to coexist.
J: I agree: these worlds can coexist. They’re inter-colliding and as the culture grows it’s creating a new mish-mush of science and mysticism, appropriate for contemporary culture. My next question is: do you have any advice for people who want to get into the kind of work that you do?
D: Unfortunately there is little training in South Africa, except for workshops such as Holding Space which I mentioned earlier. I wish that there was more of that. However, one of the things that working with mushrooms helps you with, is not to stress about how to get from A to B. If you wake up every morning and accept what is coming your way, you will step in the right direction. Until we see regulation7 and formal training in this country, trust that you will find the right people at the right time and the next step will reveal itself.
J: This totally rings true: I am following where the mushrooms take me, and it’s been fruitful. I'm sure this could feel quite scary to people who are planning their futures, but as we've both seen from personal experience, once you trust in mycelium it starts to guide you. It’s unexplainable and magical.
J: We can’t talk about microdosing without talking about the product itself. How easy is it to access good-quality psilocybin mushrooms?
D: I worry a little about the product that is out there. My kids have excitedly sent me photographs from cafes and restaurants selling microdoses, with prices double what I'm charging, if not more. I know where my product comes from and the nature in which it’s grown, with care and beautiful energy behind it. When I capsulise the microdoses myself, I put on a beautiful meditation or music, and pour a lot of good vibes into the product. I’m worried that consumers won’t be discerning about their product. When it becomes legal, psilocybin will be synthesised in a laboratory, which feels a bit sad but I guess is the nature of progress: when we get what we want we have to lose something along the way.
“I’m worried that consumers won’t be discerning about their [microdosing] product. When it becomes legal, psilocybin will be synthesised in a laboratory, which feels a bit sad but I guess is the nature of progress: when we get what we want we have to lose something along the way.”
J: Like with any subculture that bubbles up into the mainstream, we’ll see commercialism, extractive capitalism as well as people engaging with good intentions. Hopefully more of the latter than the former! Like you, I hope that consumers will be able to be discerning and educate themselves. Shop around and do some research before buying for pure novelty in the moment.
D: Yeah, even with people who want to journey with me, I stress upfront that it’s important to meet face to face first, which gives us both an opportunity to see if we can work together. I say to them, “Don't just settle on me, find other facilitators, go meet with them, see how you connect with them and maybe you’ll find somebody that you feel is a better fit for you”. Ultimately I have to trust that the mushrooms only bring us what we can handle, the people we should be meeting, the experiences we should be having, and that it’s all part of our path through this school ground called life.
J: Totally. Donna, thank you so much. It's been super cool chatting with you and I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you!
You made it to the end! Grab another cuppa for this conversation with Maestro, a grower of psychedelic sacrament:
To protect the safety and anonymity of Donna and their valuable contribution to the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy in South Africa, we’ve used a pseudonym and won’t reveal a specific geographic location.
Running with Mushrooms is not the biggest fan of the terms ‘hero/heroic’ dose, despite it’s wide use and common understanding. Coined by Terence McKenna, ‘heroic’ doses refer to a large dose (usually around 5g) of psilocybin mushrooms, which can induce an intense psychedelic / hallucinogenic experience. My worry is that the term strokes the ego and facilitates a culture of bravado, presenteeism and comparison. I’d prefer a more practical, less emotional term. We use ‘micro’ dose, so why not ‘mid’ (e.g. for a party dose, around 2g), and ‘macro’ for larger 5g+ doses?
Disclaimer: This post is intended for informative and entertainment purposes only. Running with Mushrooms occasionally writes about activities or substances which may be illegal in some regions. The views expressed in this Site are solely the opinions, perspectives and beliefs of the people interviewed. Running with Mushrooms does not condone or support illegal activities.
The UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics gives a good coverage of American ethics codes and the organisations developing best practice protocols, here.
A sangoma is a highly respected healer among the Zulu people of South Africa who diagnoses, prescribes, and often performs rituals to heal a person physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually.
As of publishing, it is illegal to acquire, use, possess, manufacture or supply psilocybin-containing mushrooms in South Africa.
When legalized, not only will psilocybin be synthesized in labs, also more people will feel safe to grow their own and connect deeply with the species and medicine in this intimate process.