About Us

Siddiq Khan, Founding Director

Siddiq grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. He has been exploring the intersections of nature connection, meditation, psychedelics and systems change for the last 15 years. He has spent months on intensive silent retreat, focusing particularly on nature-based practices of embodied contemplation such as pilgrimage and wilderness rites of passage. He has developed relationships with many species of fungi, building bioreactors and countless compost piles to produce inoculum for feeding soil fertility, foraging for wild edible and medicinal mushrooms, fermenting food and drink with wild and cultivated aerobic and anaerobic fungi, and setting up a laboratory for cloning and growing wild and cultivated species for mycoprotein, mycogardening, and mycotherapy. He has grown intimate with the life-cycles of mushrooms, from spores to mycelium to fruit. His investigation of psychedelic fungi has led him to study the ethnomycological traditions of the world, from modern curanderos to precolonial Native Americans, Siberian shamans, ancient Greek Mysteries, all the way back to the ceremonial practices of our paleolithic ancestors.

Elena Echevarria, Spain Facilitator

Elena hails from Mexico City and has meandered through different continents in the pursuit of knowledge in different fields. Today, she spends most of her working time growing a plant-dye garden and thinking of joyful ways to engage children and adults in outdoor learning and nature-connection. She also works with Siddiq in the lab growing the mushrooms utilized in the sessions. She is fascinated by self-directed learning and fostering autonomy in everyday life.

When she isn’t working, she pursues long hikes as a form of self-guided therapy and loves foraging for food, medicine, and crafts. She has extensive personal experience working with psychedelics and brings an earthy comforting feminine energy, appreciated by many, to our sessions.

Peyton Chipman, Guatemala Facilitator & Secretary

Peyton is originally from the U.S. but has lived in Europe for several years now, including Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain. She has a deep love for mushrooms, both for their medicinal and culinary gifts. Her zeal for local, fresh, and wholesome cooking has led her to work with many species of mushrooms in the pursuit of cooking food that is nutritious for our bodies and spirit, blending vegan cuisine and herbalism. Beyond the kitchen, Peyton’s political-social work is focused on regenerative food systems, research that led her into mycoforestry, foraging, and working with fungi for closed-loop systems.

Along with these passion projects, Peyton has been practising Hatha Yoga for many years. In combining meditation into her daily religious practices, she has found psilocybin mushrooms to be extremely helpful for deepening meditative experiences, better understanding the Self, and attuning with the Divine.

Camelia, Thailand Facilitator

Cam’s path has been shaped by over a decade of deep self-development, guided by a sincere commitment to living from a place of Love, inner freedom and authenticity. This long-term inner work naturally informs the way Cam shows up in shared spaces: grounded, open-hearted and deeply present.

Known for a strong capacity for empathy, an ability to explain complex inner processes with clarity and a naturally calming presence, Cam creates environments where people feel safe, understood and at ease very quickly. Her warmth, compassion and intuitive healing touch offer a sense of reassurance and gentle support throughout transformative experiences.

For the past six years, Cam has been living in Pai, Thailand, where she has created a beautiful Home immersed in nature; a space that reflects her values of simplicity, connection and care. This setting, combined with Cam’s presence, offers a container rooted in trust, softness and deep respect for each individual’s journey.

Mycosomatic Magic emerged from years of intensive study and practice with psychedelics, meditation, embodied movement, philosophy, art, literature, politics, economics, education, social activism, nature connection, mycology, ethnobotany, rewilding, foraging and farming. By teaming with fungi, we have experienced profound and lasting transformations in our everyday lives, in our physical and mental health, and most importantly, in our basic way of perceiving and relating to the world. Inspired by the incredible connective role played by fungi in nature, we commit ourselves to weaving relationships through which people and the entire web of “entangled life” ^[1] can begin to heal and grow together. Through our experiences we have learned that, with some knowledge and courage, this is something that anyone can do for themselves and for those they care about. Our vocation is not merely to offer the world yet more psychedelic ceremonies, but the seeds for a more beautiful, egalitarian, libertarian, self-organising, autonomous model of healing and self-enquiry that is the birthright of every human being and the original practice of all autochthonous ^[2] peoples. We are enthusiasts ^[3] rather than experts, bridge-builders rather than gatekeepers, seedsman rather than shaman, monitors and flight attendants ^[4] rather than guides or therapists.

Time and again, the mushrooms have shown us that they are the guides, not the humans in the room. Our task is to monitor and care for the voyagers as good flight attendants do, while the mushrooms pilot the plane for the duration of the trip. In our experience, our care is most effective when we work together with our fungal allies to enable individuals with the power to become the protagonist for their own healing and wellbeing, regenerating the lost connections ^[5] whose absence causes the pandemic of depression, fear, addiction and violence that ravages contemporary society. Reconnecting to the individual self-reliance and peer-to-peer mutual-aid associations that constitute every healthy community is an essential part of this journey.

We have learned how important it is to avoid reproducing the crippling dependence on external authority figures that serves to disconnect people from the resources essential to their own psychic autonomy and health. Rather than valorise our own expertise, theories, interpretations, techniques and beliefs, we emphasise the vast latent potential each individual has to access the resources necessary for their own healing, an ancestral resilience developed through millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. This is precisely how the mushrooms — our role-models — work themselves: revealing to each person deeply buried abilities, insights and resources they never knew they possessed.

The vulnerability and suggestibility of people under the influence of hallucinogens can very easily lead self-styled “shamans”, “guides” & “therapists” astray into the abuses of power sadly typical of all too many hierarchical relationships. The art of the psychedelic ceremony is learning to balance empathy with respect: neither to lead as a guide, nor to stand back and let people fend for themselves, but to stand by their sides as an accomplice and a friend.

Beyond this fundamental ethical commitment, we have spent many years developing a working knowledge of the primary sources and traditions, familiarity with the psychopharmacology, potential drug interactions and adverse mental and physical reactions of the medicines we work with ^[6] — a working understanding which we take care to distill and channel to all those we interact with. Knowledge is power, and it is our desire to help connect this power to the people who need it most through grassroots open-access networks whose rhizomatic structures mirror mushroom mycelium.

Our active membership in the Psychedelic Society of Spain, a community organization with affiliates across the Iberian peninsula, is one expression of this intention, as is our collaboration with several research organisations ^[7] whose studies we refer individuals who participate in our sessions to join, such as Quantified Citizen and Psychedelic Survey, collaborative platforms enriching today’s psychedelic renaissance through stronger knowledge sharing, giving people around the world the ability to help psychedelic science by sharing their own meaningful experiences anonymously. On such platforms we invite our participants to join studies such as the Understanding Experiences with Psychedelics study led by the University of Michigan, whose newly established Psychedelic Centre is already publishing some fascinating research. Since we include an introduction to microdosing and meditation in the post-session integration aftercare, we also invite our participants to join the Microdose study led by Zachary Walsh of the University of British Columbia, as well as the Meditation and Microdosing study, designed by Marco Schlosser at University College London and co-run by Amanda Feilding at the Beckley Foundation, Carla Pallavicini and Enzo Tagliazucchi at the University of Buenos Aires, and Otto Simonsson at the Karolinska Institute.

As signatories of the North Star ethics pledge, we are guided by a set of principles which we are working to appropriate and adapt as an effective framework for expanding access to these life-changing experiences far beyond the scope of the economy and the academy and into the realm of a mature, ethical, responsible, evidence-based, radically transformed and transformative autochthonous culture, where it more properly belongs.