Spring cleaning our psyche with Beckley Retreats in The Netherlands
Sophie Benge reviews a psychedelic retreat in the Dutch countryside, where she discovers deep parts of her psyche and a change in her mindset around money
My trust in life’s flow for my highest good always amazes me, excepting one intransigent block - my scarcity mindset around money. Thinking my way out of this conundrum hadn’t been yielding results. So, I signed up with Beckley Retreats for their five-day retreat in the Netherlands in the hope that hallucinogenic fungi, taken in a safe setting, would break the stubborn defences of my subconscious to release financial flow.
This retreat is in a category of its own, because the nub of it happens outside our conscious control, taking us on a potentially life-transforming trip inside our head. The two truffle ceremonies that form the pinnacle of the experience are wrapped up in an 11-week programme, uniquely crafted to help us embed the change the fungi sets off.
I met Lucyne Jade, Beckley’s lead facilitator, shaman, psychotherapist, and longtime ceremony master, a month before departure, on Zoom. Her quiet reverence for the healing powers of psilocybin - the psychoactive substance in certain fungi strains - hooked me immediately. In preparation, I took on her advice to reduce coffee, increase meditation, clean up my diet and cut out sex.
“Our 16-strong, multinational group, including business owners, war veterans, a gallerist, chef and NGO boss, first met on two zoom calls, where we shared our intentions as though laying our prayers at the altar of the mushrooms’ magic”
Our 16-strong, multinational group, including business owners, war veterans, a gallerist, chef and NGO boss, first met on two Lucyne-led calls, where we shared our intentions as though laying our prayers at the altar of the mushrooms’ magic.
Still I shared the nervous anticipation among us all as we arrived at the simple retreat centre in a wooded enclave not far from Amsterdam, fully aware that we were here not to cleanse our digestive tracts but to wash out our psyche from what no longer served us, with psychedelic drugs, legal in just a handful of countries. The liberal policy in The Netherlands is the same in Jamaica, where Beckley Retreats also operates.
As we were here to ask nature’s medicine to shift our story, it seemed fitting that she took precedence over the simple accommodation, just on the right side of minimal. I didn’t mind sharing a room with a stranger (not every guest doubles up) because I was too excited for the experience to come and wholly seduced by the graceful confidence of the team: Prem, Ben, Zac, Deva, Tamara and serene ‘Queen Lucyne’, all whose lives have been touched by psychedelic rebirth and who oozed the kind of I-want-what-they’ve-got energy that carried us through the ups and downs to come.
We gathered in circle to listen and share - as we did each day, unveiling our human quirkiness, appreciating how we all carry kinks of old anger, buried emotion, fear, and grief in our hose of life, and how we are all more connected than separated.
We ate together, or alone as we chose, inside or on the porch, from a delicious vegetarian buffet: dainty salads, hot dishes and sugar-free desserts tasting better than candy.
We connected physically each morning for yoga and meditation and in the evenings for sacred songs around the fire.
We came together for potent breath work sessions prior to each ceremony. Lucyne took us through a forceful breathing journey, which, I found, fiddled mildly with my consciousness all by itself: a kind of gentle introduction for what followed.
It was the two ceremonies that took us far away from each other, from our familiar selves too, into the depths of our subconscious minds.
Psilocybin temporarily breaks down entrenched patterning in the ego-brain that can keep us in restrictive holding loops. It can bring repressed emotions to the surface for healing and take us into an expanded consciousness due to the way it reacts with receptor sites in the brain, freeing it from negative conditioning to create new neural pathways.
By the time I sipped my first truffle tea (underground clumps of mycelium strands), that tasted only mildly mushroomy, I saw the fungi as a kind of divine power, or in Lucyne’s poetic words as ‘rebirthers, nature’s connectors and the brains beneath our feet.’ I wasn’t too blasé to know too that they might imprison me in scary visions in which I would be trapped for hours with no escape. My apprehension was real.
We lay down on our mattresses, lined up school dorm fashion, surrounded by the dream team and their ritualistic paraphernalia - pipes, potions, shamanic charms, guitars, drums and feathers. They sang sacred songs and played indescribably beautiful music to carry us through the waves of the next six hours. They hug, hold and judge-us-not as deep parts of our psyche bob up and overwhelm us.
Before long my forehead fizzed and carried me inside a kaleidoscope of shape, sparkles and angelic visions of my daughter Daisy.
If I brush over my first trip, it’s because my second, two days later, was a different affair. The fungi carried me fast, as if on a flying carpet through a rolling vortex of colour and shape into visions of Daisy, as my healer. I’ve berated myself for not always being present enough as a mother when she was small, while I navigated fallout from a broken marriage, plugging the gap with more failed relationships. But Daisy (now 24) poured in with smiles to remind me of the cycle rides, picnics and make-believe games we shared in her younger years.
She told me ‘Mummy, I’m fine,’ as did my ancestors, who appeared and for whom I did a healing programme some years ago. In a six-hour flow of tears, pangs of nausea, incessant yawning (a form of release, for others it was screaming and shouting) and deep breathing to keep steady ‘on the carpet’. I found a kind of oceanic vastness, relief, and validation from the fungi that I had done my healing work and was ready to be a ‘mother’ in the fullest sense.
Their message was clear: Daisy, often described as ‘an old soul’, had been in my womb in previous lives but as a courtesan then, I had never been able to keep her. The hollow sensation the fungi found in my womb morphed into a soft pink light of grace for indomitable Daisy, my teacher.
The mushrooms healed a mother wound, from this life and past. They brought me sensations in my pelvis that told me my sexual energy is a source of power and how I must mother other women to use theirs, in the wellbeing work I do professionally. I was also called to mother my nonagenarian parents, whom I saw patiently waiting for me.
I’m sure that my long career in wellness, together with seeking solutions to hurdles in my life, helped me surrender and trust the higher power of the fungi, rather than let my rational brain fight to make sense of them. I know for some in our group, their journeys were less benign, spiked with archetypal tricksters, such as wolves, rats, demons and darkness.
Yet, by the time we left, we all concluded that the metaphorical, well-furrowed sled grooves on our mental hillsides had dissipated under a fresh fall of snow. We saw the world with the wonder of our childhood eyes.
Once home and determined that these new diamonds don’t revert to pebbles, I committed to the daily breathing and visualisations that Lucyne shared weekly on Zoom in ‘The Rewiring Programme’. There’s also a WhatsApp group and 1:1 session. This 6-week integration work, vital to cement the neurological change, is what stands Beckley Retreats apart from the burgeoning number of psychedelic retreat companies worldwide.
A few months on, I return to my intention. Lucyne warned us that the fungi can show us what we need, rather than what we want, to see. For me it’s both. My financial situation is fluid as I do more work with women - in a sense ‘mothering’ them, with my retreats and women-only massage treatments. And life still sparkles.
