Tune out, turn on, drop in to a psychedelic retreat center

I was reading an article on WeLive, WeWork’s communal living business, and came across the name of one Tricia Eastman, whose profession was described as psychedelic retreat coordinator. Holy Timothy Leary! That’s a job?

Apparently.

When you google “psychedelic retreat coordinator,” you get 377,000 hits.

Ow wow, man.

It’s a thing.

There are all sorts of psychedelic retreat centers out there, each featuring a different variety of hallucinogenic. You can go on a mushroom retreat in Jamaica, which kind of blows my mind. Wouldn’t a retreat in Jamaica be a ganja retreat?

And if you’re interested in finding out what it’s like to achieve the Yaqui Way of Knowledge you read about 50 years ago in Carlos Castaneda’s book, there’s a peyote retreat in Arizona.

In the Netherlands, there’s a retreat center in a Dutch farmhouse where you can partake of:

…river toad, bufo alvarius [which] belongs to a species of toad containing the potent hallucinogen 5-MeO-DMT in its skin. The ‘venom’ is extracted by gently stroking the frog, then smoked, producing a brief but intense altered state of consciousness lasting around 15 minutes, followed by recurrent waves for several hours.)

Eye of newt, skin of toad? That’s the farm house of weird.

I am not a candidate for any of these retreats, as I lived through the psychedelic 1960’s without ever dropping acid.

I did have friends who did LSD, and had one memorable adventure when a friend who was coming down needed someone with her for the duration. “A” had a car, and we drove – she drove, actually; what can I say? I was young and dumb, and I didn’t hesitate for moment to get in a car with someone who was tripping – and rev out to Revere, a ratty working class beach town north of Boston. There we walked on the freezing cold beach for a couple of hours. We then buzzed over to East Boston and visited the Don Orione Shrine to check out the giant statue of the Madonna Queen.

This was a trippy enough experience to be had while completely straight and sober. I can only imagine what it was like for “A.”

Seeing the statue was the second highest point of the day. The highest was tootling around with “A” in her car. Very few “girls” had cars on campus when I was in school. Most of us didn’t have any money and, even if we had,car ownership just wasn’t done. But “A” somehow had permission to keep a car on campus, and what a car it was: a 10 year old navy blue Jaguar convertible.

My other LSD-related experience – quite a bit removed from an actual LSD-related experience – occurred in high school, when Dr. Werner Koella, a scientist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, spoke at my school. His topic: LSD. I have no recall what he said – way too science-y – but I do remember that he had a thickish German accent, and that he droned on and on. It was a Friday afternoon, last period, and he spoke at our monthly school assembly. As president of the student council, I got to introduce Dr. Koella and sit on stage with Sister Superior while he spoke. It was late in the day, the buses had already pulled up and were idling their engines just outside the auditorium. The students were getting restless. The speaker was boring, the day was getting late, the buses had arrived.

Every time Dr. Koella would pause, we assumed he had completed his talk. Sister Superior and I would stand, the student audience following suit, to give the standard Notre Dame Academy standing ovation. But Dr. Koella would start up again. We would all retake our seats. This happened a couple of times before he finally stopped, much to our collective relief. At that point, his standing ovation was more enthusiastic than it would normally have been for a boring speaker.

And for a while in college, I did have this Dylan poster on my wall for a while. The one that came free in the “Greatest Hits” album.

Other than that, I was not a psychedelic kind of gal.

Nonetheless, I am intrigued by the notion of the psychedelic retreat, and the profession of psychedelic retreat coordinator.

Here’s what Tricia Eastman’s LinkedIn profile, for her business Love Juju says:

Love Juju is a platform for alchemy, infusing ancient traditions with gamification along with modern psychology through retreats, workshops, discussions, & one-on-one coaching.

Love Juju is a meta-hacked program that mirrors the creative process, for inspired, passionate people are ready for breakthroughs in their path to self-mastery.

-Use Regenerative Productivity to catapult your energy and success levels
-Unlock new levels of abundance and creativity through Energetic Responsibility
-Access your full capacity for emotional intelligence
-Infuse new levels of self awareness into your life while discovering your sense of play and innocence (Source: LinkedIn)

I must confess that I’m way too unenlightened to actually understand much of this. A platform for alchemy infused with gamification? A meta-hacked program? Regenerative Productivity? Energetic Responsibility. I didn’t get much of anything until I hit the point about emotional intelligence.

Maybe I need to expand my mind. Maybe I need to tune in and turn one. Maybe I need to head to the Netherlands and smoke me some bufo alvarius.