This piece was written by a former Vital Reset client who was able to access our services because of a Sheri Eckert Foundation Scholarship. It is shared here with permission.
Good Conditions
I almost missed the window for my psilocybin journey.
Not because I didn’t believe in its efficacy or refused to do the work it would require. Nor was it an issue of legality: supervised therapeutic psilocybin use had been legalized in the state of Oregon four years prior, back in November of 2020.
I almost missed my window because timing—real timing, the kind that lives in bodies, bank accounts, and nervous systems—is fragile. It opens briefly, sometimes without warning. And if the conditions aren’t lined up just right, it closes again.
Indigenous cultures speak about readiness, both of land and body. In Buddhism, they describe it as conditions over destiny—how opportunities arise only when the necessary context is in place. In Jewish mysticism, they talk about a ripening of time. Even clinical psychology has its parallel version: the “window of tolerance” that each of us carries within, informed by our vagal tone’s flexibility or lack thereof.
I reach for something at the intersection of all four when describing my psilocybin journey at Vital Reset on August 9, 2024—the lack thereof that had ruled my life up until then, and the river of flexibility that followed.
It was, to put it bluntly, a life-changing experience. And it only happened because I was a recipient of a Sheri Eckhart scholarship, which funded my journey in full.
As a result, the window opened, and I stepped through.
Six months earlier, at the age of 36, I’d been diagnosed with autism. Nearing the fourth decade of my life, I’d already tried every healing modality I could afford: talk therapy, somatic work, yoga and mindfulness, EMDR, the I Ching, intense journaling and creativity, oracle cards, painstaking dream documentation.
Post-diagnosis, I finally had an accurate framework: my brain, I now understood, was not broken or bad, just differently wired. The prep work, the trip itself, and the integration that followed my psilocybin journey helped expand and deepen these brand new perspectives for me; these weren’t just pretty ideas that would flit in and out of my logical brain, but lived truths I could learn to carry in my body.
Speaking of the body: for years and years I’d been told that I was not my feelings. It’s a familiar idea, one I understood intellectually with little effort. If I’d been given a dollar every time a helpful professional said this to me, I could have funded the mushroom journey myself.
But healing does not happen from the outside in. It happens from the inside out.
During my psilocybin journey, I didn’t learn a new concept. I gained a bodily point of reference. I learned what it feels like, in my gut and chest and shoulders, to have a feeling without being overtaken by it. To experience feelings as things I am with, not things that I am.
Most memorably, I saw that all feelings are made of the same substance. Tears roll into laughter, which rolls into anger, euphoria, contentment. The boundaries between them, it turns out, are nearly nonexistent. It’s a knowing that now lives in my body, and more than a year later, I still consult this internal reference point. I still pull it up when I’m deep in grief or self-judgment, or when I’m dysregulated in the ways that are a normal part of my neurodivergent life.
All those years of reading, studying, learning, being in and out of traditional therapy helped, but they weren’t enough. They provided a soil that was technically fine, but desperate for a little more water and air, for a fertilizer that could go deeper and finally allow something healthier to take root. Everything I’d done in my life had led me to that ripened moment, when the mushrooms stepped in and said, ok, let’s really do this now. The timing was right. My body was ready. The only thing missing was access.
Now I sit here writing to you on the other side of that window. I still feel hard things. I still have bad days. I still experience the high highs and low lows of being a deeply sensitive person moving through a neurotypical world.
But I fall outside of myself far less often, anchored as I am by an internal point of reference I didn’t have before. One that reminds me, in my body, that feelings move, that I can be with them without becoming them, and that I am not broken by or beholden to their presence.
This is what access to psilocybin made possible for me.
When the timing was right, and my body was ready, donors I will likely never meet helped hold the door open. My hope is that by sharing this story, more doors can remain open for others whose windows are brief, whose readiness is real, and whose healing depends not on willpower, but good conditions.
Sarah Teresa Cook is a writer and creative mentor. She lives in Oregon. Learn more at sarahteresacook.com
