Bodily
Myco made its first appearance in a festival! We were excited to speak and share our medicinal mushroom, cacao and botanicals drinks at @bodily.community, a wellness and music festival created by @fyirobyn and @ddream______, hosted by @kudhva and supported by @weare_wakingdreams. Thank you so much Robyn and Dom for the invitation and for the incredible work you do! And to all other practitioners and attendants that made this experience so special.
We felt at home speaking about the power of fungi and plants in one of Khudva’s sustainable buildings, under trees and surrounded by water and blooming wild angelicas (a plant ally that features in one of our drinks blends). Louise, the creator of Khudva is a lecturer on sustainable architecture and her buildings beautifully integrated in their idilic Cornish settings.
We served our ecstatic blend, that was honoured by Robyn’s embodied ecstatic meditation. This blend of cacao, cordyceps, reishi spores, rose petals, hawthorn flowers, nettle seeds and valerian loves being pared with dancing and communion with others. Reishi, rose and hawthorn are heart medicines that open up this centre of love, self-expression and connection, allowing a deep dive into the emotions that arise through the 5 rhythms of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness that inform Robyn’s practice.
Here’s the content of our presentation:
When we think of health supplements, superfoods and phytotherapics, we’re usually after a quick fix or a means to enhance ourselves. As if we’re not enough, we’re not doing enough, we’re falling behind. Plants and fungi are so much more than that. They can guide us to find the resources to heal ourselves within ourselves. The embodied relationship to plants has the potential to empower us to be the agents of true long-lasting change to our health and well-being.
As I’m sure many of you are aware, contemporary research into mushrooms and plants is challenging our human centric conception of intelligence. This intelligence is inviting us to go below the surface and rediscover our innate capacity to be the agents of our own healing. They aren’t here to ‘fix’ us, nor are we broken; they’re allies that walk our paths with us, supporting us in finding liberation, wholeness and self-love, so we live the fullest expression of who we are.
how often we don’t meet our own basic needs, aspects of our character that are denied expression, the emotional wounds that we might be carrying all our lives or perhaps for generations, ways that outside expectations and pressures estrange us from ourselves and fog our notions of what really makes our hearts sing. Plants and mushrooms not only help us tune into the messages offered by our bodies and identify those points, but they have the capacity to hold us in the often arduous journey of confronting and releasing them, thus potentially promoting life-changing shifts and personal growth, rather than appeasing symptom
s.
Reishi on the other hand is far from a quick fix: it is by deeply sustaining the life-giving force within us at the most fundamental level that it ultimately exerts its invigorating action. By restoring deep harmony within our entire body system, it nudges the body back to a state vitality and builds resilience in the face of stressors and illnesses.
If you practice of yoga, you likely heard of and experienced in your flesh the principle of non-violence. Our western mind has difficulties grasping this idea, but you’ve had the privilege to experience in your body the paradox of relaxed effort. We know that it’s only when we’re able to surrender and allow, that we move beyond our limitations and new achievements become possible.
When we think of stressors, first thing that comes to mind is work and responsibilities, but indeed there is so much more pressure on us than just that. Just to get an idea, it is useful to think of what life looked like for our parents. Never before our time the pressure was so big to be perfect in every aspect of life. In special in the urban environment, we are pulled in all directions by unrealistic standards that dictate the way we should eat, parent, exercise, meditate, go to therapy, constantly try to teach ourselves new skills, stay informed, be present to wider conversations on a range of topics, make sure that we consume art and music that are up to date, whilst being bombarded by a multitude of images to measure ourselves against. This striving for perfection has even pervaded what we do for leisure, how we enjoy intimacy and how we find spiritual connection.
These aren’t qualities that pertain to either men or women though, they are archetypal polarities that exist within us all and both need to be contemplated. The yin, the receptive, is the creative one. All creation and all life arise from that realm. The dark, moist, nutritious interior of mother earth is a profoundly feminine place, where all living creatures will return to and from where all new life arises. What does it mean that culturally we are trapped in a perpetual doing and have such difficulties surrendering to this pure state of being? Attuning to the constant change that rules the natural world shows us that everything has a place and time within the cycles of nature. Cycles of life and death help us see the importance of shedding and letting go, to allow what isn’t vital to be composted, to remain in constant renewal and growth.
Our ability to delve deep into these states of pure being and feeling relies on our trust in our capacity to maintain our own safety boundaries and ensure that our needs are met. We can only truly surrender to our internal ocean of emotions and feelings when we trust our own internal strength to hold this fort. The mushroom organism, as mentioned above, is made up of thin delicate hyphae strands that are completely immersed in their environment, the soil, and need to protect themselves against pathogens they live side by side with and do so with a very proactive immune system. Reishi, and in fact all mushrooms, contain polysaccharides called beta-glucans that enhance our own immune cells, strengthening our protective boundaries.
tissue healing, cause liver damage and disrupt pituitary-adrenal function, to name just a few side effects. Reishi on the other hand works by restoring normal balance to the body’s natural cycles of activation of different immune functions.
Another important potential that reishi’s anti-inflammatory property has is to reduce anxiety and depression, which have been correlated with inflammation in the hippocampus. That is not the only way that reishi helps balance emotions, it also showed its capacity to directly regulate brain chemistry in a study with oxygen deprived subjects. Reishi corrected the elevation of neurotransmitters associated with fear and anxiety and brought serotonin levels back up to normal,
Reishi’s effects on calming the spirit and balancing emotions by regulating our hormones and neurotransmitters ensure that we feel safe to ride the waves of our feelings in any storm. When the only way we know how to cope is by distracting ourselves and muffling our emotions, we cut off our access the wisdom within which is exactly the resource that we need to successfully navigate life’s challenges. If we are supported not to go into overwhelm, our earthly grounded body contains all the guidance we need here and now. A relationship with reishi teaches us that we are safe to remain completely present with the reality of our feelings and allows us remain in a state of trust in ourselves.
Nettle seeds and cordyceps are euphoric and aphrodisiac and provide a stimulation that is rooted in the body and its movement, away from the mental jitters noise of coffee stimulation. Valerian relaxes tension and inhibition, facilitating a surrender to the body, its creativity and connectivity. Reishi’s terpene rich spores, besides nourishing the heart and circulation, turn down fear related neurotransmitters in favour of a rise in serotonin.
And last but not least, full fat cacao is in itself a cocktail of feel-good brain chemicals and precursors that increase feelings of pleasure and well-being.
In the direct experience of nature and nature beings, we can see beyond the militarized view of nature as a place of competition and survival of the fittest and abandon our own default mode of fighting – be it disease or fatigue – in favour of allowing plants and fungi to nudge us back into balance and connection to ourselves, through kindness and acceptance.
You might’ve heard of mushrooms’ role in soil health and regeneration, their ability to break down organic matter and make nutrients available to plants. In fact, soil as we know it exists thanks to lichens – a symbiotic association between fungi, cyanobacteria and algae formed 1,300 million years ago. Lichens were the first organism to make it out of the water on to dry land and start breaking down the rocks that made up the crust of the Earth at that stage to start creating the soil where plants thrive.
Reishi and other saprophytic mushrooms have a fundamental role in composting organic matter and making sure that in a forest, structures that have lost their vitality are broken down and reintegrated in the cycle of life, nourishing that which is growing and flourishing.
We know that when we let go of forcing a well of strength becomes available that we didn’t even realise was there. When we switch off, new ideas and solutions become accessible. Who hasn’t experienced working so hard that we start chasing our own tail and the moment we relax we have an epiphany? Mycelia illustrate very well the idea of power in the delicate and fragile. Mycelia are made of hyphae, cell thick strands filled with fluid, at the tip of which the growth and expansion of the wider organism of the mushroom take place. Despite being as thin as a single cell and being filled with liquid, if a hypha was the size of a human hand, it would be able to lift a bus! That is down mostly to how efficiently mycelia can propel fluids within its network.
It does that by regulating the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis – the feedback system between the hypothalamus, which processes our stress response, and the adrenal glands, to help us not overreact to stressful events and return to balance more swiftly.
Reishi helps us access a place of stillness within which we know that we can just be and not constantly do. There’s so much talk on the new era we’re entering being a feminine one. What does that really mean? Women in special shiver at the thought of the masculine being the active and the feminine being the receptive.
In fact, it does more than just activating immune response – reishi is an intelligent biological response modifier, meaning it produces different effects according to individual needs. It’ll stimulate an underactive immune system and pacify an overactive one, such as in the case of allergies, autoimmune conditions and chronic inflammation. Inflammation is a natural component of our immune response. However chronic inflammation, associated with chronic stress, has been implicated in premature aging and the development of serious illnesses. Pharmaceutical anti-inflammatory drugs won’t contribute to a return to homeostasis and can inhibit the production of anti-bodies, interfere with
Louise, the creator of Khudva is a lecturer on sustainable architecture and her buildings beautifully integrated in their idilic Cornish settings.
As ever, we talked about the potential fungi and plants have to guide us to find within the resources we need for our well-being and growth. We focused on reishi’s ability to calm the spirit and balance emotions, helping us centre ourselves and find our internal well of wisdom. Speaking of well, we were delighted to see our underlying topic of the deep feminine waters and the power that arises from surrendering to them being echoed by pretty much all of the experiential programme at bodily - what a synchronous and enchanted festival this was!
We are undeniably at a turning point as a species and nature is inviting us to review how we came to perceive ourselves as separate from nature, the planet and each other. More and more people are beginning to understand that our concept of subjectivity and how we experience ourselves as separate is entirely cultural and open to revision. As we as a species evolve how we understand nature and its complex networks of relationships, we also review our role within them, how we relate to the world around us and to own internal reality.
In the direct experience of nature and nature beings, we can see beyond the militarized view of nature as a place of competition and survival of the fittest and abandon our own default mode of fighting – be it disease or fatigue – in favour of allowing plants and fungi to nudge us back into balance and connection to ourselves, through kindness and acceptance.
Besides mushroom and plant compounds’ effects in supporting us in restoring good health, they also offer the opportunity to explore the nature of our dis-ease through tuning into our bodies. Physical and mental discomfort and our stamina falling short of expectation are ways that our bodies make themselves heard and offer precious insight into points of disharmony in our lives:
I learned from Mian about the multitude of ways that mushrooms support all life in this planet and their vast potential for solving the problems that our civilization is now facing with the degradation of natural environments. Mushroom forays added a new depth to my experience of nature. Looking out for them stimulates a quality of presence and attention that is lacking in contemporary life. Fungi are unique and fascinating creatures that have been assigned their own kingdom in the study of biology and their DNA is closer to ours than to plants. The myriad of ways that they interact with other nature beings can’t help but to influence how we relate to one another and the non-human, fostering connections and collaborations.
It is fascinating to observe that a mushroom that has a role in decay and processing dead matter is heralded as the mushroom of immortality. Reishi’s scope of actions in the human body balance and nourish all organ systems and have much to teach us about what sustains life on this planet and within ourselves.
When we think of energy levels, stimulants always come to mind. It’s widely known now that stimulants deplete the adrenals and that overworked adrenals are often behind a drop in vitality. Similarly, when we feel foggy and have difficulties maintaining focus, we reach for a stimulant, ignoring the fact that prolonged strain and depletion is often at the root of cognitive issues and a stimulant will push the body beyond its natural boundaries aggravating the issue.
Even when all these practices we take up are really sound, they can only generate their benefits if engaged with not from a place of lack, of feeling that we’re not enough and must relentlessly grasp for external routes of improvement and validation. They can only nourish us if they come from a place of kindness and love to ourselves. These pressures though, can often lock us in cycles of anxiety fuelled by feelings of failure that trigger the impulse to try harder and harder, in a desperate bid for a little dopamine release, a little feeling of accomplishment, a nod that we have been good. Reishi has the ability to pierce through this snowball of adrenaline and cortisol, giving us the chance to detangle our minds, breathe in spaciousness and regain access to our core of innate wisdom.
These aren’t qualities that pertain to either men or women though, they are archetypal polarities that exist within us all and both need to be contemplated. The yin, the receptive, is the creative one. All creation and all life arise from that realm. The dark, moist, nutritious interior of mother earth is a profoundly feminine place, where all living creatures will return to and from where all new life arises. What does it mean that culturally we are trapped in a perpetual doing and have such difficulties surrendering to this pure state of being? Attuning to the constant change that rules the natural world shows us that everything has a place and time within the cycles of nature.
The state of hyperarousal we live in is akin to living in war. When our bodies’ stress response is so activated, our internal resources are mobilised to make sure that we survive a threat. There’s not enough energy left for truly thriving. Our cells’ ability to regenerate and grow is compromised and so is our ability to co-exist with the microorganisms in our environment and in our gut, so we become vulnerable to opportunistic disease. The way most people usually cope with stress is by doing intense exercise, to release the energy of fight-or-flight, get some endorphins flowing and be able to sleep. That’s all very well and good, but the need to enter a state of deep rest is often overlooked and that’s essential to allow parasympathetic nervous system activation, where the body eliminates toxins, heals tissue and reduces inflammation, allowing for optimal energy flow.
besides protecting brain cells by its anti-oxidant effect and preventing the accumulation of dangerous substances.
It also helped increase the production of energy molecule ATP, restoring neuronal activity.
Reishi can also modulate gene expression and in this experiment it helped the activity of the Brain-Derived-Neurotrophic-Factor (BDNF) gene to be resumed. BDNF is a protein necessary for the plasticity and maintenance of neurons and for maintaining healthy levels of important neurotransmitters.