Episode 240 - Michou Olivera, Psychedelic Guidance & Integration
Episode 240 is the 38th episode of Season 4.
Today we're joined by Michou Olivera, a trauma-informed psychedelic guide and relational mycologist working out of western Massachusetts. Her history with psychedelics goes back to about 1985, when she was fifteen and following the Dead around Northern California, followed by roughly thirty years away from them. Mushrooms found their way back into her life in early 2018, what stayed with her was not the journey itself but the three weeks of unusual clarity that followed it. She taught herself mycology beginning in 2019, and she is now in her fifth year of cultivation and her seventh year of practice, having grown twenty-four varieties for patients.
In this two-part conversation, Michou takes us through that arc, from working with a monthly macrodose during a stretch when very little was going right to what she describes as a clear instruction to grow the medicine herself for the people who would eventually find her. She explains how she treats mushroom varieties the way a cannabis connoisseur treats cultivars, matching a gentler one to someone fragile and a heavier one to someone with the resilience to go deep, and her stated aim throughout is to make herself unnecessary. We turn to integration, which she argues matters more than the medicine does and which she says looks less like a video group call and more like moving to music in the kitchen while you cook for family. We wrap up discussing moderation, where she reads heavy cannabis and vice use as a signal that someone is carrying too much rather than as the problem itself.
Connect with Michou on LinkedIn or visit michouolivera.com. She also hosts a monthly in-personintegration group in Westfield, Massachusetts.
Enjoy the show!
