Magic Mushrooms in Pai: That One Time I Lost My Individual Identity And Became One With the Universe

Traveling for an extended period of time by yourself without a set plan is like the ultimate experiment in following your intuition. Every moment of every day – where to go, what to do, who to hang out with – is completely up to your heart’s desire. And ideally, because you’re making so many decisions based on intuition, you get better and better at listening to your inner voice and understanding what it is you actually want.

After the Mindfulness Project I initially thought I wanted to go straight to a monastery to practice meditation for a few days. But upon arriving in Chiang Mai at 4:35 AM after a grueling twelve hour bus ride from the Northeast (and a few hours of failed hitchhiking with some people from the Project – long story), I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to buy a bus ticket to disciplined sober silent solitude right away. No, I wanted to chill out for a while. I wanted to go to Pai.

What is Pai, exactly? Pai is a tiny mountain town next to Burma that’s sort of a hippie haven (a common theme in my travels so far, I know) for Thai and foreign people alike. It’s a place where you can rent motorbikes for $4.50 a day and spend hours riding to hot springs, caves, and waterfalls. It’s a place where you can befriend all kinds of people extremely easily and frequently – at hostels, at cafes, on the street – and see them again and again after that all over town. Where watching the sunset is the most important event of your day. Where losing track of the current time and even date is quite normal. Where people often stay much longer than they intended to – weeks, months, sometimes years longer. It has become fairly “touristy” in recent years (and with that the inevitable stampede of basic bros has arrived), but there’s still much to explore and appreciate.

I’ve been in Pai for a week (I think?) and have had a brilliant time trekking through jungles, visiting waterfalls, hanging in hammocks, drinking delicious $1 passionfruit banana smoothies (and every other combination imaginable – still not sure what a mulberry is but it is delicious with dragonfruit, lime and strawberries), and meeting a shit ton of people. Last night, I went to a local dude’s house – a dope structure that he built out of bamboo and grass 11 years ago – for a group dinner. After motorbiking through the market for ingredients, we prepared and ate sweet potato curry with fish salad on top of giant banana leaves spread all over the table, made music, drank beers, and talked about transformative experiences we’ve all had (okay, that last bit may have been Mindfulness Project-influenced). I had just met him the night before on the street, but case in point that friend making in Pai is that easy!

The beautiful nature, social environment, and chilled-out atmosphere of Pai has been incredible, but to be totally honest, I also wanted to visit Pai for the mushrooms.

Yes, the psychedelic mushrooms. Yes, I know that politicians and pharmaceutical companies have done a fantastic job of making hallucinogens seem evil and dangerous and for loser drug addicts, but in reality, mushrooms are 100% natural, infinitely safer than alcohol and anti-depressant pills, and have been used by humans for spiritual and healing purposes for thousands and thousands of years. Read more about how safe and beneficial here or here or here from reputable mainstream sources if you have any doubt 😉

Anyway, one of my goals on this trip is to have cool one-of-a-kind experiences, and I figured that doing mushrooms would be a sure-fire way to attain one.

And did I attain one.

It all started at my hostel, which I found by walking up the street and asking the reception if I could stay there. After successfully booking three nights for a grand total of $16.17, I climbed up a ladder to an open-air common room, where backpackers were chilling on hammocks and watching the stunning rice-field and mountain scenery outside.

I was a bit shy to start talking to people, but smiled bravely at the closest person to me – an innocent guy putting butter on a piece of toast – and announced that I had just arrived in Pai. We started chatting about our travels and the hostel we were at and what one can do in Pai – usual backpacker small talk. Then I casually brought up the mushrooms.

“Doing mushrooms is actually one of the reasons why I wanted to come here,” I said. So casual.

“The mushroom shakes are brilliant, I’ve just had one a few days ago at the Sunset bar. They’re 500 baht ($15) each though, so I’m not sure if I’ll be doing any more,” he said.

A dude with a black stripe tattoo running from his chin down his chest came over. “You can pick them yourself at the elephant farm, you get a whole bunch for 500 baht. Enough for 4 people at least.”

A curious group started forming around us. People inquired about dosage and taste and other logistics, which he answered patiently, even drawing us a map and a sketch of what the mushrooms looked like.

“It’s a beautiful experience. God, it’s beautiful. A group of us have been doing them the past few days and we’ve seriously bonded. We had a metamorphosis through the equinox. You’ll love it.” With that, he bid us farewell and hopped on his bike for Laos.

“A metamorphosis through the equinox,” I repeated as we all watched him bike away. “What does that even mean?” 

Everyone shook their heads in bewilderment. I started rallying the troops for the trip, asking who was down to experience a metamorphosis through the equinox with me. In the end, eight people were in.

Two motorbiked over to collect the mushrooms, and then we set off on foot for the jungle. Our destination was Valhalla.

Valhalla is a hostel/bar in the Pai jungle, a thirty minute walk from town. It’s not the kind of hostel you can book on Hostelworld.com or anything, though. It’s a secret hostel. You get there by walking through the jungle, spotting a hand painted bamboo door/archway, going through it and crossing a bamboo bridge, then climbing up a steep stone-laid path. Valhalla is for Level Two SE Asia backpackers (I just made that up right now). You can chill there for a drink or smoke, and staying there for the night will set you back exactly $1.80.

Up the hill from Valhalla exists one of the most beautiful lookout views in all of Pai, and that is where we set off for after greeting the folks there. We sat down, chewed up our mushrooms (these were grown in elephant dung, one person felt the urge to remind us), and gazed at the view before us.

At first, I felt the usual bit of nausea accompanied by a fit of giggles. For some reason, I showed the toast-guy a recording of Medleys, my college a cappella group (okay fine, I do this a lot to random people even while sober) on my phone and he expressed his appreciation for our awesomeness.

“They’re my friends that I carry around in my pocket,” I said. We started laughing at the imagery of that statement.

Remembering my friends suddenly brought about a wave of nostalgia. I started thinking about how much I appreciated them all, and my parents, and my brother and my cousins and aunts and uncles. Tears came to my eyes.

“I have a really good life,” I said softly, mostly to myself at this point. I stared around at my surroundings, which suddenly seemed a bit scary and foreign. I remembered that I had just met everyone around me approximately two hours ago and they were total strangers to me. I’m all alone out here, I thought. A million miles away from everyone I care about. Does traveling for so long mean that I’m not investing enough in them? Will everyone else move on with their lives and forget about me? What if I lose all the love in my life because I’m over here being selfish and not spending time with them? What if I never get married and have kids? What if I’m alone forever? 

I hugged my knees to my chest and felt the anxiety of desperate loneliness creep through me.

Then I felt a touch on my shoulder. One of my fellow trippers, a Turkish guy with long wavy black hair.

“Do you want a hug?” he asked. I nodded and embraced him. Tentatively at first, then I sank into the hug and felt my body, tense from my toxic thoughts, slowly relax.

With every second we hugged, I felt healing energy spread through me. I was struck by how such a simple act could be so powerful. Human contact. So basic and yet most of us have forgotten about it. I started crying a bit into his shoulder, so moved by the experience, and he continued to hold me tightly. Then a guy from Bangladesh joined the hug and the three of us embraced each other. All my anxiety melted away, healed by the pure love we were sending to each other, all through simple human contact, all without saying one word.

In that moment, I forgot what their names were and where they came from, and realized that it didn’t matter. And then, I realized that my own identity didn’t matter. That being a Japanese American named Kelly from California was a social construction that put up fake walls between myself and others. That at my pure essence, I wasn’t a separate entity from anyone else. That the three of us embracing each other were all one, connected by love.

“I don’t want to be alone. I feel so lonely,” said the guy from Bangladesh.

“You’re not alone,” I said emphatically, hugging him tighter, willing my energy to heal him. So weird how quickly I shifted from believing I was alone to knowing, without any doubt, that it was in fact impossible to be alone in a world of interconnectedness.

“Why do I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy?” he replied.

“We all deserve all the love and happiness in the world,” I said. “Our minds and our thoughts are the only thing standing in the way of it.” We fell silent again and continued to all cling to each other. The sun sank behind the mountainside and the sky slowly washed from blue into pink and yellow hues.

At some point, we all laid down on a big flat rock and looked up, seeing the first faint hints of stars coming out above us. I felt like I was being freshly born into the world: pure love and consciousness, our original state before the influence of social conditioning of any kind.

“This is like Mother Earth’s gift to us,” I said. “She’s helping us heal ourselves and remember what we are.” As I looked around at the trees, dirt, and bugs crawling around next to me, I felt the compassion for my fellow humans extend to our natural environment. I suddenly understood why one of the tenants of Buddhism is to never harm a living thing, something I used to roll my eyes at as a kid. We are the earth. If we kill a bird or a fly, we’re hurting ourselves.

I’m not sure how long we stayed on that rock – time seemed to stand still. Everyone else had come down from the trip and gone back to the hostel to hang out. At some point, one of the girls climbed back to the rock, asking if we had seen her shoes.

“What are possessions?” I wondered aloud. The idea of staking a personal claim to objects, to owning private property, seemed ludicrous to me. I thought about the closets and wardrobes full of clothes and shoes I had back home and suddenly wished I could be free of them.

The girl’s arrival triggered a memory in my mind – of a few hours earlier; another girl at our hostel from Texas who asked me to message her on Facebook to meet up in order to withdraw money that she would Venmo to me because her debit card got lost a few days prior. So complicated, I thought. Money. Social media. Banks. Apps. Things that remove us from each other and from the present moment and from the planet. So needlessly confusing and impersonal. But I wanted to help her, so I reluctantly got up from the rock and made the trek back down to Valhalla to find my phone.

As I came down, the intensity of the trip started fading a bit, but lingered for a while. I remember hugging a lot of people; total strangers that I no longer saw as strangers. I remember feeling frustrated when people kept asking me my name and where I was from. I am consciousness and life energy, I would say in return. Or I would sing some made up melody and say that I was music.

Eventually, I came back to feeling like I was a separate person with all the complication that accompanies it, which made me a little sad. But even if for only a few hours, I was truly grateful to feel the incredible experience of oneness; what it’s like to be pure love and pure presence. The memory of it is something I can forever reference when I’m feeling anxiety, loneliness, anger or fear.

Mushroom trips don’t achieve enlightenment on their own – they’re ultimately not sustainable. So after this experience and a week of enjoying beautiful Pai, I’m finally on my way to the forest monastery to immerse myself (soberly) in Buddhism, the philosophy that embodies basically everything I felt on shrooms. There will be hours of silence, hours of meditation, hours of practicing the art of being completely and utterly present. What will come out of it? Stay tuned to find out!