Psychedelic trips aren’t just for hippies anymore. These days, everyone from moms to CEOs and entrepreneurs are turning to magic mushrooms to improve their mental health and even grow their businesses.
Located in British Columbia, Married couple Gary Logan and Rob Grover offer a unique experience for CEOs, athletes and even famous celebrities: a guided tour of psychedelic mushrooms.
The couple started The Journeymen Collective, a luxury psilocybin retreat, after losing Logan’s mother, who they lived with for three and a half years before her death. A friend of the couple suggested that they try a guided experiment on psilocybin mushrooms with the help of a shaman to overcome their grief.
“Robert kindly stepped forward and went first,” Logan told CNBC Make It. And after Grover’s experience, “the sadness was gone. He found his joy and happiness. He seemed to find a sense of alignment and purpose again,” Logan says.
Logan soon decided to have a shamanic experience for his birthday, which he said was the best gift he ever gave himself.
After the guided experiences, Logan and Rob “both had similar visions of magic mushrooms and guiding people on journeys,” Logan tells Make It. “Then we talked to the medical person and he stepped forward to help us develop a program and help guide people on how to travel.”
A deluxe psilocybin retreat for executives
Journeymen Collective, founded in 2018, offers a range of options, including a four-day solo retreat, a joint experience for couples or business partners, and a group retreat for three to four people, according to the TJC website.
Internships start at $15,000, and Logan emphasizes to potential participants that they are a “personal growth investment” in their inner selves, their health, and the well-being of themselves and those around them.
Grover told CEO Magazine in 2023, “We go hiking, there’s a saltwater pool in the winter, a hot tub, a plunge pool. The whole piece creates an expansion in people’s minds.”
The retreat is housed in an 8,000-square-foot home and offers a menu designed for those who participate in the experience. The food is mostly vegetarian and made with organic food cooked by Logan himself.
But, of course, the main attraction is the psilocybin and the ceremonies where clients ingest psychedelic mushrooms. “There are two ceremonies, two days of full integration. And we work on the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical levels of what it is to be human. So we teach people how to work with the medicine, how to continue to work with it. Once (they) leave,” Grover he says.
Journeymen Collective is visited by CEOs and entrepreneurs for professional development.
Courtesy of The Journeymen Collective.
“When you work with us, we’re with you all the time, so we’re with you from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed.”
The experience begins long before guests even step into the luxury retreat. Applicants must share their medical history.
“People will usually meet with us at least twice on a Zoom call, (and) we have a pretty good intuition that we can’t work with people,” Grover says before backing off.
“Again, this is for personal development. It’s not a clinical setting,” he adds. Neither Grover nor Logan are medical doctors. “So it’s not a vacation spot either.”
And after the retreat, the couple contacts their clients and stays in touch with them for three months. “Again, it’s Zoom calls and interactions to help people apply what they’re learning,” Grover told CEO Magazine.
Grover says most go on retreat once every three years. Some are once a year, but this is less common.
“Makes Better Leaders”
But what do professionals take away from the experience?
“They’re more passionate and purposeful about their business, and as a function of that, profits take care of themselves,” Grover told The New York Post earlier this year.
Grover says one client claims to have completed a job that would normally take eight hours in just an hour or two after the TJC experience. “He’s just been able to work more effectively and efficiently, and people have more self-awareness, and as a function of that, they make better leaders.”
“I think they’re developing the ability to be here right now. They’re not multi-tasking, they’re on task,” Logan said of his clients.
“They have more creativity in creating business plans, starting a new business or expanding an existing business. They also have greater courage,” adds Grover.
“Sometimes people have business ideas that they’ve had in the back of their minds, and after that experience, those ideas come to the fore, and they actually start to act on some of the old ideas that they’ve had for a while.”
The Journeymen Collective retreat is housed in an 8,000-square-foot home and offers a menu designed for those taking part in the experience, designed by Gary Logan.
Courtesy of The Journeymen Collective.
Research may help explain why TJC customers feel they have changed. In a recent intensive study at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers found that the effects of psilocybin can make a person think more flexibly and how they react to different emotions, especially negative ones.
NYU Langone Health faculty professor Dr. Joshua Siegel, “it can give a person in a maladaptive state of depression or potentially other illnesses a chance to recover and create new patterns of thinking, behavior, and mood.” Center for Psychedelic Medicine, told CNBC Make It last month. Siegel previously worked at Washington University in St. Louis and helped lead the study.
It’s important to note that study participants took psilocybin in its purest form, not by ingesting psychedelic mushrooms. They were also given high doses of psilocybin.
Siegel does not screen and enroll people with a history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder in psychedelic clinical trials, or who are at high risk of developing these conditions because they have a first-degree relative. Even if someone has no medical or family history of these conditions, there is still a risk that taking psychedelics can trigger psychotic or manic episodes.
Siegel strongly encouraged that if you are considering psychedelic therapy, seek professional help to do so “in a controlled setting where you have a trained therapist and are in a safe environment.”
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