$175
You will receive:
15 grams of amanita muscaria
2 1ml gummy bear molds
45 minutes of phone/zoom coaching while you brew your tea
Amanita muscaria is a powerful and alluring spirit with a 10,000 year history of traditional use by humans all over the globe.
That being said, this information is for research purposes only and I will not ever advise you to ingest it. Any internet search will “reveal” that while this mushroom is perfectly legal it is also widely if falsely believed to be poisonous. There is no abundance of medical or scientific evidence to substantiate that claim and both active compounds found in Amanita Muscaria have been synthesized for medicinal research. There are no amatoxins in Amanita Muscaria. It has no toxic “Look-alike”.
For everyone’s safety I want to be redundantly clear that I am neither a doctor nor a psychiatrist and that I will never diagnose a condition or prescribe treatment.
Below I will share what I know about traditional Lithuanian practices and the chemistry involved in preparing this mushroom as a medicine.
Decarboxylation:
Here’s where the alchemy happens. Amanita muscaria contains two active compounds and they’re both wonderful. Ibotenic acid is a stimulant which causes delight and clarity of attention. It is unstable when wet and decarboxylates into Muscimol which is an analgesic dissociative. The two compounds work together to create a deep state of relaxation while awake, followed by deep sleep often with lucid dreaming. It is historically used for both chronic pain and nervous system dysfunction related to attachment trauma.
Russian and Siberian protocols use dry mushrooms which have limited decarboxylation in sunlight (photoconversion). The American varieties do not decarboxylate in sunlight. Most New World protocols suggest you do between 30% and 60% decarb in order to negate the possibly imagined detrimental effects of the ibo.
There are four methods for decarboxylation. The first is to dry the fresh mushroom at approximately 140°; generally re-drying dry mushrooms is for preservation purposes only. No further decarboxylation will occur when dry.
The most common method is to simmer the dried caps in water for 20 minutes. This gives you between 25 and 35% decarb.
Stable acids like lemon juice will give you another 30% decarb. This is also true of vinegar or any acid below pH 2.8.
There are people who will tell you to boil the flesh in an acid with pH of 2.5 for four hours in order to fully decarboxylate all the ibotenic acid. This represents not only a loss of all the ibotenic acid but also results in the destruction of approximately 50% of the total muscimol.
Making tea:
Making tea can be simple and a common folk recipe follows. Add 15g of mixed dried caps to 1 cup of water and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain and add water to return the entire amount back to one full cup. Freeze to preserve.
Before you begin you might want to run your gummy bear molds through the dishwasher so they’re clean and sterile.
We say to use mixed caps because an individual cap an be particularly strong or weak but by mixing caps we average out the likelihood of getting a particularly strong or weak dose.
It is not necessary to boil the water. A simmer is fine. The active compounds are so water soluble that in Russia this is done in a cold water extraction. No decarboxylation occurs in a cold water extraction.
After you strain your tea you would wait until it cools and use the dropper to fill the bear molds. Each bear is then one ml. You can keep the gummy bear sized ice cubes in a Ziploc bag in the freezer for over a year without any loss of potency.
If you do leave tea in the refrigerator you should know that has a 1 to 2 week shelflife.
Finding a microdose:
As with any new compound, if you ever wanted to test it yourself you would follow this advice: start low and go slow.
The traditional method to find a microdose might look something like this: on the first night put two gummy bears in a mug and squeeze a half lemon over them. In three minutes come back and add honey and hot tea. This mixture would be taken an hour to an hour and a half before bedtime and the following day one can reflect on how tired they were, the quality of their sleep, their dreams, and how much energy they feel when waking.
If one doesn’t notice much, they increase the amount until the dose is perceptual. Over the past years I’ve noticed that many people choose a dose between five and eight gummy bears.
Because these compounds leave your system in four hours it was considered perfectly safe to experiment daily for up to two weeks. At that point one would have been advised to take a three day break.
Doses of 30 to 60 gummy bears are not unheard of but that is not a microdose. A microdose is the largest amount that one can take before one notices the effects. Somewhere between five and eight gummy bears you would notice that you get very tired. A microdose is one or two gummy bears less than that.
Protocols and stacking:
Congratulations, you’ve gotten through the two most difficult steps: decarboxilation and finding your dose. From here on out the experimentation is more perceptual.
Traditional Russian protocols have you taking between .5 g and a full gram of raw dried powder each morning and night for 11 weeks. That seems really extreme for most people.
A traditional European protocol, sometimes called reverse titration, reduces the frequency of your microdose over a 10 week period.
For a reverse titration protocol you would take your dose every night for three nights; then every third day for three occurrences; every five day for five occurrences; and every 10 days for 10 occurrences.
At each time range the medicine will provide different effects. This protocol was designed so that someone could get a real sense in their body of what effects one gets at what dose AND what frequency.
*There is no way to “mess up” the protocol*
All you would be doing is getting new information about how it affects you, so if you miss a day or three there’s nothing to worry about.
People report: Taking it daily tends to resolve physical and emotional pain including anxiety about future pain. Taking it every three days functions like gabapentin in the system. Taking it every five days creates more of a spiritual connection and tends to improve people’s boundaries and help release childhood trauma. Taking it every 10 days is very subtle but can be an excellent maintenance dose. None of this is reviewed by the FDA so what I’m describing is citizen science and traditional use.
There are two kinds of stacks with Amanita: supplements and habits. For each person a stack which maximizes the experience is very specific both to their health needs and their desired outcome.
The most common supplements are mushrooms and minerals. Amanita works very well with turkey tail and lion’s mane. Amanita also “very much likes for there to be minerals in your body” according to people who hear her voice. Sources of minerals can include fulvic acid, ocean plasma, vitamin D with K, and baking soda. Some of the research even suggests that colloidal gold and other ORMUS are highly effective in combination with Amanita. Pineneedle tea and quercetin are also compounds which occur in nature in symbiosis with Amanita and seem to stack well.
Behavioral stacks are always very personal but some common themes include inner child work, heart coherence, internal family systems and boundary work. It’s also incredibly helpful to add some kind of dream journaling or reflective writing at least twice a week. This will allow you to track your research and your goals over the course of the protocol.
The bottom line with behaviors is trust your intuition, you already know what you need to be doing to improve your life and now is a great opportunity to do it. 6 to 10 weeks from now you can look back and see your progress and assess how this medicine might best serve you.