[Ep 228] Rethinking Medicine: Psychedelics, Place, and the Work of Healing | Beana Bern

Beana Bern is the founder of Rootstock Retreat, a ten-acre retreat and community in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where she works with psilocybin through immersive medicine retreats and seasonal microdosing programs.

In this conversation, we rethink what we mean when we use the word “medicine.” Beana shares her own decades-long relationship with psychedelics and explains why mushrooms can be remarkably efficient at showing us where our pain, patterns, and stories come from...while challenging the idea that the psychedelic experience itself does the work of healing.

We talk about our own early experiences with microdosing, the problems with turning psychedelics into another magic pill, and why Beana structures her microdosing work around the rhythms of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. From there, the conversation widens considerably: the medicine of place, reconnecting with nature, developing internal authority without rejecting the need for guides, and learning to recognize wisdom in the world immediately around us.

We also venture into animism, the sentience of mushrooms, energetic and spiritual hygiene, unseen forces, and whether “hallucinogen” is even the right word for experiences that can sometimes feel more real than ordinary reality.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about much more than psychedelics. It’s about awareness, relationship, and expanding our understanding of medicine beyond something we consume to include the places we inhabit, the seasons we move through, the experiences that challenge us, and the living world (terrain) of which we are a part.

Learn more about Beana and her work at Rootstock Retreat: https://rootstockretreat.com/

Use code TERRAIN333 to take $333 of their next Microdosing Immersion: https://rootstock.mykajabi.com/medicine-of-the-west

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Terrain Theory episodes are not to be taken as medical advice. You are your own primary healthcare provider.

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Music by Chris Merenda