What do truffles do to your brain during a ceremony?

It is the question people ask when they are seriously considering coming, and rarely before: what exactly happens in my head? Below is the answer as Kelly Schuller gives it on the phone, without making it prettier than it is.

Many people expect something dulling, as with a sleeping pill or alcohol. That is not what this is. According to Kelly, certain parts of your brain become a good deal more active and others less so, and that is what sets the inner journey going.

You notice it straight away in something practical: you do not fall asleep, not even from the quiet music that plays all day. More on that later.

How it begins is remarkably often the same.

It often starts with lots of little colours, for example. Like a kind of kaleidoscope image.

That is why we encourage you to lie down and close your eyes. You have your own bed in the room. The inside is where it happens, and anyone who keeps looking around keeps themselves out of it.

For what comes next Kelly uses an image that stays with you:

As if all the cupboards and drawers of your brain are pulled open, ones you probably have not looked into for a very long time.

So all sorts of things will probably pass by. Not because someone pulls them out, but because they were already lying there. That is also why a ceremony is mainly sad for one person and light, even cheerful, for another. What is in those drawers differs from person to person.

The effects last four to six hours on average. That sounds long, and on paper it is. In the experience of participants it works differently: the sense of time largely falls away, and so much is going on inside that the hours pass without you noticing.

A ceremony day with us runs from 13:00 until around 20:00. That span holds the run-up, the journey itself, coming back and a shared meal. The meal is not an afterthought: it is how you land again.

That comparison comes up regularly, and it does not hold. Kelly is brief about it: the whole set-up is different. This is not an evening out, it is not a party, and the intent from the start is processing rather than entertainment.

For the same reason we do not call it a trip.

Tripping is a bit like, we do that for fun. And we really do take this seriously, as therapy.

Nobody knows beforehand how it will go for you. So we do not say what you will get out of it, because we do not know. A ceremony is not a medical treatment and does not replace regular care.

What we do is set up the conditions so that you come through it safely: a dose adjusted to you, two guides with a maximum of ten participants, and an intake call beforehand in which we go through your health, your medication and your reasons. That call and the guidance on the day are in English.

More on what such a day looks like is on what a truffle ceremony is. If you would rather talk it through first, use the contact page.