This luxury psilocybin retreat ‘creates better leaders,’ founders say

Psychedelic trips aren’t just for hippies anymore. These days everyone from moms to CEOs and entrepreneurs are turning to magic mushrooms to help improve their mental health and even expand their businesses.

Based in British Columbia, married couple Gary Logan and Rob Grover offer what they say is a unique experience for CEOs, athletes and even high-profile celebrities: a guided trip on psychedelic mushrooms.

The pair started The Journeymen Collective, a luxury psilocybin retreat, after the loss of Logan’s mother, who lived with the couple for three and half years before her passing. A friend of the pair suggested they try a guided experience on psilocybin mushrooms with the help of a shaman to process their grief.

“Robert kindly stepped forward and went first,” Logan tells CNBC Make It. And after Grover’s experience, “the sadness had disappeared. He found his joy and his happiness. It looked like he was back in alignment and purpose-grounded,” Logan says.

Soon after, Logan decided to have a shamanistic experience for his birthday, and says it was the best gift he ever gave himself.

After the guided experiences, Logan and Rob “both had similar visions related to magic mushrooms and guiding people on journeys,” Logan tells Make It. “And then we spoke to the medicine man, and he stepped forward to assist us to develop a program and guide us on how we should guide people on a journey.”

The Journeymen Collective, founded in 2018, offers a number of options that include 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 site.

Experiences start at $15,000, and Logan emphasizes to prospective participants that “it’s a personal development investment,” into their inner self, health and the well-being of them and those around them.

“We go for hikes, there’s a saltwater pool, a hot tub, a plunge pool in the winter. The whole piece creates an expansion in people’s consciousness,” Grover told CEO Magazine in 2023.

The retreat is in an 8,000-square foot home and offers a menu that is curated for those partaking in the experience. The meals are mostly vegetarian and are made with organic food cooked by Logan himself.

But of course, the main attraction is the psilocybin and the ceremonies where clients get to take psychedelic mushrooms. “There’s two ceremonies, two full days of integration. And we work on the spiritual, mental, emotional and physical planes of what it’s like to be human. So we’re teaching people how to work with the medicine, how to continue working with it once [they] leave,” Grover says.

“When you’re working with us, we’re with you the entire time, so we’re with you from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed.”

The experience begins far before clients even step foot into the luxury retreat. Applicants must share their medical history.

“People will meet with us, typically, at least two times on a Zoom call, [and] we have a fairly good intuition as to whether or not we can work with people,” before the retreat, Grover says.

“Again, this is for personal development. This is not a clinical setting,” he adds. Neither Grover or Logan are medical doctors. “So this is not a recreational setting, either.”

And after the retreat, the couple stays in touch with their clients and checks in with them for three months. “Again, that’s Zoom calls and interaction to help people apply what they learned,” Grover told CEO Magazine.

Most attend a retreat once every three years, Grover says. Some as frequently as once a year, but that’s less common.

But what is it that professionals take away from the experience?

“They’re more passionately and purposefully engaged in their business and as a function of that, profits take care of themselves,” Grover told The New York Post earlier this year.

One client claims that he completed work that typically took eight hours to finish in just an hour or two after his TJC experience, Grover says. “He was able to just work more effectively and more efficiently, and people have greater awareness within themselves, and as a function of that, it creates better leaders.”

“I think they develop an ability to maintain a presence of being here in the moment. They’re not multitasking, they’re completing the task,” Logan says of his clients.

“They have greater creativity in creating business plans, creating new businesses or amplifying an existing business. They have greater courage as well,” Grover adds.

“Sometimes people have business ideas that they’ve been keeping on the back burner, and then after this experience, the back burner ideas come out into the foreground, and they actually start acting on some of the old ideas that they’ve had for a while.”

Research may help explain why TJC clients walk away feeling changed. The effects of psilocybin can cause a person to have more flexible thinking and shift how they react to different emotions, especially negative ones, researchers found in a recent intensive study done at Washington University in St. Louis.

This can “give someone who is in a maladaptive state of depression, or potentially other illnesses, the chance to reset and to create new patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior and mood,” Dr. Joshua Siegel, faculty at NYU Langone Health with the Center for Psychedelic Medicine, told CNBC Make It last month. Siegel formerly worked at Washington University in St. Louis and helped to conduct the study.

It’s important to note that participants in the study received psilocybin in its purest state, not from ingesting psychedelic mushrooms. They also were given high doses of psilocybin.

Psychedelic clinical trials screen out and don’t include people who have a history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or are at a higher risk of developing those conditions because they have a first degree relative with those illnesses, Siegel said. Even if someone doesn’t have a medical or family history of those conditions, there is still a risk that taking psychedelics can cause a psychotic or manic episode.

Siegel strongly encouraged that if you’re considering psychedelic therapy, you search for professional help to engage in a “controlled setting where you have a trained therapist, and you’re in a safe environment.”

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