ABOUT
​Welcome to Hyphaelife Santa Cruz! I started this company at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Up until that point, I had spent 27 years as a professional chef, working in just about every capacity the field provided. I graduated from Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island with a degree in culinary arts in 1996. To make a long story short, I have always been a quick study and it only took me the next 27 years to realize that I loved to cook but wouldn't want to do it as a career.
My tenacious nature, which is usually a feature, was a fault in this regard. During this time, like everyone else, I too found myself collecting an unemployment check. Having a bit of breathing room, I was working as a bud trimmer when someone gave me a mushroom-infused chocolate. It had been some 20 odd years since I had last tried psilocybe mushrooms.
Like most of us, I was told that it would harm, not help my psychic/psychological condition, whatever it may be. It was at this time that Johns Hopkins released their study regarding the effects and benefits of consuming Psilocybe Cubensis mushrooms to relieve symptoms of depression, anxiety, or other moderate psychological conditions. The study showed comparable, if not outright superior, efficacy compared to some of the most commonly used pharmaceutical psychotropic drugs we are familiar with, like Lexapro, Prozac, and other common SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor).
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Needless to say, like most people, I was surprised to find that there is evidence to show that psychedelic mushrooms can alleviate, mitigate, or in some cases, outright cure people of some of the most deleterious symptoms these familiar social maladies inflict.
So to make a long story longer, needless to say that my experience taking the mushroom chocolate was revelatory and eye-opening, to say the least. I found my perspective internally to be just slightly twisted to the objective (if that makes any sense at all). This tiny bit of added objectivity allowed me to see the proverbial forest for the trees and what I was doing to contribute to my own suffering. The conclusion I drew was simple and deeply unsatisfying to anyone who hasn't had this type of epiphany yet: "Stop doing that." So I quit cooking and started this business.
I realized that I was not pursuing my own happiness, completion, or personal growth in any meaningful way by pursuing a career in the culinary arts. For whatever reason, I had lost track of for who or what I was doing for the last 27 years so single-mindedly, despite the demonstrable harm it has led me to. I began on a regimented dosing schedule after quite a bit of R&D to create a shelf-stable confectionery product that I could share with the world.
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A part of my epiphany was that for most of my life, I felt like I was on fire. A fire that I could not figure out how to put out. So I just went on with my life, a conflagration of suffering. Then suddenly, the fire went out, and I can only attribute it to the medicine I started taking. I have tried every commercial psychotropic available on the market, yet the fire still burned. Then unexpectedly, I found myself extinguished the following day for the first time in so many years it may as well have been for the first time ever.
About 2 years ago, I feel like I arrived on this planet, before then, most of my attention was taken up by the pain. After the fire went out, I found myself present for the first time in the moment, whatever moment that might be. Capable of bringing my entire focus to bear on whatever problem might be presented to me. Up until that point, most of my working memory was being used up by recursive thought processes, self-destructive doubt, and self-loathing. Not for nothing, but that takes brain power. In my case, recursive thinking was the proverbial monkey on my back. The worst and most confusing moments of my life would replay in endless cycles in the back of my mind for so long that it became indelibly normal. When the recursive thinking went away all at once after I took the chocolate, it was like (not "like", it was!) suddenly becoming 25% smarter.
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Depression and anxiety waste our finite cognitive resources. It may not seem like a significant expenditure, but it all adds up, detracting from the finite total working memory you started with. I realized that this is not isolated to just people with clinical depression or anxiety, but this paradigm exists on a spectrum in all of us. Everybody experiences some anxiety and moments of depression in their life. It has been my revelation that it is how we process those experiences that allow them to be internally distilled down to their intrinsic lessons and incorporated into the agency we wield. The recursive thinking, self-doubt, and resulting self-loathing I experienced were not symptoms of a disease or permanent malady, just the effect of unresolved, unexamined, and ultimately completely misunderstood experiences left to go to seed in my "soul" like an unintended field that occasionally catches fire. Most of us are walking around with a "debuff", and we don't even know it.
So in a nutshell, I'd like to say that, in my opinion, mushrooms are the chemical aid to the human interface. We all have one; you just don't realize it. We have been using psilocybe mushrooms since we climbed out of the trees, and it represents one of the only pristine psychoactive molecules that have been present in parallel for the countless eons hominids have been evolving. We, as a bipedal ape species, have been using these natural medicinal organisms to cure what ails the modern monkey since Australopithecus Africanus was the bad boy breaking all the monkey rules! It's no wonder it works so well! If Pfizer had been working on Prozac for 3.2 million years, it would probably work better than it does!