In Right Relationship

In this episode of In Right Relationship, hosts Liz Chernet and Lily Eggers speak with Tracey Tee, founder of Moms on Mushrooms, about the unique healing potential of psilocybin for mothers and the essential role of community in that journey. Tracey shares how her own psychedelic experiences, first microdosing to emerge from grief after losing her live-comedy business, then guided mushroom journeys following a near-fatal car accident, opened her heart, helped her see her daughter more clearly, and inspired her to create a safe container where mothers can learn and heal together. She explains that mushrooms, as a mycelial web, are never meant to be used in isolation; instead, they call us back into authentic relationship with ourselves, our children, and one another. Tracey outlines Moms on Mushrooms’ offerings, from multi-month microdosing and mid-dose programs to a $2-a-month private “circle” where moms can share questions and insights, and emphasizes the need for women to relearn communal rituals that honor both their roles as mothers and their identities as women. Throughout, she reminds listeners that true psychedelic healing requires conscious collaboration with the medicine, a willingness to feel uncomfortable, and a commitment to ongoing integration. By reclaiming devotion, dismantling stigma, and nurturing “circles” of support, Tracey believes mothers can model resilience, compassion, and sovereignty for their children, and ultimately help shift culture toward a more interconnected, empowered future.

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[00:00:00] Tracey Tee: I am so grateful for this medicine because I was meant to be with mushrooms for sure. So when I started working with it, my life just went. And all the dots of my spiritual journey, all the question marks, all the unanswered things, just the dots started to connect and I started to find a pathway forward, like back home to myself, and really quickly it became abundantly clear to me.

[00:00:27] Tracey Tee: Two things, and this is not proprietary, almost everyone knows it. But on my own, I realized one, this medicine was never meant to be done in a vacuum. It's mycelial. It literally is a web and it's meant to be done in community. And two moms need this community and this medicine is an opportunity for us to come back to each other.

[00:00:54] Liz Chernet: Welcome to Inright relationship. Integrating Psychedelics and embodying the Sacred we're your hosts, Liz Chernet and Lily Eggers, taking you behind the scenes of the psychedelic zeitgeist. We bring you stories, wisdom and experiential deep dives with experts in the field, including healers, coaches, clinicians, spiritual guides, artists and beyond on all things psychedelic integration.

[00:01:18] Liz Chernet: It's fun, it's fascinating, and it's the future. So join us in exploring what it means to be in right relationship with ourselves one another, and the earth

[00:01:28] Lily Eggers: because wow. I love Tracey.

[00:01:33] Liz Chernet: Tracey for President.

[00:01:35] Lily Eggers: Tracey for President. What a gift to the world that she's taken her own conscientious mothering and brought it into the sphere of sharing psychedelic education with those who are curious.

[00:01:49] Liz Chernet: Truly, I'm also really deeply relating to what she shared around. The idea for moms on mushrooms coming through, checking to see if the domain was available, and then this, oh shit moment of, oh my God, no, I don't wanna be the one to have to create this thing.

[00:02:05] Liz Chernet: Can someone else do it? Can someone else do it? And I'll join. Not that those were her exact words, but I just so relate to that sentiment and I feel like there are some inspirations cropping up for me right now where I am like. No, but it's

[00:02:21] Lily Eggers: yeah, I can't wait to hear about what those are. Liz.

[00:02:27] Liz Chernet: Thank you. But yeah, such a good conversation and she explains also a lot about the specifics of what Moms on mushrooms is, and there's really something for everybody here. And also this conversation will obviously be so resonant for moms, but it's also resonant for people who don't. Identify as mothers.

[00:02:48] Liz Chernet: It's just a beautiful conversation. And whether we're mothering children or we have grown children, or we don't have any children, most of us have children in our lives in some capacity, and most of us are birthing something in our lives in some capacity, and I think the themes of this conversation are just as relevant to.

[00:03:13] Liz Chernet: Those who identify as fathers. So I just wanna say, if you're not a mom, there's still a lot here for you.

[00:03:20] Lily Eggers: Tracey T founded the internationally recognized psychedelic community for mothers, moms on mushrooms in Spring 2022. Since its launch, mom has been featured on NPR. Good Morning America. Today's show, rolling Stone Magazine, NBC News, Fox News, and London Times, and has been a guest on over 30 podcasts, including Resetter Podcast with Dr.

[00:03:46] Lily Eggers: Mindy Peltz, psychedelics today, and Kat and Nat Tracey has appeared on Dr. Phil and has spoken on panels for PBS. T Integration. Microdosing Collective Wonderland Conference. Cycon Conference, and was an invited speaker at the Historic Maps Psychedelic Science 2023 Conference. Moms on Mushrooms is a community for mothers offering multiple channels for working with and healing through the sacred use of Microdosing and Theo medicine.

[00:04:22] Lily Eggers: Through her own health journeys, coupled with a lifetime of learning about women's health and wellness, Tracey's deep embodied compassion allows her to hold space for moms with health, birth, and womb trauma, while also offering practical tips for overwhelmed and busy moms to simply feel better in their bodies and embrace a more sustainable and natural approach to physical and spiritual healing.

[00:04:49] Lily Eggers: Tracey lives in decriminalized Colorado with her husband of 22 years. They are two dogs and their miracle daughter, who is 14 years old. Hi Tracey. Welcome. Hello. It is so exciting to have you. I'm a fan girl and I love. What you've created in this world, and I can't wait to talk more deeply about it.

[00:05:11] Lily Eggers: We like to begin with a little rooting into this present moment. So let's all three of us take a breath land here and just wanna invite you, Tracey, to share anything that feels present, moment, relevant or salient or important to you that you just wanna name in this circle of moms.

[00:05:33] Tracey Tee: Thank you. Yeah, there is a lot swirling right now.

[00:05:35] Tracey Tee: I've really been contemplating the importance of community and how important it is for mothers to relearn how we exist in community with each other, and. That it's really a missing piece that I'm not even sure we're fully aware of the damage that it might be doing. And I've also just been in deep gratitude for the last few months of all the women working in the psychedelic space and in awe of women taking chances, putting themselves out there, women who also happen to be mothers.

[00:06:11] Tracey Tee: It's just a deeper layer of devotion, unfortunately, than it is for men. And I've just been really grateful for that. And the voices. That deserve to be heard, that's what's in my heart lately.

[00:06:21] Lily Eggers: Something about the word devotion touched my heart around this conversation of motherhood and psychedelics and this sacred work.

[00:06:29] Lily Eggers: Ultimately, for me anyway, the motherhood is first, and then the sacred work extends out from there. And the sacred work of psychedelics being about my motherhood journey. So thank you for that word devotion that really landed in my heart.

[00:06:43] Tracey Tee: Yeah, and devotion requires a lot of commitment and a lot of sacrifice actually.

[00:06:48] Tracey Tee: But the other thing I've been thinking about a lot too is that devotion does not require suffering and that we don't actually need to suffer as mothers and as women and as psychedelic leaders. Suffering doesn't actually have to be part of the equation and the devotion, it's such a beautiful word, even to say, we don't say it enough.

[00:07:04] Tracey Tee: It casts this bright, glowing light over. Everything, but it does require sacrifice and commitment, for sure.

[00:07:12] Liz Chernet: Yeah. Something else you said really jumped out to me, which was relearning a certain way of Yeah. Being in community as moms. And circulating around motherhood. And I'm really curious about that, this idea of.

[00:07:30] Liz Chernet: A paradigm or a particular lineage of mothering that you are wanting to reclaim or reimagine in some way?

[00:07:41] Tracey Tee: Yeah, the relearning, there's such a deep wound among women.

[00:07:46] Tracey Tee: And I don't think it inherently came from us. I think it was like thrust upon us and not to sound. Conspiratorial or like I'm railing.

[00:07:55] Tracey Tee: But I do think this has been going on really since eve bit into the proverbial apple, and it feels like almost this curse of a wall between a woman and another woman, and fear and paranoia and mistrust from each other, which has kept us growing more and more separate as the years roll away. And it's ironic because we're also raising children, so we're almost perpetuating the wound with every child that we bring into the world, especially if we bring in girls into the world.

[00:08:30] Tracey Tee: And it's not every culture. Certainly there's cultures that have wise elders and that prioritize community and. Mentorship and rites of passage and ceremony much more than certainly Western cultures do, but wars and religion and politics and policy and health issues, it's just driven us all further and further apart and we don't know how to be in.

[00:08:53] Tracey Tee: I. To coin a phrase, right? Relationship with each other, toll, deeply, trust, and I've been talking a lot about this with my daughter who's 14, so she's very much in that friendship learning phase of her life. And I find myself telling her how important it is for women to have good friends and how important it is for her to be a good friend, and how she has to learn how to be a good friend.

[00:09:16] Tracey Tee: And it takes effort and it takes patience and kindness and compassion for yourself and for your friends. So that moves into that lineage. Part of changing how we mother, because I feel like, especially in modern times, let's give it the last 60 to a hundred years, the way I feel generally the West has mothered, has been to spite everybody else.

[00:09:40] Tracey Tee: It's oh, I'm raising this kid and I'm gonna do it this way to spite either her or to spite this other system or to spite myself. And not actually what's best for our kids. And we fear leaning into our children and learning what's right for them because we fear what other people are gonna say to us about how we parent.

[00:10:00] Tracey Tee: And a lot of that comes from our parents and this expectation that we just have to keep doing it the same way. And so all of that leads into psychedelics and why they've risen up in this time, especially for women, because it's like ladies. We gotta wipe the S slate clean. We gotta start over and we gotta learn from scratch and we have to do it from the heart.

[00:10:21] Tracey Tee: 'cause if we don't do it from the heart, nothing's gonna happen. Nothing's gonna stick. We can't do it angry. We can't do it like men. We can't do it with picks and torches. We gotta do it from our wombs and from love. And we have to do it with our children, not outside of our children. And so it's all this big amalgamation of change and we're in this seminal moment, I think, where people are not only realizing it, but actually have the ability, because women have come so far and we are in the best place we've ever been in history.

[00:10:52] Tracey Tee: We do get to work, we do get to speak our minds. We're not being burned at the stake and drowned. Like life's pretty good right now. It's not perfect, but we are at a time where we can actually affect change, but we have to do it the right way. And I think that's the lineage that seems like it's emerging.

[00:11:07] Lily Eggers: Oh, wow. I love this so much. I've been replaying and replaying it in my mind, this sahan statement about the next Messiah being a sangha instead of a person. Oh, like it's a Sangha, right? Yeah. How do you feel it? It's the embodiment. It's the being. It's actually living these lessons that have been taught the principles, the spiritual text.

[00:11:31] Lily Eggers: Now it's living it with other humans and. I wouldn't be okay without my girlfriends, my women, I feel like I would fragment into a shell of a person because they hold that, which feels bigger than a partner. Certainly a job. I don't know what else is supposed to hold you. No one can do it like your girlfriends.

[00:11:55] Lily Eggers: And so something about the sangha of women just feels so juicy and alive. For me, I talk about this a lot actually 'cause I'm like. How do we do this more? And yeah, we're doing it, but how do we bring intentionality to it and how do we bring guidance? Because you're right. Yeah. We are taught to be in competition.

[00:12:14] Lily Eggers: I remember as a kid watching a nature show and all the male birds are colorful and they're doing their dances and making their nests, and I look around and all the girls are wearing these tery high heels and this was the 90. They're like doing their hair and the guys are like walking around in pajamas and I was like, what's up?

[00:12:32] Lily Eggers: What's up with that?

[00:12:35] Tracey Tee: Yeah. And all that's just been inverted to the ability to feel beautiful and to make yourself beautiful, and to express yourself outwardly for the sake of it, without it being oversexualized, without it being downplayed, and without it being out of need and out of lack, actually. And just saying, I'm a fucking goddess.

[00:12:52] Tracey Tee: Here I am, and this is how I wanna show up in the world. And I certainly struggle with that. It looks different for everyone, and that's part of it too. Like how I express myself outwardly is different than how my other girlfriends express themselves outwardly. And I find sometimes those little pings of judgment or cynicism or arrogance, and I don't think it's our story.

[00:13:14] Tracey Tee: It's not our story.

[00:13:15] Liz Chernet: There's this energy of opening the field to anything and everything that's here for us. As women. As moms, as friends, and it can get murky sometimes, but there's value in that. And then I'm hearing you too. I'm opening the field with our children. So much of this paradigm we've been conditioned in is that we are the authority figures and we know best and we make the rules.

[00:13:40] Liz Chernet: And it's this subtle energy of competition that you've both alluded to, right? Is this how well we can get our children to perform or conform or all these. Things. And even if those aren't our personal values, this is the water we swim in. And it permeates us in ways that we're not even aware of or conscious of.

[00:13:58] Liz Chernet: And this idea of co-creating a field with our children to allow them to be soul companions and guides for us as moms because they know so deeply and so intuitively, especially before they're fully programmed. By the system or the matrix or the patriarchy. They know what their soul is called to, they know their gifts, they're embodying their gifts.

[00:14:28] Liz Chernet: That's. So much of the beauty of being a child. So I'm really appreciating that shift from making the rules and saying what the plan is to allowing that to be more of a collaborative process with our kiddos.

[00:14:42] Lily Eggers: I love that so much, Liz, and it feels like a really sweet segue moment. I'm really excited to do a segue that's like Liz's, like segue queen.

[00:14:50] Lily Eggers: I'm gonna do a segue now where for me, psychedelics have so supported my capacity to see my children. With greater depth to actually expand my consciousness so that I can see them as them, not as what I want for them or what I think they should be or all the things. And I'd love to hear from you, Tracey.

[00:15:09] Lily Eggers: Tell us about your journey with psychedelics and motherhood.

[00:15:14] Tracey Tee: I say that often, and I feel like sometimes people look back at me blankly. But the amazing thing is that when I started working with psychedelics, especially microdosing, it allowed all of those layers that we've been talking about to just fall away.

[00:15:29] Tracey Tee: I. Like I imagine I had this crusty wall around me and the shrooms just chiseled away at it, and all the crust just fell away. And what that allowed me to do is exactly what you said, to see my daughter for who she is and not who I want her to be, and not who her grandparents want her to be, or her teachers want her to be, or my friends want her to be just who she is.

[00:15:53] Tracey Tee: And then because my heart was starting to open. I was dropping all of these preconceived notions of who I had to be and how I had to show up in the world. And then all of a sudden I really cared about what was best for Evie. And then it didn't matter what anyone else thought, because like you said, Liz, I was looking at her eyes and I'm like, this is what she wants.

[00:16:16] Tracey Tee: Or this thing that she doesn't wanna do or does wanna do, this is what she wants. I don't even understand it. And wow, I can actually observe my ego showing up to the chat and saying I just really wish she would do blah, blah, blah, because that's what I did. And that's a hard pill to swallow. But when I started doing that, I saw my daughter soften, and then actually parenting became a lot easier.

[00:16:38] Tracey Tee: Because then it wasn't a battle of what I wanted versus what she wanted. It was, oh, okay. I hear you. I see you. And I also wanna say the flip side, the paradigm of that is I also became very empowered in making decisions on my daughter's behalf. I actually felt very clear about being a parent, about making decisions, about knowing that I am her caretaker, that her father and I do know more than my kid does.

[00:17:04] Tracey Tee: That we do see things from a different understanding, that we do want her to be safe. And I didn't feel apologetic when I did make a decision. It's different from a place of ego like this is the way it is and I'm a genius. It was like, no, this is how we're doing this right now. It's what's in my heart and what's best for her with the consideration of what she wants.

[00:17:21] Tracey Tee: And so it's become this really beautiful balance of sovereignty and ownership while also really leaning into to what she wants. And it changed how we parent. I stopped caring about what my friends. All the different activities that they were enrolled in. 'cause my daughter's an introvert and knows exactly what she needs to charge her social battery, her words by the way.

[00:17:42] Tracey Tee: And I stopped trying to over perform her and I just let her be her. And guess what? She's doing great.

[00:17:47] Lily Eggers: Yeah. Yeah. It's so important. I think one of the hardest parenting challenges is around how much space. To give a child and then how much boundary and holding of a line and when to do it and how to do it, and I love your sort of through the mushrooms chiseling away and opening your heart.

[00:18:08] Lily Eggers: Then you had this gaining of clarity around, oh, I get to help her be herself. By getting my stuff outta the way. Yeah. And what a beautiful offering to our children. It feels, for me anyway, a never ending unfoldment. It's not like I can do it just one day. It's oh, there's totally, there's another layer of me getting in there.

[00:18:29] Lily Eggers: Sure. Oops, there I am again. There's my grandma. Oh, there's my lineage. There's my, ancestral wounding. Oh, there is Lily. But at least it's a process of unfolding, of discernment and the more we listen to them and let them be the guide while we are the grownup, and that we don't lose that. I think I got lost a little bit at times where I was like, oh, they're leading themselves when they were like two.

[00:18:51] Lily Eggers: It was chaos. Total chaos. Yeah. Then I had to grow that of, oh, I can lead and receive. But anyway, people need that in all areas of their lives, not just in parenting, but in parenting. When you get it wrong, you can see the feedback so quickly. Sure.

[00:19:07] Tracey Tee: Yeah. And I think we've come to this place like we're going through these phases of parenting and it's really easy to put a pithy term onto different things.

[00:19:14] Tracey Tee: And now we're in those anti-car phase, but we uplift helicopter parents, but we also make fun of them, and it's very difficult to navigate. But I think there's a lot of power in being a powerful mother and being very clear on your boundaries and being very clear on the value system of your family and sticking with it.

[00:19:32] Tracey Tee: And sometimes I easy to get scared of our kids. Good god, my daughter's scary sometimes. And then especially when you heart feels their pain. You want them to be happy, but sometimes that is, you know what, you gotta go back upstairs and practice your cello and I don't care how much you're crying about it, this is what has to happen.

[00:19:51] Tracey Tee: I talk a lot in mom classes and stuff about having a strong back, but a soft heart. And coming back to how we started this conversation, if we actually had elders and other mothers who lifted us up and gave us those strong backs, and imagine like a hand on the back of your back girl, if you know what you're doing, this is what's right.

[00:20:11] Tracey Tee: We would feel stronger and not so insecure about our parenting. And I think kids really react well to that. They want structure and they want some boundaries. And they want a parent who leads. They want a parent who can apologize, certainly when she doesn't show up the way she's supposed to. But they also want someone that can.

[00:20:29] Tracey Tee: Make them feel safe. And when you're young, safety equals boundaries.

[00:20:34] Liz Chernet: Yeah, totally. Dr. Becky talks a lot about that. There is an inherent baked in need just in being a child, being in that developmental stage of needing that containment. I love love, hard back, soft front. And it's so funny, that just came up this morning in another container I was in, so there's.

[00:20:54] Liz Chernet: Something really resonant around that today. The other thing I was thinking, as you were saying, like the anti-car movement and this conversation about the nuances of containment and walking that line, I was thinking not a Karen, but a Faron. Just thought of that right now and I think it's good. Anyway, so much richness here already in this conversation about motherhood and community and psychedelics and the sga.

[00:21:21] Liz Chernet: Before we go too much further down the rabbit hole, I would love to create space for you to share with our listeners about Moms on Mushrooms. You created this incredible platform. Oh my God, it is so cool and generative and inspiring, and you are really leading to use your word. You're really leading.

[00:21:46] Liz Chernet: Around opening the portal for psychedelics to create support containment community and so on for the path of moms. So tell us more about moms on mushrooms.

[00:22:01] Tracey Tee: Yeah. When I started working with psychedelics in my mid forties, my daughter was already. Eight or nine at the time. I was struck pretty quick. I, first of all, I'll just say this sort of slipped out in a journey.

[00:22:14] Tracey Tee: Early on I was lying on the floor with my mentor, three grams of penis envy down the throat, weeping, and I go, I think I was just meant to be on this earth to eat mushrooms. So I really that, I am so grateful for this medicine because I was meant to be with mushrooms for sure. So when I started working with it.

[00:22:34] Tracey Tee: My life just went, and all the dots of my spiritual journey, all the question marks, all the unanswered things, just the dots started to connect and I started to find a pathway forward, like back home to myself, and really quickly it became abundantly clear to me. Two things, and this is not proprietary, almost everyone knows it.

[00:22:57] Tracey Tee: On my own, I realized, one, this medicine was never meant to be done in a vacuum. It's my C. It literally is a web and it's meant to be done in community. And two moms need this community and this medicine is an opportunity for us to come back to each other. And what we've done in the past with memes and even my old life, I had a comedy show for mothers.

[00:23:22] Tracey Tee: And so we would bring moms together and laugh about. The effed up things in parenting and the laughter was very healing and the community was very healing. But what we did with that show now, it was time, especially after COVID to come together and actually start talking about it. We're really good at laughing about it and performing it and posting about it, but really getting into that muck.

[00:23:44] Tracey Tee: And so it was like a non-negotiable and it had nothing to do with me. It was all the medicine that this container needed to happen. And then I was in meditation one day. And MOM moms on mushrooms just dropped in my head and I sat up and I was like that's genius. Like obviously someone's thought of it and went to the computer and it was available and I was like, oh my God, seriously?

[00:24:08] Tracey Tee: Like me? Like I'm supposed to do that. Like I did not wanna start moms own mushrooms, like at all. Just so early on in my journey, did not think that's who I was supposed to be. Didn't want the responsibility, was terrified of becoming a leader, all the things. And I said no, for a long time, no.

[00:24:26] Tracey Tee: Like knees and face on the ground in prayer. Please find someone else to do this. And I wouldn't go away. God just put that in my heart. And so when I said yes, it just blew up. And it was good because that was the confirmation, right? We need a platform. For permission and probably the largest foundation of moms on mushrooms is to empower mothers with knowledge.

[00:24:50] Tracey Tee: And I really, from the bottom of my heart, think that we can learn about this medicine and we can learn how to heal together. We don't need another dude to coat. Telling us how to take a pill and tell us to take it at what time or what protocol we need. We need to remind ourselves that we have intuition and that we can share it with each other.

[00:25:09] Tracey Tee: And I think we just needed a container to start that or give that permission. And that's really all that Mom is. My prayer is that mom. Isn't around forever because we figured it out. Like we've created the Sangha, we've found our circles, we've brought our elders back into the conversation. The medicine is at the center.

[00:25:30] Tracey Tee: And everybody good. But until then, that's really who we are and what we're about. And I think mom is gonna evolve and change over time to meet the needs of mothers. But right now, there's so much fear, there's so much stigma. Even still, there's stigma around healing, and we talk about empowerment or just being a empowered woman.

[00:25:50] Tracey Tee: The truth is that we really don't like happy, healthy moms. We're very scared of happy, healthy moms. We're scared of women in general who are expressive, who are in their power and who are happy, and we've rewarded mothers for a long time. By numbing them out. For Christ's sake, we used to chloroform moms when they were giving birth.

[00:26:10] Tracey Tee: We don't like to hear them scream. We don't like to see women in pain. We don't like to see women in their power and their raw, sensual, sexual energy, their life force energy, we're terrified of it. And so it was forming and then it was, okay, let's let her have her. Afternoon martini at Bridge Club, and then it was the Valium, and then it was the wine mom and, oh, isn't this cute that we're all getting together for play dates and getting wasted at three in the afternoon on Chardonnay and now it's the SSRIs and all of it.

[00:26:41] Tracey Tee: If you really look at it. There's this tone of hand dissension I find that is like this pat on the head to mothers. People always ask me like, oh, you're just perpetuating mommy's little helper. And I hate that phrase, and I've listened to that song on purpose so many times to get to the root of even what the Rolling Stones were trying to say.

[00:26:59] Tracey Tee: But it's just oh, look at her. Moms are sad and we know it's hard. And we'll just let her have this thing to make the life go out behind her eyes. And psychedelics are the complete opposite of that, and we've been made to feel fearful of our own happiness and self-worth and fearful of being actually fully present.

[00:27:19] Tracey Tee: So I think that's what mom is supposed to do, is to give permission to mothers to say, Hey, you don't have to check out anymore. And you're around other people that feel the same way and are figuring it out. We don't have the answers, but we know we don't have to be perfect.

[00:27:33] Lily Eggers: I really love so much what you're saying and wanna really differentiate.

[00:27:37] Lily Eggers: For any listeners that might be confused around substances that take us away from our experience versus psychedelics, which bring us into our experience. Yeah. And give us a larger capacity to hold what's true. And it's very different. Both might ease your suffering, but one is leaving. One is going away or numbing, and the other is actually dropping into it and landing in it in a way that builds strength.

[00:28:07] Lily Eggers: It builds consciousness, it builds presence, and it's such a different way of engaging with our feelings. Which aren't always joyful. They can be, that's great when they are, but they're not always joyful. And then what do we do with that? Children are monkey see, monkey do. We are modeling every moment, and so how do we model something that's whole and present and as real to the human experience and not trying to make it look nice? I remember a group of moms talking about, oh no, I cried in front of my child today. And I was like. That sounds great. Good. Yeah. Kids need to see people cry. That's part of the human body.

[00:28:46] Lily Eggers: Yeah, that's a good thing. Let them see it, let them see you work through and have a hard time.

[00:28:53] Tracey Tee: Yeah. I think one thing too is that we've taken on this a full identity. When you become a mother, you cross into this portal, which we can also talk about isn't celebrated, isn't revered, isn't whatever, but then you just become mom.

[00:29:08] Tracey Tee: But we're actually women. We're women who happen to be mothers. And I feel like that statement's very triggering for people because they don't actually want to say that they get to be a woman. But when you're a woman, you have your own desires, your own dreams, your own creative pursuits, your own intelligence, your own needs.

[00:29:27] Tracey Tee: And then you're a mom on top of it, which makes it so much richer. And when your kids get to see you being a human person, a human woman who cries and is angry and messes up and stubs her toe and gains some weight, or whatever the struggles are, that reminds them that you're not just a mom, which is like a one dimensional character.

[00:29:49] Tracey Tee: And so part of that is reclaiming that womanhood and saying, I get to be both without shame around it.

[00:29:56] Lily Eggers: And where's the holding for that process? That process of integration of motherhood? I feel like I had a baby and I was like, what?

[00:30:04] Tracey Tee: Oh yeah. Where

[00:30:05] Lily Eggers: did Lily go? Like, where's the woman? How do I be both? And I'm in a longstanding process of writing a one woman play about this process because for me, I was so unguided, I had zero mentorship or holding.

[00:30:18] Lily Eggers: And it was totally with medicine. My play is called Moms on Drugs. Similarly,

[00:30:25] Tracey Tee: amazing 'cause of there different

[00:30:26] Lily Eggers: medicines that I was utilizing to make sense of this integration, of this incredible role that we have to integrate, not be replaced. I am, we're not exclusively mothers.

[00:30:39] Liz Chernet: There's so much nuance. I just had a moment yesterday with my son where I was crying in front of him and he was consoling me.

[00:30:46] Liz Chernet: And I had this flash of, oh my God, am I going to make this child a parentified child? This is not okay. Oh wow. And it was like all the conditioning. And then I caught myself. I observed and I was like, no, this is so beautiful. And actually it's not only okay, but it is stunning for our children to not only see us in our vulnerability.

[00:31:12] Liz Chernet: And also in our power, but to be able to hold us, we do so much holding and it's okay for our kids to hold us too. Once I just softened into that and my sweet little four and a half year old son was just patting me and loving me and holding me and it felt so. Good. Especially once I softened into it.

[00:31:34] Liz Chernet: This is amazing. Nothing about this needs to

[00:31:37] Tracey Tee: change. Yeah. Can I reflect 10 years in your future? Yeah. I'll probably start crying, so forgive me, but this weekend I had to go to a funeral of a friend who passed away in a terrible way. And Evie had only met her when she was really young, so she didn't remember her.

[00:31:54] Tracey Tee: But I was obviously sad and my husband and I are getting ready to go to this celebration of life and I was crying all morning. And she just came up and gave me this hug, a compassionate, caring, concerned hug. And in that moment I was like, look at this kid who's grown up and can observe someone else's pain and show it.

[00:32:15] Tracey Tee: Holy shit, it's working because she allowed me to be a human and I allowed me to be a human. And then from that modeling and starting at four. They're gonna grow up and they're gonna just be okay with people feeling sad and not wanna run away from it, and not freak out, and not try to gaslight it or sweep it under the rug, or all the things.

[00:32:37] Tracey Tee: And the same thing. It was like not only did I get to receive compassion from my favorite human on the planet. I was actually comforted in that moment. And honestly, as mothers, if we can't get and receive love from our kids, like what's the point stuff. Bring it, please. Thank you.

[00:32:55] Liz Chernet: Yeah, so true. Yeah, that's definitely a paradigm shift.

[00:32:59] Liz Chernet: I love it. One thing I'd love to come back to is, Lily, you presence, the difference between substances that take us. Away that help us escape or numb out versus substances that carry us deeper into our experience, deeper into the present moment. And I'm curious, Tracey, for women coming into moms on mushrooms who have.

[00:33:22] Liz Chernet: Little to no experience with mushrooms or are confused like how is this different than drinking wine with my girls? Or how is different from cannabis or who just really might not have a frame of reference for how and why mushrooms are so supportive in this way. I'm curious. What wisdom you offer.

[00:33:41] Tracey Tee: Yeah, that's very common. 99% of the time. The wisdom we try to offer is time and space and an opportunity to unlearn because the modern mother, the only experience I can speak to is being an American mom, a western modern mother generally come to this medicine with an expectation of a quick fix.

[00:34:05] Tracey Tee: Even wine is a quick fix, right? You drink a glass of wine, you feel it pretty darn fast. It's almost instant relief because you can feel it in your body. Everything in America that we use to self-soothe from a medicinal point of view is very potent. And it also requires no buy-in and no co-creation. You have a headache.

[00:34:25] Tracey Tee: You take Advil, you sit back, the Advil fixes it. You're depressed, you're overwhelmed. You take an SSRI, you sit back, you wait for the SSRI to do its thing. Same with wine, same with coffee. You're tired, you don't feel alert. You drink a cup of coffee, boom. There she is. It's over and over again.

[00:34:42] Tracey Tee: And what we find is that women come in and they're like. I've heard about microdosing. It sounds amazing. They hear the presence, they hear the happiness. They hear these things, and they want it in three days. And so they're like, okay, I wanna start microdosing. I wanna start microdosing yesterday and I'm gonna lose 30 pounds and I'm gonna write the book and I'm gonna get the job upgrade and I'm gonna fix my marriage and my kids are gonna be happy.

[00:35:03] Tracey Tee: And what frustrates people when they come to mom is that we're like, yeah. It's not really gonna happen. And again, it's like an unlearning. And I really learned this lesson very recently. Early in the fall actually. I went on a trip with one of my mentors to Oaxaca. On this big medicine pilgrimage and we were up in San Jose de Pacifico, which is like where mushrooms just seem to grow on every surface.

[00:35:30] Tracey Tee: It's the most magical place I've ever been. And we were with these eros and the evening before our mushroom journey, we had to do a sweat lodge. And before we went into sweat lodge, we had to build the fire. To heat the stones that go in the sweat lodge. But everyone had to build the fire. We had to get the fire going, and then we had to wait for the fire to get hot enough to heat these huge stones that go into the temescal.

[00:35:55] Tracey Tee: And in that moment I'm like, oh my God, I'm so tired. I was sick as a dog. I had, I. Montezuma's revenge or whatever. So I was exhausted. It was dark. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted to get in and experience the Temescal 'cause I was excited and I had to sit there and blow on the sticks of this fire. And we had to do the directions and we had to go around and we had to stay prayers.

[00:36:13] Tracey Tee: And I'm like, come on. And what I realized. Was that they were asking us to build the fire essentially for our own demise. I heated up those rocks that an hour later when I was in that temescal screaming and crying and sweating and thinking I was gonna die. I did that to myself. That's co-creation. Yeah.

[00:36:32] Tracey Tee: And it was such a huge lesson, and that's what the mushrooms want. And until you realize that you are 50% or more responsible for the outcome of your life, and that mushrooms aren't gonna come in and just wipe the slate clean. There are going to be an ally in the journey that you're creating for yourself, but you have to want it, and you have to be clear about what you want.

[00:36:54] Tracey Tee: You have to ask for help, and you have to put in the work. And so this is probably a really long tangent for a simple question, but that's what we try to teach, is that this all requires you, and you're gonna be very disappointed in mushrooms if you're not willing to at least meet them halfway, if not all the way.

[00:37:15] Tracey Tee: The other thing that I think is really interesting is our resistance to being uncomfortable. We don't like to feel uncomfortable. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about hysterical women. So oftentimes we'll get women who start microdosing and they'll post inside our private community, or they'll message us and say I started microdosing.

[00:37:33] Tracey Tee: I'm tired, I'm cranky. I've been crying for two weeks. It's not working. And we're like, actually it might be working. Look at all those feelings that are coming up. When's the last time you felt that? And we just hate feeling uncomfortable and we view it so negatively. And if we can't come to a place of acceptance that we have rage and sadness and depression and fear and all these things inside of us that need to come out, then it's gonna be a really hard and long road moving forward.

[00:38:01] Tracey Tee: And mushrooms are gonna be very disappointing. Yeah. I don't know if that answers your question.

[00:38:05] Liz Chernet: Totally. That makes a lot of sense. And to your point, we absolutely have to excavate. It's like being in the muck is the breakdown and route to the breakthrough. This is esoteric and somewhat of a non-sequitur, but I was thinking about this idea being in the mud.

[00:38:22] Liz Chernet: And what that means. And I was visualizing it and I went into active imagination around it. And I had this awakening around being in the mud. It was like actually the combination of two elementals, it's earth, it's being so deeply embodied in that connection to Pacha Mama and the substance. The flesh of life.

[00:38:44] Liz Chernet: And then it's water, it's earth and water and the water of emotion and. Softening into whatever emotion is here. And when I started to understand the mud and the muck that way, I was like, oh, something moves that so bad. I dunno. It went from feeling really dirty and icky and stuck to being like like I wanna roll around in some mud now.

[00:39:08] Lily Eggers: Anyway. I love that, Liz, thanks for sharing that. I like imagining you like in contemplation of mud and there's something about that process that is. The healing path, it's forming our relationship to that which comes to us and we resist. I don't like this thing. I want to eject it to delete it, to surgically remove it.

[00:39:30] Lily Eggers: From my life instead of. I'm gonna welcome it in and I'm going to really get to know its essence and then let the essence of it change me. And I love that, Liz. I love that so much. And it links to what you were just saying, Tracey, about how much our culture doesn't understand time, this concept of.

[00:39:49] Lily Eggers: Growth and evolution being something that's alive and happening all the time. It's not like it starts and finishes. It is continuous and constant. And I work a lot with couples and they come in and they're like, everything's bad, fix it. And I'm like no. We're gonna go look at your relational garden and we're gonna see what's dead and dying.

[00:40:09] Lily Eggers: And it's such an overused analogy, but it's so helpful for people because. God, things suck for a while. Why? Because you haven't spent much time in your garden, or you're not tending it right. You're not giving it the sunshine and the compost. It needs that stuff, and you've been focusing on your work and all the other problems in your life.

[00:40:25] Lily Eggers: Okay. Then there's this process and it takes time. Of excavation, tending. Some things you have to pull up, they're gone. But then you plant new things and then it takes a while and then you don't. Stomp all over your seedlings. That's conflict. That's damaging, but it's a never ending involvement.

[00:40:44] Lily Eggers: And I think what you were saying there, Tracey, about how to understand mushrooms and to work with mushrooms is understanding that you make the change, the mushrooms offer light or offer opportunities, but it's you. Engaging in your life, in your thoughts, in your interpretations, in all of it. You're engaging in a new way.

[00:41:05] Lily Eggers: That now is possible potentially if you let it, if you let yourself feel new in your life.

[00:41:12] Tracey Tee: Yeah, and I love the mud thing too, and the garden, because then it's not punishment that you're in mud. It's not suffering in your mud. You get to be in mud. And if we're gonna be moms about it. One of the biggest lessons I taught myself early on way before Shrooms, 'cause I had to teach it to my kid, is that any mess can get cleaned up.

[00:41:30] Tracey Tee: Like it's not permanent. You're in the mud, you can go wash it off when you're ready, it's gonna get cleaned up. And so I. This idea that once you're in the mud, you're always in the mud, or that once the garden's dead, it's dead forever. We can never bring it back. All of that is this like apocalyptic thinking and time and patience and compassion and kindness to the mess is just part of it, and understanding that it's not permanent and that it's not a one time thing either.

[00:41:57] Tracey Tee: I think there's this understanding, which I find it to be less with women, especially mothers in this space, is that if you're a healer, if you're a leader, you're like this perfect person or like you've got it all figured out. And while I do think on some level you can become self-obsessed with healing and figuring stuff out, and sometimes you actually just are okay.

[00:42:14] Tracey Tee: And I don't think we give ourselves permission to say that. I'm actually just happy. That's okay. Yeah. On the other hand, I think we find we start to judge people. We want people on pedestals. And it's all this unlearning that we're a part of this whole conversation is just shedding all of that and saying, I talk a lot about this with my team and with myself.

[00:42:33] Tracey Tee: We're coming from a time of hierarchal leadership and parenting and all the things, but really to me, I see it all in a circle like circular leadership and circular parenting. So you're never getting to the top of a pinnacle. You might be moving around the circle, maybe you're in the middle of the circle at some point, but you're back out and everything.

[00:42:51] Tracey Tee: There's no hard edges. There's no. Corners and the circle is infinite, right? And so that just gives you permission to constantly be growing a garden. And those are things that we just, we've forgotten, I think.

[00:43:05] Liz Chernet: Yeah. I feel like with all this conversation about the mud and the muck, we'd be remiss not to mention that mushrooms literally grow.

[00:43:14] Liz Chernet: On and from shit. They grow in the mud and they're ephemeral. They sprout up from decaying matter, and then as quickly as they bloom, they wither. So lots of resonant themes just in the body and the lifespan of the mushroom itself and how it is in its own rights and embodiment or reflection of all these themes we're discussing.

[00:43:38] Tracey Tee: Yeah. Mushrooms walk the walk for sure.

[00:43:41] Liz Chernet: They sure do. Yeah. That also makes me think of the donate theory and all of that, which we can save for a different podcast episode. But these ideas that the evolution of our species is actually thought to be connected to consuming psilocybin mushrooms. It's pretty wild.

[00:44:00] Liz Chernet: So we'll dangle the cherry right there with that one and come back to it another time. I wanna ask you even more about mom. Okay. Because I think it's really clear to our listeners now that you've created this beautiful community for moms on mushrooms, for people to find other like-minded mamas who are in their own process and using mushrooms and microdosing to support that.

[00:44:23] Liz Chernet: I know that you teach various courses, you have different containers and different offerings. Maybe we can have you share a little bit more about the nuances and the specifics of what this platform is all about.

[00:44:34] Tracey Tee: Yeah, thank you. We're definitely in a time of evolution right now, and things are changing, but the core again, are three principles.

[00:44:42] Tracey Tee: One, in our foundational offerings, our courses in community. We have three month courses, and in my heart, I really believe that to create an intentional microdosing practice. It takes time like we've been saying, and three months is a good amount of time to let yourself peel back some onion layers and go through those highs and lows and come out with an understanding of how mushrooms feel in your body.

[00:45:07] Tracey Tee: And I would say that for everything, what my goal is to provide mothers with a pathway to create an intentional relationship with this medicine. So we have three month courses. We're about to launch a four week course. Just understanding that life is busy for moms. That sometimes you do wanna go all in a short amount of time, 30 days to change a habit.

[00:45:32] Tracey Tee: There's some merit there. But to give you the basics and then give you some time to think about how you wanna move forward, and that we'll be here waiting when you're ready to really go deeper. That's for kind of introduction. And then we have a beautiful course that is five months that works with a mid dose journey, like a half a gram to a gram.

[00:45:52] Tracey Tee: And encourages mothers to have one of those journeys every month with a different strain and with a different intention. So one month it might be to just connect with nature. One month might be you take it and it's really for creativity, and you create something out of that experience, whether it's a collage or whatever.

[00:46:09] Tracey Tee: And again, all of it is becoming in relationship with the medicine and from where I stand in this moment in time, I think that microdosing is a very easy and gentle way to create that relationship and that context with the medicine. So everything we try to do is to set the foundation of microdosing. So you then go on.

[00:46:29] Tracey Tee: Do large dose journeys, but God willing, you're not destabilized or disappointed because you understand the medicine a little bit more 'cause you've taken your time. So we have courses, then we have a lot of self-paced things, a lot of bite-sized information. Just download this PDF, here's my wisdom to you.

[00:46:46] Tracey Tee: Just think about and contemplate the concepts of microdosing and psychedelic medicine. We really believe, like I said, about education. So we have a lot of really cool research documents. If you're curious about microdosing and breastfeeding, we went ahead and just gathered every last study we could find and put it in a document, annotated it, summarized it so that you can at least have it all in one place and then you can decide what's best for you.

[00:47:11] Tracey Tee: And then we have our private membership community, which is like Facebook for moms on shrooms. It's $2 a month. And that's like part experiment, part prayer, that we learn to grow together and that we start to talk on a digital platform in a private way outside of algorithms and likes and shares and all that.

[00:47:29] Tracey Tee: And we just start having a conversation. So it's really for moms who are curious but don't know yet if they wanna dive in. But really it's more for moms who want to share their journey and connect with other mothers. That's what we have so far. And God willing, we're gonna start doing more in-person events.

[00:47:42] Tracey Tee: 'cause I do think this community part is, we need to get together and look each other in the eye. I have this vision of mom potlucks all over the country. Let's bring back potlucks. Yeah, love a potluck, love a pot and you gonna walk away with more food. So I'm just trying to figure out like the right way to do that because.

[00:47:58] Tracey Tee: We're not used to doing it outside of like church, and I don't want to start a church,

[00:48:02] Liz Chernet: yeah. If you've started your own church of sorts and oh my god, so glorious. All of these offerings that it really feels like there's something for everybody. I hope so. In what you're creating, which is super cool, ranging from self-guided to live or hybrid and the platform so juicy.

[00:48:20] Liz Chernet: I love it. This is maybe a little bit more on the personal end, but I'm so curious in what you're creating and building, what do you want Evie to know one day about? Yeah. The work that you are doing with the medicine. The legacy that you are attending with Mom?

[00:48:42] Tracey Tee: Thank you. I think I don't want her to know anything actually.

[00:48:46] Tracey Tee: I want her to understand that my life was my message, the Gandhi quote, that I love so much, and when I start to doubt myself or this work, or why the hell do any of us wanna work in psychedelics in 2025? It's so freaking hard. I go back to that quote where Gandhi was on a train going to some war faction part of India, and a reporter ran up to him and said, do you have a message for the people?

[00:49:11] Tracey Tee: 'cause everyone thought he was gonna die. And he took the reporter's notebook and wrote, my life is my message. And I just want her to understand that you can lead with love and you can be in service to others, and you can be abundant, and you can be independent, and you can be creative. And I want her to know that because she saw it.

[00:49:30] Tracey Tee: And then I want her to feel like she was raised in a place where she can make up her own mind and have her own beliefs and make her own choices. And more than anything, I just don't want her to be scared. And so whether or not she ever takes mushrooms, she probably won't because as we know as moms, your kids never wanna do what you or you're into.

[00:49:49] Tracey Tee: If any anti-drug person wants to actually scare kids about drugs, like start doing drugs and talking about it, like they'll never do it. But if she ever does it, I know that she'll, God willing, feel like she can ask us questions and know the right way, because I just lived it every day. So that's what I want.

[00:50:06] Lily Eggers: I'm so touched by your words, Tracey and your sincerity, and I so feel the deep devotional way that you live. Even when you were sharing about mom being like this mission given to you instead of this thing that you strove for. Yeah. Given to you and you didn't want it. That's such deep feminine energy of creation of the emergent, like from the bottom up.

[00:50:32] Lily Eggers: You live this way and you live it, and what a different model like that feels. So this is the way of the future is creation in this way, living true to our values and modeling for our children, and then allowing them to be who they are. And live how they live. My 10 year old's so different. He's like, when do I get to brain upgrade?

[00:50:53] Lily Eggers: That's what he calls mushrooms. Oh my God, I love that. When do I get to brain upgrade? Mom? Hold

[00:50:58] Tracey Tee: your horses son. Yeah, we'll get there.

[00:51:03] Tracey Tee: That is awesome. I love that. Yeah. Maybe if I told her it was a brain upgrade, she'd think about it. But yeah, I don't know. We'll see TVD on that one, that's part of my un shedding too, is this. Narcissistic idea that our children have to walk in the path that we walk. It's so arrogant. I battle with it daily.

[00:51:20] Tracey Tee: 'cause I like what I do. I believe in it. And of course I want her to experience it, but it's not my choice. And making her do it certainly isn't gonna help anything. And that's a big letting go. It's a big ego buster right there. If that's not what parenting is, I don't know what it is. Just watching your ego just get shit on every single day, 10 and again.

[00:51:41] Liz Chernet: Oh my goodness. As we bring this conversation to an honorable close, wondering if there's anything else we should have asked you but didn't, or anything else you feel compelled to share with our listeners.

[00:51:54] Tracey Tee: Gosh, I think I've already cried like three times, so I don't know if I've got anything else out there.

[00:52:00] Tracey Tee: I guess if I would ever offer any mother or anyone, any advice about if you're considering psychedelics is just to remain curious. And if I haven't beat the horse at this point, like you've made it this far without shrooms, take a little bit more time and learn about it. Learn what you're putting in your body.

[00:52:18] Tracey Tee: Learn about your brain a little bit more. Learn about what it can do. Seek out wisdom traditions and find some context from the past. And not everything has to be science-based. Not everything has to be proven right in front of us right now, or be trendy or have some sort of male thought leader signing off on it.

[00:52:37] Tracey Tee: Trust your instincts and just get curious. Then from there, trust the medicine. And also just that it's a lot safer than we've been told, and that's a big one that everyone's gonna have to peel back. But yeah, I think it can do a lot of good for a lot of people,

[00:52:52] Lily Eggers: I'm grateful for it. Thank you, Tracey.

[00:52:55] Lily Eggers: I'm so grateful for you and what you're creating and what you bring and how you live.

[00:53:00] Liz Chernet: Also, where do you live? Because can we like hang out? I wanna be your friend.

[00:53:05] Tracey Tee: Always. You wanna talk about URMs? We moved to the country a year ago, so I live an hour southeast of Denver. I'm in Colorado, which is convenient, so I'm surrounded by trees.

[00:53:16] Tracey Tee: Literally, that was the shrooms that made this move happen, and I wanted to share publicly. It's been a big weekend for me because I love birds and the crow has been my spirit guide for about a year, and I've been calling in the crows and a pair of crows arrived on Good Friday this year and they haven't left.

[00:53:32] Tracey Tee: I have my windows open and I run out with peanuts for the crows, and I talk to the crows and this is who I am. So if you wanna hang out with the crazy bird lady in the forest, please, by all means. Wow, cool.

[00:53:43] Liz Chernet: I love that. And goes without saying, we will have in our show notes. The link to moms on mushrooms and the Instagram.

[00:53:52] Liz Chernet: Are there any other resources or sites or, that's pretty much it.

[00:53:56] Tracey Tee: That's pretty much it. But I can send you guys some offerings for people if they're interested. Great. Some easy ways to get started and yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. Okay, thank you. Thank you both so much. Yes. Bye.

[00:54:08] Liz Chernet: Tracey. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing in Right Relationship with friends and fellow seekers.

[00:54:15] Liz Chernet: And if you really loved it, leave us a review. We love hearing what resonates for our listeners. Also, if you'd like to share a story about a psychedelic experience that somehow changed you or impacted you in an important way, we'd love to hear it and share it with our listeners. Check out our show notes for detailed instructions on how to contribute.