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Alli Schaper will tell you that the most important things she knows about living, she learned from mushrooms, including how to die. She is the CEO and cofounder of SuperMush, a functional mushroom brand backed by globally recognised artists, athletes and founders, a co-founder of Microdosing Collective, the first US nonprofit dedicated to legal microdosing advocacy, and the host of Into The Multiverse, a podcast exploring consciousness and psychedelics. Her path there did not begin on a stage. By the time she was 21, she had been prescribed around twelve different pharmaceutical medications for chronic gut issues she had carried since childhood.
The tuning fork
Alli’s way out was not a magic pill, and that, she says, was the whole lesson. Functional mushrooms, lion’s mane instead of high doses of caffeine, chaga for immune function, reishi to wind down for sleep, acted as what she calls a tuning fork for her nervous system. They slowed her down enough for her body to follow its natural rhythm, and for her gut, our second brain, to function well again. She is quick to add that not all mushrooms are made equal. The gold standard is the fruiting body of the fungus, double extracted through hot water and alcohol, and she is passionate about people learning to read the label of what they put in their body.
The lie of the quick fix
Society, Alli argues, has sold us a massive lie: that everything we take should fix us immediately. An Advil numbs the pain, a Xanax puts you to sleep. Adaptogens are different. They work to bring the body into homeostasis, and sometimes the first week feels worse, not better, as the body works through what it has been holding, the way a sauna stirs up what it is helping you release. Stay the course, she says, and the discomfort is the detox.
What fungi know about death
Then the conversation goes somewhere most wellness interviews never do. Humans share almost 50 per cent of our DNA with fungi, and Alli believes we have barely begun to learn from them. Beneath every step we take runs the mycelium network, and when something dies on the forest floor, the fungi decompose it and return its nutrients to the soil as new life. Mushrooms, she says, are great alchemisers of death and dying. That teaching became personal when her father passed away unexpectedly, five days before he was due to retire. Her whole family had experienced mushrooms together before he died, and it gave her mother, married to him for 36 years, a profoundly different relationship with grief. His passing also left Alli with a warning she now carries everywhere: beware destination happiness, the habit of parking your joy at some future date you may never reach.
A breath between trigger and response
Microdosing, Alli explains, is a sub-perceptual dose of a psychedelic taken like a supplement, no visuals, no hallucinations, on a protocol of a few days a week over about three months. By quieting the default mode network, where our habit loops live, it opens a window of neuroplasticity. Her favourite example is disarmingly ordinary: her mum calls, says something triggering, and where the old programme would answer like a six-year-old, microdosing gives her a breath to choose her response. Those subtle shifts, she believes, could change the world. It is not a panacea, she is careful to say, and used unconsciously psychedelics can cause real trouble. Used consciously, with reverence, they helped her look at herself honestly.
Not a magic pill
For 15 to 20 years, Alli sat on the crinkly paper of doctors’ offices waiting to be told what was wrong with her. The turning point was deciding her health was her own responsibility, and seeing clearly, in her words, how much of her life her mind was making her sick. What the mushrooms unlayered was something she believes we all carry underneath: your natural state is joy.
Alli left us with three shiny golden nuggets. Functional mushrooms can be a tuning fork for your nervous system. Microdosing can create open-mindedness and the ability to pattern-interrupt yourself. And mushrooms are incredible teachers of death that can teach us how to live more fully.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Find Out More About Alli Schaper
Website: https://www.supermush.com | https://www.allischaper.com
Instagram: @allischaper
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@iamsupermush
Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/
