Dear Friends,
Heather A. Lee, LCSW, is one of the first licensed psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists in the country, and most of her clients are women, sixty and over. She has been on Mind Body Health & Politics previously and most recently, to talk about her book, The Psilocybin Sessions.
This time she came with news. She is selling her house near Boulder, Colorado and moving to Peaks Island, Maine, a town with a population of only nine hundred.
I believe human beings are tribal animals. We live healthiest in small groups, where we know one another by face, if not by name. Heather is about to find out how long it takes to learn nine hundred new faces.
On a recent psilocybin journey, she said the mushrooms got a little cheeky with her.
“Everybody’s talking about mushrooms you know, we’re getting all the press. But all the other plants have something to say.”
This October she is leading two retreats in the Azores, the Portuguese islands four and a half hours from Boston, where the ferns stand as tall as she, and the moss is so deep you feel you are floating. People take a small dose of psilocybin and then spend the day in the forest, lying on the moss with a magnifying glass, or doing breath work on black volcanic sand to the sound of the surf.
I know something about taking people into nature to heal. In 1972, I created a nature preserve and health sanctuary at Wilbur Hot Springs in northern California, and for forty-eight years I was its owner and chief caretaker.
Nature is prescription grade medicine, RxN. Somewhere along the way we came to see ourselves as living on the planet rather than as part of it. When we separate ourselves from nature and live in cement, it is not healthy for us.
I asked her about adverse effects, which is the subject of my latest book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines.
The adverse effects she has seen is in people who have a hard journey and then go silent, skip the integration, and stop returning her calls. Out of about four hundred clients it happened three times.
I invite you to listen to the whole conversation.
Heather’s retreats and her book are at heatheralee.com. Below, a small practice you can do without a mushroom.
Today’s Practice: Prescription Grade Nature
A simple thing to take with you from this week’s conversation.
Go to a park, sit down on a bench and look around. You don’t have to do anything else.
Take in the different colors of the grasses, the trees, the bark. If people walk by, look at them and see what is beautiful about them. Sit still and take it in for five or ten minutes.
That’s the whole exercise. You are taking medicine when you take in nature, RxN, prescription-grade nature.
Heather’s uses a magnifying glass and a mossy forest in the Azores. Yours can start on a bench this week. Do it once, write back and tell me what you saw.
Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Forthcoming New Book
Resources mentioned
Heather A. Lee, The Psilocybin Sessions (Modern Wisdom Press, 2025) | heatheralee.com
Return, Remember & Rewild — Azores retreats (Oct 13–18 sold out; Oct 26–31, 2026; Apr 2027 dates listed)
A note on working together
I offer a small number of one-on-one sessions for those who want to work with me directly.
This is not traditional therapy. You bring whatever is troubling you, and we practice the simple tools I have used with patients for six decades — ways of quieting the mind and easing anxiety that you can carry into daily life.
We go at your pace, and we work on what helps.
My Latest Book
The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.
A few words from the front of the book:
Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.
— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.
— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.
My Other Books
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking
