The therapists and the patient perform a ritual in which the intention for the day is set and ropes are bound together, signifying everyone’s interconnectedness. The subject is directed to don an eye mask and headset and to lie on the couch. The headset plays six hours of rhythmic wordless music from around the world. The music is one more nod to the ancient shamanic traditions that the research team has borrowed from.

What happens next is unique for every patient. O.M. traveled halfway around the world to embrace the family he left behind in his native country. He traveled inside of his own neck to see that the swollen lymph nodes he had hated so intensely were actually filled with clear, benign fluid. Hate turned to love when he realized that they were a part of him. D.B., a life-long atheist grasping for words, felt bathed in what she could only describe as “God’s love.” Estalyn Walcoff, a white woman, stained her mask with tears as she viscerally felt the pain of hundreds of years of slavery and “the interconnectedness that runs through us all.”

Nick Fernandez entered a cave. “I’m outside of my body,” he recalled nearly a year after it happened, with a “realer than real” immediacy that still could only be expressed in present tense. “My body is on a clothing hanger. I’m walking around it, looking at it, deciding if I want to choose it or not. I’m thinking about my body in terms of all the people my body has ever had sex with, all the food that’s ever gone into it, all the chemotherapy, all the exercise, all the shit that’s ever come out of it. I pictured my parents conceiving me, making this body. Everything I can imagine that’s happened to this body in 26 years, I saw. It’s like when you shop for a new car and they say it has 30,000 miles, and was in this crash, and this happened to it. And, I was outside of this body walking around it thinking, ‘Should I get this body or not?’ I eventually decided that I would. And, when I entered into my body, honestly, I felt like a superhero putting on his suit for the first time. It was the first time since I’ve been sick that I came to terms with what my body was. It wasn’t this thing that I wanted to be better, that I wished didn’t have cancer. I said, ‘This is my body and I choose to take it as my vehicle in this life.’ And, I think the message is, that you don’t get to choose. This is what you get. Use it well.” Nearly a year later, Nick still thinks about that message every day.

The data from the study is still being analyzed, but anecdotally Dr. Ross and his team report that the vast majority of their patients have exhibited an immediate and sustained reduction in anxiety. Consistent with similar studies involving psilocybin, approximately three-fourths of the participants rate their experience with the drug as being one of the top five most significant events of their lives.