≋✺̱ Fungi Tings — Black Body, Gut, and Consciousness Field Notes

Collage-style hero illustration introducing the Fungi Tings section. Against a dark star-filled background with risograph-inspired textures, bold purple title text appears above a constellation of stylized fungi, mycelium networks, and a circular mushroom spore print radiating from the center. A hand-built clay sculpture of a fat Black figure stands beside an oversized spotted mushroom while illustrated oyster mushrooms, shelf fungi, trumpet fungi, branching mycelium, and clusters of mushrooms spread across the foreground. The composition combines botanical illustration, sculpture, and printmaking into a vibrant field of fungal imagery.

Circular mushroom spore print with a dark central disc and radiating lines of spores that fade into evenly spaced dots, creating a starburst pattern.

Stylized illustration of overlapping shelf mushrooms with broad spiral-patterned caps growing in a layered cluster.

Stylized illustration of a single mushroom with a rounded yellow cap covered in dark circular spots and a long curved brown stem.

≋✺̱ Fungi Tings — Black Body, Gut, and Consciousness Field Notes

On Da Left Hand Side of Mushrooms and Roses

Abstract illustration of a blue perspective grid outlined in red, bending into smooth waves across a black background.

Hand-built clay sculpture of a fat Black figure standing upright with shoulder-length copper-colored locs, simplified facial features without visible eyes, a gap between the front teeth, a brown bandeau top and wrapped skirt, and exposed feet with root-like forms growing around the ankles.

Stylized illustration of a branching fungal filament with clusters of rounded spores gathered along the strand and concentrated at one end.

Stylized illustration of a small cluster of slender mushrooms with rounded caps growing among smaller button mushrooms.

Stylized illustration of two cup-shaped fungi with glossy interiors surrounded by small rounded mushrooms.

Stylized illustration of a winding strand of connected blue circular spores or cells linked together in an organic chain.

Stylized illustration of branching orange mycelium with rounded nodes spreading horizontally like an underground fungal network.

Stylized illustration of an interconnected web of branching green and black mycelium spreading outward in an organic network.

Stylized illustration of a clustered group of rounded mushrooms with textured orange caps covered in raised circular spots.

Stylized illustration of overlapping oyster mushrooms with broad fan-shaped caps growing in layered shelves.

Stylized illustration of three trumpet-shaped mushrooms with flared funnel caps and textured interiors emerging from a cluster of rounded stones.

Fungi Tings

Black Body, Gut

and Consciousness

Field Notes

Sacred Boundary Statement

Hand-built clay sculpture of a seated fat Black figure with shoulder-length copper-colored locs, simplified facial features without visible eyes, and a gap between the front teeth. Small mushrooms emerge from the hair, shoulders, legs, and ankles while glowing blue vein-like lines spread across the body. The figure rests in a grounded crouch with both hands draped over bent knees.

I want to be absolutely clear before you read any further.

This is my body, my lineage, my medicine, my relationship with fungi. What you are stepping into is not entertainment. It is not casual commentary. It is not a space for judgment, critique, or performative curiosity.

I have engaged with harm that most cannot see or understand. I have walked through cycles of colonial grooming, bodily trauma, and systemic disregard. My choices, my body, my practices—all of it—is sacred.

I am someone who needs to be protected.

Your discomfort, your assumptions, or your critiques will not be entertained here.

If you are ready to approach this with reverence, curiosity, and relational integrity, continue.

If not, step back.

The waters are deep.

This medicine is serious.

Entering The Waters

Stylized circular mushroom spore print with a bright pink center and radiating dotted lines that expand outward into evenly spaced spores.

Stylized illustration of a branching blue mycelium network with rounded nodes extending outward like underground fungal roots.

These waters are new, uncharted, and electric. Most of the site’s content—strain notes, recipes, field observations—are your docked boats. This page is the current, moving under the surface.

The Dream of Consciousness here is medicine for Black bodies. Anyone engaging the plant can access:

emotional recalibration
gut-brain communication
sensory and visual amplification
ancestral and communal connection
liberation praxis

I use a neurodivergent lens for safety, clarity, and protection—but the medicine itself benefits all Black bodies, not only neurodivergent ones.

Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background introducing the beginning of the fungal journey through fear, tears, and radical excavation. Neon pink heading and chartreuse text are accompanied by clay and glitch portraits connected by a pink mycelium illustration, visually expressing emotional release, nervous system healing, gut-centered transformation, and the uncovering of ancestral and colonial trauma through relationship with fungi.

Stylized pink and blue illustration of a branching mycelium network with rounded fungal nodes extending outward like an underground communication system.

The Beginning — Fear, Tears, and Radical Excavation

My first fungal sessions weren’t casual. Teaching Black Beauty School, traveling coast to coast, dosing in the car—truths too big for performative spaces.

Tears. Gut-level fear. Nervous system fluttering. Extended crying. Deep release.

The plant didn’t create fear. It revealed colonial residue, loops of grooming, cycles of harm, ancestral and systemic imprinting. Each session offered reset and recalibration, slowly showing me that activation ≠ trauma.

Clay figure seated on the ground with hands covering their eyes as translucent tears stream between their fingers. Small mushrooms emerge from their hair, shoulders, feet, and legs while electric blue lines glow across the clay body.

Duotone glitch rendering of the same seated clay figure in blue, violet, and coral tones with hands covering their eyes, streaming tears, glowing body fissures, and mushrooms emerging from the body.

Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background exploring the gut as the first site of fungal activation and healing. Neon green text and retro pixel typography are paired with clay and glitch portraits of a figure drinking from a cup, connected by a winding chain of glowing spores that visually represents nourishment, digestion, internal communication, and the release of long-held patterns through relationship with fungi.

Gut First — Appendix Surgery as Final Seed Release

The gut was the first site of activation. Fungi’s work appeared through intense bowel responses, visceral nervous system sensations, and deep somatic awareness.

By summer 2025, I underwent emergency appendix surgery. This wasn’t just medical—it was symbolic. The appendix removal represented the final seed of conical harm and grooming leaving my body. Fungi had been preparing me, communicating internally, showing where old patterns needed release.

Along the way, I found relief with herbal and dietary supports:

heartburn pills when necessary
teas of nettle, marshmallow root, and slippery elm to support gut communication

Certain foods I had previously eaten became incompatible. That dissonance made no sense initially, but my body was rewriting its relationship with digestion, nourishment, and flow.

By the time my appendix came out, blood work revealed markers, but they were overlooked by the medical system—a reminder of the systemic ways Black bodies are constrained and surveilled in Western medicine.

Clay figure with closed eyes lifting a handmade cup to their mouth with both hands. Small mushrooms emerge from their hair, shoulders, and waist while electric blue lines glow across the clay body, suggesting internal energy, nourishment, and embodied healing.

Red and deep blue duotone glitch rendering of the same clay figure drinking from a cup, emphasizing themes of ritual, medicine, nourishment, and altered perception through bold digital color separation.

Flowing chain of glowing orange spores connected in a winding path against a black background, varying in size to suggest movement, communication, dispersal, and fungal connection.

Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background exploring early somatic healing through breath, stretching, movement, and music. Neon green text and retro pixel typography are paired with clay and glitch portraits of a figure raising both arms in celebration, while a flowing chain of glowing magenta spores reinforces themes of nervous system regulation, embodied awareness, internal communication, and joyful transformation through relationship with fungi.

Breath, Stretch, & Music — Early Somatic Healing

Before visuals, before fascia, before full network expansion, I started in the body:

Breath Work
- I was holding, skipping, and shortening breaths.
- Six months to a year of practice taught full inhales and exhales, using breath as a tool for nervous system regulation.
Stretch & Movement
- Muscular tension and stored trauma surfaced with fungi.
- Intentional stretching allowed fascia to release, align, and activate, echoing the plant’s internal communication.
Music
- Psychedelic Black music playlists became somatic anchors.
- I played music on a JBL speaker, placing it on areas of tension to release pain through vibration, connecting body, nervous system, and ancestral memory.

This triad—breath, movement, music—was the first real doorway into embodied healing with fungi.

Clay figure standing in an open, celebratory posture with both arms raised and one foot stepping forward. Mushrooms emerge from the hair, shoulders, waist, and ankles while electric blue pathways glow across the clay body, expressing movement, somatic healing, joy, and embodied transformation.

Pink and violet glitch rendering of the same clay figure with raised arms, using layered digital textures and color separation to emphasize vitality, movement, liberation, and altered perception through fungal relationship.

Winding chain of glowing magenta spores connected in a flowing line against a black background. The spores gather into a dense central cluster before dispersing again, symbolizing growth, communication, expansion, and fungal networks moving through the body.

Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background exploring fascia as the connective layer through which fungi communicate with the body. Neon green text and retro pixel typography describe fascia’s role in storing tension, memory, lineage, and trauma, while overlapping purple and green connective networks visualize fungal mycelium intertwined with the body’s connective tissue. The composition emphasizes communication, nervous system recalibration, somatic release, and ancestral healing through interconnected living networks.

Fascia — The Layer Fungi Mirrors

Fascia, the body’s connective web, holds tension, memory, trauma, and lineage. Fungi illuminates and activates fascia:

highlights trapped energy
amplifies subtle bodily signals
creates a highway for nervous system recalibration

When paired with breath and music, fascia becomes a conduit for ancestral and somatic liberation, letting the body release patterns carried across generations.

Stylized purple connective network resembling intertwined fascia and fungal mycelium. Fine branching strands weave into a dense web, illustrating communication, tension, memory, and the interconnected pathways that carry signals throughout the body.

Stylized green connective network with branching, root-like strands spreading outward in every direction. The layered web evokes fascia as a living communication system, symbolizing embodied regulation, nervous system connection, and the movement of healing through interconnected tissue.

Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background exploring the importance of listening beyond diagnostic labels. Neon green text and retro pixel typography accompany a clay figure writing field notes beside its glitch counterpart, while a radiant blue signal expands behind them like a constellation or fungal communication network. Together, the composition emphasizes observation over certainty, embodied inquiry, interconnected systems, and healing that emerges through attentive relationship with fungi rather than rigid interpretation.

Circular burst spore print of deep blue dots radiating outward from a central point in evenly spaced lines. The expanding constellation evokes communication, resonance, listening, and the transmission of insight spreading through interconnected relationships.

Listening Beyond MTAs/MCAs

At first, I thought I was experiencing MCAS, MTAS, or histamine activation. Literature, social media, frameworks—everywhere.

But no.

My body was speaking its own language, one fungi helped me tune into.

Key lesson: true healing requires listening, not labeling. Social media, rigid frameworks, and reductive biomedical interpretations often trap Black bodies in cycles of collapse.

With fungi, I learned:

how tension and pain communicate
how fascia, gut, and nervous system interconnect
how to distinguish fear, activation, and ancestral communication

This practice expands healing beyond limitation, connecting body, lineage, and liberation.

Green and blue glitch rendering of the same clay figure writing in an open journal. Digital color shifts and layered textures transform the act of writing into a visual metaphor for translating bodily experience into knowledge through fungal relationship.

Clay figure seated in quiet concentration, writing in an open journal with a handmade brush. Mushrooms emerge from the hair and shoulders while electric blue pathways glow across the clay body, symbolizing observation, memory, integration, and the practice of recording embodied knowledge through fungi.

$Section presented on a black, star-filled risograph-inspired background examining how fungi amplifies visual perception and symbolic thinking. Neon green text and pixel-inspired typography accompany the cover of Fungi Ting, emphasizing that internal colors, geometric forms, fractals, and symbolic landscapes function as embodied maps rather than decorative imagery. The composition connects hyperphantasia, memory, lineage, and visual cognition, framing fungi as a collaborator in perception, pattern recognition, and inner reorganization rather than simple hallucination.$

Visual Mind — Hyperphantasia Amplified

I’ve always seen internal colors, shapes, and patterns. Fungi expands that visual field, revealing geometry, fractals, energy flows, and symbolic landscapes.

Visuals aren’t just aesthetic—they’re maps for internal reorganization, linking memory, emotion, and lineage.

Colorful cover artwork for Fungi Ting, a BespokeCurry publication exploring fungi through embodied observation and Black ecological knowledge. A central cluster of mushrooms emerges from an animal skull surrounded by radiating violet rays, layered with saturated psychedelic colors, collage elements, barcode graphics, and retro editorial typography. The composition blends field guide aesthetics, speculative biology, and experimental print design to present fungi as both scientific subject and cultural archive.

Section presented on a black, star-filled editorial background examining the distinction between colonial fear and plant activation. Pixel-inspired magenta typography and neon green text frame two mirrored versions of the standing clay figure—one rendered in natural tones and the other through psychedelic color inversion. The composition visualizes the process of learning to distinguish conditioned fear from genuine embodied activation, presenting fungi as a relational teacher that reveals inherited colonial patterns while supporting clarity, discernment, and liberation through sustained practice.

Colonial Fear vs Plant Activation

Old patterns and groomed identities can feel like fear. Fungi mirrors them, revealing where colonial conditioning still lives in the body.

Through relational practice, you learn to discern fear from activation, creating clarity and liberation.

Clay sculpture of a standing Black figure with braided hair, mushroom growth emerging around the ankles, and a wrapped waistcloth. The figure stands upright with relaxed arms and a grounded posture, emphasizing embodiment, stability, and presence. Rendered in earthy clay textures with layered red, green, and purple color separations that evoke risograph printing, the work explores transformation through stillness rather than spectacle.

A color-inverted variation of the same standing clay figure, using deep earth tones, violet shadows, and luminous edge separation to emphasize dual perception. The alternate palette suggests parallel ways of seeing the same body, reinforcing themes of internal activation, mirrored consciousness, and ecological transformation.

Abstract clay fungal form with a rounded, perforated cap and elongated stem, rendered in glowing magenta and violet tones. The organic object resembles both a mushroom and a ceremonial tool, emphasizing fungi as a living instrument for perception, healing, and embodied practice.

Cluster of small mushrooms emerging together in bright pink and magenta hues. The tightly grouped forms suggest community, collective emergence, and relational growth rather than isolated transformation.

Liberation Praxis

Dense mound of rounded fungal forms resembling spores or clustered mushroom caps in luminous pink tones. The layered composition evokes multiplication, propagation, and the expansive networks through which fungal life spreads and communicates.

This medicine is personal and collective. It strengthens:

attention and perception
emotional intelligence
bodily sovereignty
ancestral connection

Consistent, relational engagement with fungi is liberation praxis, not trend-following or performative microdosing.

≋✺̱ On Microdosing Culture

≋✺̱ on micro dosing small dosing is where the relationship begins. not spectacle. not ego. not collapse. what you see pushed as “hero doses” is often rooted in dominance, not depth. too much, too fast, without the body’s consent without the nervous system’s capacity— that is not expansion. that is overwhelm.

the body needs time. time to listen. time to build. time to recognize what is changing. tolerance is not about chasing a higher dose. it is about building relationship so the body can sustain what is being opened. without that? you are not integrating. you are disrupting. and disruption, without grounding, does not lead to healing.

Stylized cluster of layered shelf mushrooms rendered in vivid blue and green with subtle red shadows. The overlapping caps evoke fungal colonies growing through shared structure, emphasizing mutual support, ecological connection, and the expansive networks beneath visible life.

≋✺̱ On Healing vs Optimization

≋✺̱ on healing vs optimization fungi is not here to make you more productive. not sharper for the system. not optimized for output. that is colonial thinking. healing is not performance. it is not efficiency. it is not biohacking your way into acceptability. healing slows you down. breaks patterns. asks you to feel what you have avoided.

sometimes it makes you less functional inside systems that were never built for you. that is not failure. that is realignment. if your only goal is to return to the same system but better at surviving it — you have missed the work.

Cluster of trumpet-shaped mushrooms with textured interiors rendered in luminous violet, lavender, and soft pink tones. The tightly grouped forms emphasize fungal communities, shared growth, and the interconnected relationships that develop beneath the visible surface of ecosystems.

≋✺̱ On Set & Setting vs Relationship

≋✺̱ on set & setting you’ve been told set your intention. fix your environment. control the outcome. but fungi does not move through control. you can prepare the space. you can tend to the body. but what actually matters is the relationship you have built over time. relationship with the plant. relationship with your body.

relationship with what surfaces. without that, set and setting becomes performance. a curated container that still cannot hold what emerges. relationship is what allows you to stay. to listen. to not run when the body begins to speak.

Pair of rounded, cup-shaped fungi in bright magenta and lavender hues surrounded by small mushroom forms. Throughout the animation, a glowing liquid slowly overflows and drips from the cups, creating a continuous cycle of release that evokes nourishment, exchange, and the movement of resources through fungal networks.

≋✺̱ on misuse and the dominant culture

≋✺̱ on misuse this plant is being extended into dominant culture without accountability. used to refine hierarchy. to deepen control. to polish performance rooted in anti-blackness. that is not healing. that is extraction.

Stylized illustration of a branching magenta mycelium network with rounded nodes and radiating fungal threads. The graphic serves as a visual symbol of underground connection, reciprocity, and the unseen relationships that sustain living ecosystems.

≋✺̱ on recreational use

≋✺̱ on recreational use fungi is being flattened into experience. a moment. a feeling. a temporary shift that asks nothing of the body once it passes. this is where the dishonesty lives. fungi is not an escape. you do not step in and return unchanged. without integration, without relationship, without a shift in how you move—it is not healing. it is interruption. and interruption, repeated, becomes distortion.

Stylized illustration of a branching magenta mycelium network spreading horizontally across the page. The interconnected threads and nodes symbolize underground communication, reciprocity, and the living relationships that support fungal ecosystems.

≋✺̱ on bad trips

≋✺̱ on “bad trips” there is no such thing as a bad trip. there is only resistance. what is often called “bad” is the moment the mind loses control and the body begins to surface what has been avoided. discomfort is not failure. looping is not failure. fear is not failure. it is entry.

this does not mean every strain aligns with your body. mismatch exists. capacity exists. and sometimes the body will say no. that is also information. but even then, the experience is not meaningless. it is communication. the question is not how to avoid it. the question is whether you can stay long enough to understand what is being revealed.

Stylized illustration of a branching green mycelium network with rounded nodes extending across the page. The interconnected threads evoke underground communication, reciprocity, and the living relationships that sustain fungal ecosystems.

If You Are New Here

This is serious medicine.
The body, mind, gut, and fascia are communicating continuously.
Observe: body sensations, breath, tension, emotional responses.
Reflect. Journal. Move. Listen.

Boundaries: Judgment, casual commentary, or performative critique has no place here. This is relational practice, not entertainment.

Closing section presented on a star-speckled, risograph-inspired background with bright neon typography. Two columns provide a reflective Field Notes prompt encouraging readers to observe bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, and emerging patterns alongside a preview of future topics that expand the practice into strain-specific experiences, visual mapping, cannabis and fungi relationships, somatic practice, and advanced network exploration. The layout frames the page as the beginning of an ongoing learning journey rather than a complete guide.

Field Notes Prompt

Body: gut sensations, breathing, muscle tension or release

Mind: pattern recognition, memory surfacing, symbolic thinking

Emotion: grief, joy, curiosity, relief

Next Steps

Future pages (paywalled) will dive deeper into:

strain-specific experiences
visual and gut-brain mapping
cannabis + fungi foundations
somatic liberation practice
advanced network expansion

This page is the foundation, open to all, showing the waters before you swim.