Origin Story
Throughout my childhood I was struggling with symptoms like severe stomach pains when I ate, floaters in my visual field, attention/hyperactivity issues, canker sores in my mouth, and random joint pain. My mom regularly took me to doctors and specialists to help manage the symptoms I was experiencing. We had no idea why I had to deal with these issues, I just knew both of my parents experienced autoimmune syndromes as well. Doctors never asked my diet or lifestyle, they just gave me medications I was expected to take indefinitely.
It wasn’t until I was 17 years old that I was led by the cosmic hand down the rabbit hole of self healing. It was also around this time that I had begun to experiment with meditation, yoga, nutrition, and fitness. One morning I woke up from my bed to what appeared to be an entire cloud in my room. I wiped my eyes thinking I was just sleepy, but the cloud remained. It was at that moment that I realized something was wrong. What had appeared to be a cloud in the room was actually a cloud of inflammation leaking out from small blood vessels in my eyes. Terrifyingly that morning I still tried to drive to school by looking down the yellow line on the road by my car all the way to school (a couple mile drive).
For years thereafter we visited specialists and doctors around the country in search of a diagnosis that was more than the diagnosis of exclusion which did not help us understand anything about the root cause. I began going to see a uveitis specialist every month or two to have my ocular inflammation checked with extensive tests that included numbing my eyes and taking photographs of my retinas with high powered microscopic cameras after injecting me with florescent dyes.
Eventually, after requiring me to take prednisone (an anti-inflammatory steroid taken at up to 80mg daily) and methotrexate (a form of chemotherapy injected weekly)for years. The doctors began to have concerns about the long term damage my body would develop from such high doses over years so they began to explore other treatments. This led them to a biologic gene-therapy called Remicaid that suppressed my immune system when taken intravaniously for 3 hours every 6-8 weeks. At this point I was 19 years old and looking at a lifetime of going to this rheumatologist to have my body megadosed with these experimental drugs that were designed to shut down my body’s defense system because “it was hyperactive and auto-immune”.
“What happens if I stop contributing to the toxicity in my body by taking conscious control of the foods I give it to make my cells with?”
At that point I realized that the modern medical system could not truly help me. All they had was institutions like for-profit healthcare, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies profiting from selling me products and treatments that required endless and continual intervention. As a child of the Information Age I could not let this be my fate. I knew there was more I wasn’t being told.
I devoted myself to the question “What happens if I stop contributing to the toxicity in my body by taking conscious control of the foods I give it to make my cells with?” I began to delve into nutrition and ultimately became fascinated by evolutionary biology and anthropology as they seemed to hold the secrets to our true nature.
During the time while I was receiving transfusions I began to learn about ancestral diets and looking at the evolution of the human diet. It became starkly apparent that our diet had taken some major shifts in the past 10,000 years. Beginning with the agricultural revolution where our primary nutrient sources shifted from protein based to simple carbohydrate based with grains making large populations more sustainable in fixed locations. The next major shift was the shift in the past 50 or so years to a primarily processed food based diet.
These realizations were enough for me to start making drastically different choices with what I allowed to enter my body. At first, it was exciting and inspiring as I saw my choices directly change the expression of the symptoms I had always had as far back as I could remember. As time went on, however, I began to feel a dichotomy growing within me.
While on one hand I was carrying everything from my own spices to butter, oils, and other ingredients everywhere I went to keep from needing processed food-like-poison and guarantee a consistent supply of super foods to my body. Still on the other hand, I was struggling to communicate the insights I was having to my loved ones about our bodies ability to heal if we can just allow them the chance.
My morning routine at the time was to meditate, exercise, and come home to make a high potency coffee drink to start my day. It was while I was preparing this drink every morning, where I would pull out my medicine bag of jars and proceed to sprinkle a bit of this, a dash of that, depending on what my body was feeling that day. Overtime, I noticed that my intuitive daily dance through the jars of magic powders was consisting of the same 12 spices, mushrooms, and herbs.
Whenever I showed up to jiu-jitsu, work, yoga, or the studio you could count on me coming in with a jar of some concoction or what I called my “magic potion”. My friends and family would ask to try it and I loved making them my magic drink. Eventually I had friends and family asking me to make them some of the stuff I put in my coffee.
Around this time I started experimenting with other applications for the blend. I started coating my home roasted nuts with the chocolatey dust. Making bancakes with it, a pancake with just 2 eggs and a banana as the base instead of flour. As the number of uses grew, so did my realization that I had struck the gold at the end of the rainbow.
With the help of some mycological guidance a vision came to me about what this blend of humble plants and mushrooms could do for the people in my community and in my human family. WZRD Pow was born to make Nature’s most trusted tools accessible to anybody in any part of their health journey in a convenient easy to apply way. The Travel Tube’s cap is a single 1/2 tsp serving ready to make its way into your coffee, tea, sweet potato casserole or anything else you want a chocolatey dash on.
