Ayana Iyi Is a Living Legend in Detroit’s Psychedelic Scene

While most may think of Berkeley or upstate New York when recalling the first psychedelic wave, Cleveland and Detroit appear to be home to the most rooted mushroom culture in America. At the center of this culture is a handful of practitioners, who have been quietly serving their communities for decades—charting their own path with high-dose journeys, 10 grams or more, and incorporating rituals from their own lineages. Two of these practitioners were Kai Wingo—also a mushroom farmer and beloved amongst East Cleveland’s local food community—and Baba Kilindi Iyi—a controversial, and also beloved, figure known for doing journeys of 30 to 50 grams (more than 10 times what’s considered “a high dose”) and bringing back insights to his devotees.

Almost a decade has passed—and Kai and Kilindi are both gone. Kai passed away at the tail end of a 40-day fast. Kilindi got Covid after sitting with his sick mother in the hospital. He went home and jumped on a trampoline—and soon was gone. But nobody, including myself,  likes to say he died of Covid.  He was exhausted and rail thin by then, hanging on by a thread both mentally and physically by the time he hit that trampoline.

During his passing, Kilindi was surrounded by many powerful women who have carried his teachings into the world along with their own. Ayana Iyi—his first wife and a legend in her own right within Detroit’s psychedelic community—is holding down the movement where it began.  

A grandmother, Ayana continues to host gatherings for women in psychedelics, including the Women and Entheogen conference in Cleveland, first hosted by Kai Wingo. Kai invited me to speak and I accepted, following the Facebook group to its source to find a community of high dose mushroom practitioners, inspired by the charismatic Kilindi. Most psychedelic explorers I have come to know leave their families and job lives at least temporarily, to venture into a world of psychedelic otherness—think Burning Man or a Peruvian Aya Retreat. Here, was a community that developed a tradition of doing mushrooms together at home—mothers, fathers, brothers, grandmothers, teenagers. 

I met Ayana at Kai’s conference. Wearing robes and a head wrap, she spoke about seven grams being the best dose for exploring sexuality. Itching for a reason to talk to her, I approached her and asked if Kilindi ever needed someone to transcribe his lectures. “You know he’s got three wives, right?” Ayana said, getting that out of the way in case it freaked me out. 

“How is that?” I asked.

“It’s hard sometimes.”  

On the surface, Ayana’s got Church lady vibes, making sure all is taken care of,  but beyond the traditional garb and muffin trays, she is an experienced psychedelic witch who hosts gatherings with women in the woods and holds down deep intentions through ritual for her community both in this world and other realms. This year, she invited me on a whim to the conference again, after seeing a reel where I was dressed as a rabbit on Facebook. She didn’t know I’d written about Kai and her community in my book, The Wild Kindness. 

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In her home, me and my lady slept in a bedroom she prepared for us above the legendary Palantir crystal—a stone Kilindi Iyi procured as a “link-up technology.” (My understanding is that while on a journey if you tune into the stone, you are connected to Kilindi and others and granted access to hidden dimensions.) Her home is filled with altars —figurines, family pictures, photos of women from her rainwater gathering ceremonies. In the morning, we helped her load up the car with flowers and snacks. She was unflustered and intentional. Her stature as an elder triggered just a little bit of fear in me, but she was warm and direct, funny. At a time when a growing number of people in their twenties and thirties—working outside the scientific and medical paradigms—are working to carve out a space for themselves within the psychedelic movement, she serves as a pillar and a pioneer, a reminder amongst those who know that this work is not new. 

DoubleBlind: I want to know about Detroit. I can’t imagine your practices coming out of nowhere. Is there any lineage that is known or that you feel in your bones?  

AI: Absolutely not, no. I just started standing in my truth and didn’t give a shit about what people thought. My own beloved mother kicked me to the curb when she realized what I was doing: the terrifying mushrooms, the witchcraft, a polygamous relationship, and just the whole not dealing with religion. She told me, ‘I don’t want you in my home and in my world ever again until you plead the blood of Jesus.’ I was like, ‘lady, I don’t even know what that means.’ On her dying bed, when she opened her eyes two months before she passed, she sat up and said, ‘you know more about this religious stuff than I do, you know?’

What was your first time eating mushrooms like?

Baba Kilindi gave me five grams and said ‘here, eat this.’  I said, ‘well, what is it?’  He said, ‘it’s mushrooms. Where’s the pizza?’ I mean, he didn’t tell me anything about anything.  Just ‘here, eat this.’ And of course, well, you’re my man, and I trust you, so I’m gonna eat the mushrooms. I was not prepared for that journey at all because I had no prior information about what was gonna happen.  I can honestly say that it totally changed the trajectory of my life.

That’s a powerful statement. In what way? 

Just knowing that so much more to life was to be had instead of the American dream. Buy a house, the husband, car, two and a half kids, a dog, maybe a cat. Go to work, come home. Do it all over again, every day. Two weeks out of the year, you get a vacation.  There’s so, so, so much more to life than what we were experiencing. I wanted that type of life. I wanted that feeling of being out there, unhinged, and not connected to the mainframe.  

That’s definitely the feeling I got when I met everyone. All of you were exemplifying a whole other way to be a person, that with each other and the mushrooms, you could make a whole other world. 

That’s the walk that Baba Kilindi had always been on. He wasn’t programmed by the programs that are put in place for us to be programmed by.

How often did you journey?

About five or six journeys per year for the next 16 years. And then it just kind of eased up.

I’ve found that those of us who stick with it get employed by the mushrooms. We develop special talents. Do you have something like that going on?

They put me in the place of having to deal with those that were dying or already dead. I was chosen to do this work. Whether it’s because I’m a Scorpio or because I’m a sister of Oya.

Oya, the Santeria goddess of storm, lightning, and death who guards the cemetery gates?

Yes. I needed to help the dying and recognize those who are in the process of dying.  My mother had five sisters.  I was able to tell her when each and every one of them was preparing for their transition. She thought I was a demon spawn, because only God is supposed to know that, right? Now, mind you, I don’t have a religion. So when I say my religion, it’s just what it is—the moon, the stars, the water, the Earth, the air. If I have to worship something, then that is what it would be. The trees, they talk to me. I can hear the language of the water. I sometimes can hear and understand the language of the birds those early mornings when they’re out there talking and chattering and whatnot. If you get really still and go into that place and become one with the sound, you can actually kind of understand what the birds are saying out there. I gave my soul over to nature, and, yes, she opened up and allowed her gifts to resonate within me.

READ: Why People on a Psychedelic Path Should Embrace Interpersonal Conflict

What inspired you to organize another Women and Entheogen Conference?

My granddaughter was sitting on the floor coloring and she looked up and said, ‘You know, Baba is still teaching, right?’ I said, ‘How do you know that?’ And she said, ‘Well, he whispers in everybody’s ear.’  

He whispered something to her and she passed it on to me and she went back to what she was doing. Kilindi basically said, ‘I need you to put this out there, because Kai did her work and she wasn’t around long enough to receive her flowers. She was willing to sacrifice much to do the things that she did in such a short time, she needs to be honored, and people needed to know her name.’  

Do you often feel Kai’s energy?

No, I did not prior to this, but I did feel her at the conference, especially when her daughter spoke.

What was your relationship with Kai at the time of her conference?

You know, I’m gonna tell you, yes, she was my co-wife, but I wasn’t a fan of hers. She wasn’t a fan of mine. We weren’t that close, right? But Kilindi was all over doing a conference in honor of her. I was honored to do it.

Do you feel you have stepped into a place of mastery with the mushrooms?  

What exactly do you mean when you say mastery? 

You’re a woman who knows what she’s doing.   

It’s a knowing. I don’t doubt, I don’t second guess. 

Was there a point when you realized you were doing really deep work? 

Yes, when I stopped taking the mushrooms for other people who were afraid to do it themselves. 

I can really relate to being on the job for other people at the beginning.   

It was when I did them on my own and I found I had been a soul who had traveled to many alien terrains. But, these alien terrains were familiar to me. I’ve had fights with wind animals in the sky. And once, we were in the sky fighting. And when we hit the land, we turned into land animals.  When I got tired of this particular battle that I was in with this female animal, I just bit her head off. It was like, I’m done. I’ma bite her head off. 

You said you were a warrior so it makes sense you would fight it out in the journey. 

That next morning, I threw something up that just wasn’t right. Oh, it just wasn’t right, baby. And I was like, ‘what is this? What did I just bring up out of me?’ I’ve been a warrior for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years.

After Kilindi passed, I did a high dose of 27 grams with Syrian Rue. I felt like I linked in with all of you. I live in the high desert. I stood on a hill and saw these energies dancing and there was a big spaceship. I got the idea somewhere that everyone does high doses in a group and has interconnected visions. Am I correct about this?  

Yes. The way I found out about the link up is I would take women out into the woods once every two years. We call ourselves Sisters of the Sacred Black. It’s not about the darkness of the skin, but the triple black darkness of the womb. We only take three grams, right? We were in nature, though, and we linked up through our wombs. The womb can be a home or a tomb, see?

I felt that, like my womb is not just my own, but something shared. 

I think that a lot of women are walking around dead inside, because they are holding on to this anger and resentment and hurt and pain and confusion, not just from the men, but from parents and relationships, period, that we store a lot of it in our womb. That’s when I realized that my work was to help women stand in their power. And that power simply is love of self, a total acceptance of self.  

I watched a talk you gave a while back on mushrooms and scrying with mirrors.  It stood out as one of the few psychedelic lectures that offered a glimpse into the possibilities of what can be done in psychedelic space. On the conference scene, real talk of shamanism and witchcraft is glaringly absent. As a practitioner, I don’t need to hear about how mushrooms can help me, I want to know what kind of stuff I can do while in there.  What other kinds of shamanic talents have emerged from your journeys?

So I do readings for people, right? I use my cauldron, in particular, like if I need to see something. I was working with this woman who had a nine-year-old daughter and I saw that the father was grooming her to be sexually abused so I scried with the cauldron.  I took three grams [of mushrooms], and I was drawn to my cauldron, and I filled it with rainwater. And the moon was full, and I allowed the moonlight to hit that rainwater while I was on this three to give me the images that I was needing, to confirm that this man was doing what I believe he was preparing to do. The water got muddy and thick,  it almost had an odor to it. I’m getting the chills now thinking about that energy. But that was my answer. I didn’t see him in the water touching the girl, or, no, shit like that. It was how that water changed and the smell that emitted from it. It let me know that a vile deed was happening, or was going to happen. So the mother filed for complete custody of the baby. She’s fine. It was shown that he was on that path, you know.

The energy of the mushrooms in my home space is also very much in service to the safety of women and girls. 

It’s part of the prayer with the mushrooms, with women, I think. I’m a part of what’s happening to the women out here at the hands of the so called powers that be, or men that just feel like women are to be shitted on. I’m into helping women be all that they can be, more than human, be the goddesses that we were put here to be.

You’ve advised women to work with menstrual blood, to put menstrual blood in their hair, to put menstrual clots in the freezer and make a powder out of it.

I have testimonies from the women who listen and do the things that I offer.

I would absolutely do what you say. 

I guess that’s the ultimate form of respect, isn’t it?  I’ve been elevated in my community with respect and honor.

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