Will Brandenburg felt like he’d gotten famous for all the wrong reasons.
“I checked all the boxes; wife, kids, house, worldwide renown—”
Will told me of his career as a skier and coach. His natural acumen for slalom, a high-stakes ski discipline involving tight turns and decisive pivots, had taken Will from his hometown in Washington, Walla Walla, to multiple World Championships and, eventually, the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
“—but I was in the darkest place ever.”
Will contextualized his infamy around a single anecdote. He’d been leered at while grocery shopping in Sun Valley, Idaho, where he’d moved after his pro career ended to take a coaching role as Alpine Program Director. Will was something of a local celebrity. When one of his young skiers took her own life in December 2024, the whole town looked Will’s way.
“It all just got to be too much,” he continued. “I was looking for a place to go.”
Will ended up going to Beckley.
Psychedelics aren’t a frontline treatment for mental health issues. While emerging research on substances like psilocybin shows promise, clinical access to therapies involving psychedelics generally requires the patient to have tried several traditional interventions first.
Will had known he was in peril. His student’s passing had awakened repressed traumas from his past, including the deaths of one of his former teammates years prior and, more recently, a work colleague. His agony had become overwhelming. In February 2026, Will petitioned his supervisor for a leave of absence.
“I didn’t understand trauma and the ways in which it lives in your body,” Brandenburg explained to me. During his time away from work, Will met with various mental health professionals, including a psychologist who encouraged him to try EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. Nothing moved the needle.
A circumstantial interest in ayahuasca prompted Will to look beyond both conventional mental health treatments and local therapists. “I needed somewhere to go,” he recalled, having felt suffocated by the atmosphere in Sun Valley.
His search for a psychedelic retreat program was not fruitful - at least not initially. Some retreats cited truly exorbitant costs; $50,000 to $150,000 for a month’s stay. Others danced around the details of their protocol. Beckley Retreats stood out: “The other programs weren’t as detailed or professional. So I gave Beckley a call, and they broke everything down for me, and then said, ‘I think we can help you.’”
Will was heartened, but it wasn’t until he had his first cohort call - a group intake virtual meeting where prospective attendees make introductions and receive an overview of Beckley’s itinerary - that he realized he “wasn’t crazy. None of these other people are, they’re just looking for guidance too.”
Beckley’s intake process is thorough but seamless. Retreat attendees undergo medical screening, background checks on personal and family health history, and outline specific treatment goals in advance.
“It was an unbelievably peaceful space,” Will recalled of his arrival to the enclave. He’d had to give up his cell phone and couldn’t contact his wife, Shannon, who was more than a little skeptical.
“You’re going on a trip to do mushrooms?” He recalled her asking.
“It’s medicine,” he responded.
I was surprised by the resolve in his voice, so I asked Will if he had gotten cold feet at any point in his stay. “During the middle of the first psilocybin ceremony,” Will answered frankly.
“It was really dark for me. I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing? Everyone was right. I left a perfect job. I’m going to lose my wife, and for this?’ I took off my eye mask in the middle of the ceremony and asked the facilitator, ‘Can I go nature pee?’ It’s what my kids say when they’re outside and need to go.”
The facilitator, Kosu Boudreau, a trauma-informed psychotherapist, escorted Will to the restroom. After he’d relieved himself, they sat and talked. Will had expected a big breakthrough from the get-go.
“You’ve put a lot of pressure on this moment, Boudreau told Will. “Allow it to be what it is.”
Psilocybin is thought to work by disrupting the brain’s Default Mode Network - a collection of rigid neural pathways responsible for self-processing and internal coherence. When suppressed, new neural pathways and new real-world perspectives take shape.
The remainder of Will’s stay at Beckley was different. He recounted to me an anecdote of his second psilocybin ceremony, during which a guest seated adjacent was distracting him from his breath work - something he credits as his “biggest personal breakthrough.”
“Mandy, the facilitator for that session, could tell I was distracted. She said, ‘You can get up and move.’ That’s when the dam broke,” Will told me.
He’d spent years in a world where success and failure were easy to measure. Grief was messier, and he told me he didn’t know how to make sense of it.
“This is my journey, my moment. I need to stop judging myself every single second. I need to stop trying to be perfect,” he continued.
Will got up and moved.
Beckley doesn’t believe in letting psychedelics themselves do the heavy lifting. There’s a long and calibrated off-ramp procedure focused on what’s called integration. Integration describes post-trip practices and behaviors meant to help users organize their thoughts and feelings into tangible change.
Will took morning nature walks with his cohort, engaged in group therapy, and met with facilitators one-on-one to parse through his feelings. Some changes took hold through conscious effort. Will gravitated toward breath work, describing to me how repeated sessions helped calm his mind and pull him out of flight-or-flight mode.
Agency is a key aspect of effective integration, but some changes appeared seemingly spontaneously. During a conversation with Micah Tafari, a meditation specialist, Will decided he could do without alcohol. Will had wrestled with booze for years prior, but didn’t mention it when I asked about his motivations for seeking treatment at Beckley.
“I just didn’t get the intent behind it anymore,” he told me. He hasn’t drank since.
Returning to his “regular” life was not without its hardships, Will told me. He described the first two weeks back as feeling like he was clinging to the edge of a cliff. His job had decided to let him go while he was away. His relationship with Shannon was unsteady.
Psychedelics can create an “afterglow” - a period of short-lived effects characterized by changes in values, attitudes, and, often, increases in wellbeing. You might think of it as recently-tilled soil; the earth is shaken and disturbed, but seeds don’t plant themselves.
This so-called afterglow effect is an opportunity created by psychedelics, not a byproduct. It can last weeks for some users. From Shannon’s perspective, Will had fled his marital and familial duties and returned a different, but not yet wholly changed, man. Her skepticism lingered.
Were he not armed with the appropriate tools, Will fears he would’ve lost his grip on the proverbial cliff, and potentially his wife’s faith in their union, as well. He regularly meditates in the early hours of the morning, walks his dog as the sun comes up, and is an avid reader.
These practices are hallmarks of the integration curriculum at Beckley. They’ve helped him stay grounded and present in his marriage. Shannon has come to occasionally partake in Will’s rituals, too.
Will started to tell me he hadn’t missed a day of meditation since returning from his retreat. I was impressed, but not surprised - it’s the kind of habitual diligence innate to an elite athlete.
Then he stopped himself. “Excuse me, I just lied,” he said. He had missed a day here and there. The lingering pressure Will put on himself to perform perfectly, something he attributed to the ranking-based, pass-fail nature of his ski career, still lingered.
He’s working on it. “I’m trying to be intentional with my words,” he told me.
I asked him if he’d have stopped, caught, and corrected himself, alleviating that imposed pressure, if he had never spent time at Beckley. He said no.
“All they give you are tools,” Will told me. “It’s up to you to use them to live your life the way you want to see it lived.”