How a Traditional Forest Mushroom Helped Me Think Clearly Again

His name is Keoni. He has lived three houses down from me for eleven years. We have talked over that fence about his dogs, his kids, the way the trade winds shifted before that last big rain. I know his face like I know the back of my hand. But one afternoon in November, I walked to the mailbox, he called out to me from his yard, and I could not come up with his name. I stood there smiling and nodding, my mind reaching for it the way you reach for a word in another language. It was right there. Then it was not.

I did not say anything about it to my wife. I went back inside, made myself a glass of water, and stood at the kitchen window for a long moment. Keoni. That was his name. It came back to me about twenty minutes later, while I was folding laundry. But by then I was not relieved so much as unsettled. Because it was not the first time something like that had happened. It had been the worst time, but not the first.

For about a year before that afternoon, I had been noticing a kind of fog around my thinking. Not forgetfulness exactly. More like a slowness. Like I used to be able to reach for a word or a face or a memory and it would come right away, the way you flick a light switch and the room goes bright. Now there was a delay. Sometimes a long one. My wife said I was just getting older and maybe I was. But I come from a tradition that says the body tells you things before the mind catches up. And my body was telling me something.

My grandson Koa is seventeen now. He has been interested in health and nutrition since he was about fourteen, reading things online, asking me about the old plant medicines I grew up with. One evening he came to the house with his phone and showed me something he had been researching about lion's mane mushroom. He knew I respected mushrooms from the Hawaiian tradition, and he had read that certain cultures in Asia had used lion's mane for mental clarity for hundreds of years. He was not trying to sell me anything. He just said, quietly, that it might be worth looking into.

In la'au lapa'au, we never looked for a single miracle. We looked for a plant that could support what the body was already trying to do. That is a different kind of medicine.

I spent a few days thinking about it. I am not someone who reaches for a supplement quickly. I have seen too many things come and go, too many claims that went nowhere. But there was something about the mushroom that felt familiar in a way I could not quite explain. In the forest, things grow in the dark and the damp and they work quietly. That is how the best medicine often works. Not with noise, but with patience.

Koa ordered me the Real Mushrooms Lion's Mane capsules. The reason he chose that particular brand was that a lot of lion's mane products on the market use the mycelium grown on grain, which means you are mostly getting grain powder in a capsule and not much actual mushroom. Real Mushrooms uses the fruiting body, the actual mushroom, and they test for beta-glucan content, which is the compound that researchers have been studying for cognitive support. He printed out the details for me. I read them twice.

I started taking two capsules every morning with my first cup of tea. I did not tell many people. I did not keep a journal or a chart. I just paid attention, the way my tutu taught me to pay attention to what the plants were doing after a rain. You do not stare at them. You check in every few days and notice what changed.

After about three weeks, I noticed the delay was a little shorter. Not gone. But shorter. By the end of the second month, I was reaching for words and finding them more often on the first reach. The fog was not entirely lifted, but it was thinner. I felt more like myself in conversation, less like I was translating from somewhere else into the present moment. My wife noticed before I said anything to her. She said I seemed more like myself. That landed.

I want to be honest with you: I cannot tell you this is going to work for you the way it worked for me. I am seventy years old, I have my own history, and whatever was happening in my mind had its own causes I cannot fully name. What I can tell you is that this was not a dramatic transformation. It was quieter than that. It was the difference between a window with a film of salt on it and a window that has been wiped clean. The view was always there. I just could not quite see it.

What I Would Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you sat across from me right now with a cup of tea and you told me your mind had been feeling slow, that words were taking longer to come, that you had been standing in a room not quite knowing why you walked in there, I would not tell you to panic. I would tell you what my tutu told me about the plants in her garden: that some things work on the body like the tide works on the shore. Not all at once. Not with a crash. But over time, steadily, something shifts. Lion's mane is that kind of medicine for me. It is worth three months of honest attention. Give it that, and then decide.