It came to him on a psilocybin mushroom journey. Shaman Shu was told that he would open a church, to spread the gospel of healing in Detroit. He had never been to Bushnell Congregational Church on the city’s west side before purchasing it. But as he explored the chapels and community rooms of the 60,000-square-foot campus, he came to understand it was meant to be.
Shu leads us down a long hallway inside the empty church to a room with a picture of revered Detroit psilocybin teacher Kilindi Iyi on the wall. Pictures of an anthropomorphic mushroom and his wife Ayana Iyi riding a boat on a purple sea, a mountain of crystals in the background, are taped below it. Kilindi and Ayana are the hosts of the Detroit Psychedelic Conference, with Ayana leading the charge after Kilindi’s death in 2020.
“This building called me, in the spiritual realm, to it,” Shu says, pointing to the photos. He says he did not know Kilindi personally but was familiar with his work. “This was in this building before I actually had access to it. I show up in here and I’m like, wait a minute, there’s a mushroom that’s here.”
Shu is setting up his Soul Tribes International ministry inside the long-vacant complex at 15000 Southfield Rd. Here, psilocybin mushrooms are the congregation’s holy sacrament — along with other naturally occurring “entheogenic” or psychoactive fungi and plants.
“Our whole ministry is based upon healing,” he says. “So whether you’re Muslim or Christian, or Buddhist, whatever you believe, we believe in healing. This ministry is all about, I like to call it, the ‘Michael Jackson’ — seeing yourself and starting with the man, or woman, in the mirror.”
Shu purchased the church three months ago and has big plans to host psilocybin, ayahuasca, and iboga ceremonies on its grounds. He also wants it to be a retreat center for yoga, meditation, and breathwork, with saunas and cold rooms onsite. It’s the first psychedelic church of its kind in Michigan and, perhaps, the largest in the country.
When we’re introduced to Shaman Shu via email, we imagine a Peruvian healer dressed in a traditional chullo hat and poncho, but when we arrive, we’re greeted by a born and raised Detroiter wearing a baseball cap with “Soul Tribes” written across the front. He wears a necklace of gemstones in rainbow colors for the seven chakras, mirroring the “Chakras Knowledge” diagrams hanging in the building’s mushroom dispensary — or “sacrament center,” he corrects us gently.
Shu intends for the church to be fully operational by November, but Soul Tribe’s sacrament center — where they sell dried psilocybin, capsules, gummies, and, eventually, mushroom-infused chocolate made in-house — opened over Labor Day weekend. All the products are from mushrooms Shu grows himself.
Tapestries depicting Egyptian deities and a slug crawling through a field of mushrooms against a starry sky cover the walls. Shu hands us a packet of magic mushroom gummies branded “Wakanda Blue,” with a cartoon of the superhero character Black Panther on it. A stack of fliers for the shop reads, “WE GOT SHROOMS! Join the Tribe.”
The church is legally protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to sell mushrooms and host psilocybin ceremonies.
“We have a right to our sacrament. We have a right to our belief system,” Shu says. “We’re a small indigenous belief system that believes we can heal the world with these techniques and our plants. You become a member of our church, just like you would any church, temple, or mosque. We’re no different.”
Becoming a member of Soul Tribes gives people access to all of the classes, retreats, and ceremonies Shu is planning to host there.
Shu was also behind Proposal E which Detroit voters approved in 2021 and decriminalized entheogenic fungi and plants like psilocybin, DMT, and ayahuasca. The organization Decriminalize Nature Detroit supported the effort.
“It really will be a healing center. It’s not just about the mushroom. I call it the fivefold ministry — we’ll teach fire, earth, air, water, space... We’ll teach people breathwork, how to sit with a candle and meditate, and take your mind to another place.”
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Cities like Ann Arbor, Ferndale, and Hazel Park have also decriminalized entheogens in recent years. Indigenous cultures have used these plants in ceremony to connect with the spirit realm as far back as 1,500 BCE, but psychedelics have seen a major boost in popularity in the last few years as people begin to understand their reported mental health benefits. A psilocybin journey can range from feelings of euphoria, the horrific reliving of past trauma, visual hallucinations, and even the sensation of meeting “god.”
Shu says ayahuasca told him to write Proposal E during his first experience with the medicine on a retreat in Costa Rica two years ago.
“I wrote the actual legislation based upon what the ancestors told me to do,” he says. “I was sitting in Costa Rica and I was like, ‘What? You want me to do, what?’ I never expected that… I hired a lawyer, hired a lobbyist. I didn’t raise any capital. I did it all myself on these shoulders because I wanted the people to have liberation. Everybody can’t afford to go to Costa Rica. I want people to have access to it in urban areas.”
Shu came back from the ayahuasca ceremony, determined to follow what his spirit guides told him, but he only had two weeks to collect enough signatures to get Proposal E on the ballot, which he did. He says the Detroit City Council didn’t believe that his signatures were legitimate and he had to threaten to sue the city before they allowed it. Detroiters voted to pass it by 61% percent.
In 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused him, along with two other business associates, of running a misleading crowdfunding campaign for a cannabis real estate company, though those charges were eventually dismissed. In 2017, Shu pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor violations of the Michigan Credit Services Protection Act, and on behalf of his business, to two felony counts of obtaining money by false pretense, for improperly taking upfront fees for mortgage audit services. The convictions were recently expunged.
“Thank God for America that we live in a system where we get second chances, and I used my second chance to turn around and heal our community,” he says about his past. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Looking back, Shu says he has been doing shamanic work his whole life. He’s a reiki master and acupuncturist who has studied breathwork and meditation extensively. He and his wife have taken over 150 people on psilocybin journeys in Detroit completely free of charge, at an undisclosed location.
Now that using entheogens as mental health therapy isn’t as underground, he wants to “bring Costa Rica to Detroit” through the church. The ceremonies won’t be free anymore, but he plans to charge around $750, which is cheap compared to psychedelic healing centers in Colorado and Oregon that charge up to $4,000.
“We’ve taken murderers through the process,” he says about the ceremonies. “We’ve taken drug addicts through this process. We’ve taken CEOs of 100- and 200-million dollar companies through this process. We’ve taken vice presidents and executives of Fortune 100 companies through this process, and they all come out in gratitude.”
He adds, “You have to look at yourself in the mirror and deal with the trauma that has been embedded. We say that all trauma is spiritual. If you go back and read the Koran and the Bible, the Upanishads, they didn’t call it trauma. They called it spirit… We’re spiritual beings rocking leather suits. Some people got light-skinned suits. Some people got dark-skinned suits, but we’re all spiritual beings in this dimension having an experience. What the sacred plant does is it gets you out of the suit and takes you to the spiritual realm.”
The man in the mirror
Shu’s trauma came in the form of homelessness and molestation at a young age. He was born into what he called a wealthy, “Huxtable family,” but when his younger brother drowned when Shu was eight, it ripped the family apart. His father moved to Texas, leaving him and his mother homeless.
“We were squatters,” Shu remembers. “We found a house on the Eastside that was boarded up and we moved in. All through that process, every day my mother would pray. I didn’t understand it. I was going through depression just trying to figure out our lives.”
Then, while his mother left him alone in the house, Shu was molested. Though he locked away that debilitating trauma as a child, his pain was manifesting in broken relationships and fits of anger.
“My molestation came from women. How close could I get to a woman when I was violated at a young age?” he says. “It wasn’t until COVID happened. The beginning of it made me go through a sort of rehab where I couldn’t get on a plane. I had to sit and see my ugly self during that time period. I had to face me, and let me see me in ways that I loved about me and in ways I didn’t. And I was like, ‘I need to fix this.’ And from that point, I went right to Costa Rica.”
Initially, he went on the trip to watch over his then-girlfriend with whom he had been in a tumultuous relationship. But he says the journey split his soul wide open, forcing him to overcome what had been holding him back since he was a boy. At the end of the experience, he and his now-wife got married on the spot and decided to become facilitators of psychedelic healing.
“I wasn’t even thinking about me, but [the ayahuasca] said ‘Gotcha. You’re supposed to be here,’” he says about that first experience. “I would have still been saying, ‘That’s for somebody else. I’m straight.’”
He clearly wasn’t “straight,” but can now look back on his life with gratitude, despite how painful his childhood was.
“I’m glad that it happened,” He says. “I went through being homeless and abandoned, and molestation because [now] I can talk to people that went through those things. I know what it’s like to be poor and I know what it’s like to be rich. I understand both aspects of the same coin… So there are no excuses. You can’t come to me and say, ‘Well, I’m poor, I can’t make it.’ Guess what, I know what that life looks like. You can’t tell me you’re rich and you’ve got it together.”
He adds, “My mentor was a guy who was rich. He was a billionaire and he committed suicide. And I realized one thing, I never asked him who he was,” he pauses. “All these lessons along the way brought me to where I’m at today. I am a Shaman. I am a healer. And I am a businessman.”
The experience in Costa Rica changed his life, but it was back in Detroit where he was guided to purchase the church. How he came to find Bushnell, specifically, is an unbelievable story and Shu repeatedly replies to our disbelief with “I can’t make this up.”
One night he was lying in his bed meditating after taking psilocybin to prepare for a ceremony that he and his wife were about to lead, when he says he was told by the medicine, ancestors, or whatever you want to call it, that he would get a church. Later, one of the ceremony’s participants told him, “Man, I saw you with a church. As a matter of fact, our collective friend’s father was a pastor of a church.”
Six weeks later, Shu led another journey where a second participant saw the church and told him it was Bushnell Congregational. After that, he sat with a friend, whose father happened to be a pastor at the church. He swears his friend never mentioned his father being a pastor, even though they’d known each other for 30 years. Then Shu asked about buying Bushnell.
“He said, ‘You know, I’m not really into psychedelics, but I wish my dad were here so we could see if he would be comfortable with it.’ But you just saw that picture [of Kilindi Iyi and the mushroom] in the corner,” Shu says. “It was there when his dad was pastor.”
The final culmination was when he realized one of the teachers who taught him breathing techniques to help him climb Mount Kilimanjaro with asthma in 2013 was on the board for Bushnell Congregational. They gave Shu their blessing.
“They connected the dots that it was me who wanted to do this work here, and I’ve been doing this work in the community for years,” he remembers. “[They said], ‘We’re going to work with you.’ That’s how it happened… This is an example of a true manifestation of something that I couldn’t write the script [for]. I couldn’t write the script that there’s a mushroom in the corner of the building over there.”
So far, Shu has installed new plumbing, electricity, and a roof on the 100-year-old church, which he says had essentially been abandoned since 2015. We walk past a gym full of clothing, shoes, and small appliances that he’s getting ready to offer to people in the community in need. On the second floor, Shu shows us countless rooms, sitting empty for years, that he plans to turn into temporary housing for veterans or anyone struggling with mental health.
The church will also host classes on meditation and spirituality.
“It really will be a healing center. It’s not just about the mushroom,” he says. “I call it the fivefold ministry — we’ll teach fire, earth, air, water, space… We’ll teach people breathwork, how to sit with a candle and meditate, and take your mind to another place. We’re bringing the best minds from all over the world to teach these courses.”
The entrance to Soul Tribes’ sacrament center is located at the north end of Bushnell Congregational Church next to the Valero gas station. Just look for the parking lot sign that says “thou shalt not park here.” You totally can park in the lot, just not in that spot.
This article was updated with additional information regarding Shu’s criminal record and to clarify Shu’s role in Proposal E.
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