We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Avital Kushilevich. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Avital below.

Avital, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

I believe that there is a lot of conditioning and pressure around who we should be vs doing what really feels good to us. I would change how and what students learn, giving the student more autonomy to explore their passions and find fulfilling work sooner than later. Also just the whole culture and mindset needs to shift. I felt a lot of pressure from my parents to go to college and do something that makes me good money – but at the age of 18, I had no idea what I really wanted to do. I would have preferred to take a year off and just go travel so I could learn about myself, learn independence, expand my view of life and consciousness. I ended up in college for 7 years because I switched my major 3 times and now do something that I didn’t really need college for, I learned everything on the job and real life experiences. I also think schools should teach financial literacy, nutrition, wellness and spirituality into the curriculum, because many people, like myself, didn’t learn that at home, which greatly impacted me negatively in those areas, and if people knew these things sooner and created the habits early on, we would have more healthier and happy humans.

Avital, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have 2 businesses currently – one in marketing/business consulting and one in plant medicine. I have been in marketing/business for about 15 years now. I started in this field by working in 2 large name companies, Massage Envy and Xerox for 10 years. In 2020, when covid happened, I had been feeling very burnt out and got sick. The stress and pressure really got to me and it felt very out of alignment to continue working there. For the previous 6 years, I had been on a holistic healing journey as well and with my health being impacted again, I decided I needed to make some changes. Really, through a meaningful coincidence, During this time, I ended up going back to school to study integrative health, quit corporate America (which was extremely soul sucking) and became a certified holistic health coach, where I got to help many people all over the world in their healing journey, while also doing a lot of deep healing myself. At this time I was also connected to a plant medicine woman who introduced me to mushrooms and helped me do a lot of deep spiritual healing, this was truly a game changer. I started incorporating this medicine in my client work and have now created my own microdosing brand and have a mission of helping millions of people heal all over the world. I also have started my own business, offering marketing and business consulting to others, as a way to share my knowledge, leverage my skills and help other like minded creative businesses share their gift with the world as well. I am very passionate about the work I do and am very intentional and purposeful with what I do, who I work with and ensure I stay in alignment with my souls purpose.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

When I was 12 years old, I started experimenting a lot of physical illness and ended up getting diagnosed with crowns disease. I spent over a decade struggling with it, was in and out of hospitals, had multiple surgeries, tried all the medications under the roof and nothing was really working, I kept getting worse. In 2016, I moved to Denver and my whole world was opened up. I learned about other methods of healing and started making big changes to my physical and mental health. I stopped all western medicine and went on a holistic healing journey. Through this, the biggest lesson (s) I learned or had to unlearn, is the conditioning from society and conventional medicine – their medicine is only treating the symptoms and not getting to the root cause and they are not here to heal us, they want to keep us sick because there is no money in making us healthy. Also, I learned that the body is capable of healing itself when given the right tools.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Ooo social media is my specialty – I believe that social media is one of the greatest tools out there and if you aren’t leveraging it yet, you are missing out. I built my social media by sharing my story, educating people and challenging current beliefs, by being different and controversial, because that is my whole vibe :p. For anyone just starting out on social media, focus on showing up authentically, consistently, and connecting with your audience, and the growth will come. It really doesn’t matter how many followers or likes you have, what’s more important is how you are connecting with those that are in your community, and treat it as a community, they are there for you, so share your gift with them.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: mushroommuze

Image Credits
Ariella Karim – my plant medicine woman and who I credit a lot of what I learned about plant medicine and in my own spiritual healing journey