Keke Palmer Says Taking Mushrooms Helped Her 'Love' Herself

The actress revealed her experiences on the latest episode of her podcast, 'Baby, This Is Keke Palmer.'

Keke Palmer is getting candid about her experience taking mushrooms. On the latest episode of her podcast, Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, the actress opened up about her past mushroom trips, and how they changed her life and even helped her with self-love.

"It really made me love myself so much. And I remember looking in the mirror and being like, ‘You are absolutely gorgeous,'" the 29-year-old new mom shared. "I remember it was to the point where I was like yo girl, you gotta calm down because I was looking at myself like, 'Damn, I never really knew that you were this beautiful.'"

"I was looking at myself like, 'You are gorgeous. You are beautiful, and you are profound. You are gonna continue to survive and thrive and keep telling your story, girl, and keep processing creatively and just know that you are on the path,'" Palmer recalled.

Palmer remembered a friend she was with telling her that he saw their "ancestors" through her.

"I was just encouraging myself and then my friend looked at me, my friend started tearing up and he's like, 'I see your ancestors. This is exactly why you are who you are. They all are living through you and they all are sending you the messages.' Like they're all sending you the message and that's why you feel so much, but you are releasing and when you're releasing, you're telling their story," she said on her podcast. "I was literally living my best life at this moment."

"I came outta there feeling like I was closer to myself," Palmer concluded, "that I was just reminded that I'm on the right path, you know, things that I really kind of always knew, but -- the way that it impacted me in that moment, it was just so clear... I felt on a spiritual level that God was like, 'Girl, yeah, yeah, girl.' It was literally the coolest thing...  So that was my magical experience."

The actress also called out one particularly positive mushroom trip, where it helped her confirm her love of acting. 

"One of the things that I realized was that, I think it was when I realized that so much of what my gift is, is my defense mechanism in dealing with life. And the reason why I love characters is because they allow me to escape and to project all the different emotions and worries that I feel about having to exist as this emotional human being," Palmer said. 

"I'm so reactive and I'm so sensitive to everything that my way of dealing and coping is what we call my 'Keke Palmer Entertainment,'" she continued. "And I started thinking about, Turnt Up With the Taylors, like me playing all those characters. That was all therapy for me and how I processed humanity, like my characters, and I remember just crying, being like, I'm trying to survive."

Palmer offered advice on how to handle a bad trip, but prefaced by saying she hasn't had any specific stories to share on that front. 

"This is probably the most powerful lesson that I had learned in my own experience, is that it doesn't actually have to be anything that I don't want to make it. That I actually have control over the perception of how I choose to feel about something," she said. "And so once I got out of it and I had a day or two to really kind of process everything that I had went through, or realize, it really made me feel more empowered about what I could actually control with my thoughts, with my experience and how I wanted to feel about where I was and when I was, and it just really made me feel more actually in control of my life."

Asked whether she'd ever do mushrooms or take psychedelics at Disneyland, Palmer shot that idea down. "No drugs at Disneyland, child," she declared, explaining, "I think it's all too much. It’s chaotic, the energy, too. I also don't love people, so being around a lot of people doing something, it's just… Now, if I was at Disneyland alone, you know, me and a very close friend, if I was on some I had the whole park to myself type gag, then maybe."

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