Dinah Bazer's confrontation with her fear during a psilocybin session

Dinah Bazer’s psilocybin session became a turning point not because it changed the facts of her cancer, but because it altered her relationship to the fear surrounding it. With Tony Bossis’s support, she gave that fear a vivid form, confronted it, and felt it disappear. Years later, she reported that it had not returned—a change she distinguished sharply from the cancer itself, which remained outside her control.

Illness and Anticipation

Bazer was in her sixties, a figure-skating instructor in New York, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2010. Although chemotherapy was successful, the possibility of recurrence continued to shape her days. She described herself as waiting for the other shoe to drop: the treatment had addressed the disease, but it had not released her from dread.

Her experience belonged to a wider pattern described by cancer patients who took part in psilocybin research. Some recounted rebirth; others encountered their cancer, or their fear of it, in a way that seemed to diminish its hold. These accounts did not make illness disappear. They suggested instead that the emotional power attached to illness could shift, even when the illness itself could not be commanded.

The Session with Tony Bossis

Bazer worked with Bossis, and she remembered the session’s opening as frightening and constricting. She imagined herself trapped in a ship’s hold, rocking back and forth. Reaching out from under the blanket, she said, “I am so scared.” Bossis took her hand and encouraged her to go with the experience; she remembered his hand as an anchor. The image of confinement and the steadiness of his touch give the scene its immediate tension: the fear is overwhelming, but she is not left to face it alone.

As the session continued, Bazer located the fear beneath her left rib cage. She emphasized that this black presence was not her tumor. In her account, the distinction matters: the encounter did not confuse the feared disease with the fear itself. Once the fear appeared to her as something separate, she could address it directly. She became enraged and shouted, “Get the fuck out! I won’t be eaten alive.” She said the fear was gone; she had driven it away with anger.

What Changed—and What Did Not

Bazer’s account stops short of claiming that the session controlled her cancer. Her later formulation draws a boundary between the two: “The cancer is something completely out of my control, but the fear, I realized, is not.” She reported that the fear had not returned in the years after the session. The change was therefore neither a cure nor a promise about the future of her disease. It was a durable shift in how powerless she felt before the prospect of recurrence.

That distinction also explains why the episode is more than a simple story of fear vanishing. The cancer remained an external uncertainty; the fear, in the session, became something she could see, resist, and act upon. Her anger was not an abstract realization but the means through which she experienced herself as able to respond. The book presents her report as her own account of lasting change, not as evidence that every patient will have the same experience.

Love, Belief, and the Research Context

After confronting the fear, Bazer’s thoughts turned to her children and to what she described as “overwhelming love.” She called herself a “solid atheist,” yet said she felt “bathed in God’s love.” The contradiction did not require her to abandon her stated disbelief. Instead, the language of divine love was the expression she found for an experience that exceeded her usual vocabulary. In her story, intense emotion and religious language arise without becoming a new doctrinal position.

The wider clinical context gives the account significance without making it a universal explanation. In December 2016, results from the New York University and Johns Hopkins University psilocybin cancer studies were published together. Across the two trials, about 80 percent of patients showed clinically significant reductions in anxiety and depression, with effects lasting at least six months; the intensity of participants’ mystical experiences closely correlated with symptom relief. The studies included 80 subjects in all and were small enough to require larger trials before rescheduling or treatment approval could be considered. Bazer’s experience illuminates one possible shape of relief—fear encountered and diminished—while the trial results concern the group as a whole and do not establish why any individual patient improves.