Chapter
3. Integration
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3.
Integration
Integration is considered by many to be the most important aspect of a psychedelic journey. This is the lifelong process of understanding and incorporating the insights gleaned from your psychedelic journeys in ways that benefit you and your community. While the actual psychedelic experience is a powerful source of healing, the work to integrate its lessons into your daily life is just as important and often more difficult. Proper integration ensures that the insights experienced on your journey become meaningful, active parts of your life rather than distant memories.
Some of your psychedelic experiences are bound to be more challenging than others. Integration practices can help you ground, find your balance, and move forward confidently with the new knowledge you have gained.
Zen proverb
Before enlightenment:
chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment:
chop wood, carry water.
The healing that begins with your medicine experience continues as you practice loving kindness and compassion in every aspect of your life, especially the areas you tend to ignore or overlook. You learn to be gentle, soft, and generous with yourself and others. You practice consciously choosing how you relate and act in the world. Through integration, even the anger, grief, shame, and guilt you may experience can become your teachers instead of your enemies.
While it might be tempting to hang on to the memories of your psychedelic experience like a lifeline, you must continue looking and moving forward. Planning and diligent effort are required for proper integration to increase quality of life while minimizing the risk of retraumatizing behaviors and interactions. Approach your integration with purpose and mindfulness.
Each psychedelic experience allows you to reach a mountain peak. You can sharpen your tools and skills between climbs, allowing you to venture into the next climbing experience with greater perspective and wisdom, and hopefully less suffering.
But where and how do you start the integration process? This can be an overwhelming question, particularly if your experience with the medicine was difficult. Even if you had a pleasant journey, what could possibly recreate the clarity you experienced while you were in it? You may feel the need to change everything about your entire life all at once…but how do you do that? And should you do that?
These are questions to consider as you move through the integration phase of your journey. While it may be best to wait at least a few weeks or even months after your medicine experience before making major life decisions, you are the one who knows best what is right for you. Remember to trust your intuition. Everything you need is within you.
Integration process
Coming down
Integration begins by creating a soft, gentle landing as you come down from the medicine and return to the earthly plane. A light meal and the presence of a loving guide or friend can help you feel grounded and aid in a smooth transition back to an ordinary state of consciousness.
Regardless of how your journey went, you may want to spend most of the following day relaxing and reflecting. Let yourself rest and sit with any paradigm shifts you may have experienced. You may feel emotional, vulnerable, and raw, especially if you had a challenging time. If you had a blissful ride through magical realms, you might feel a bit let down by how mundane everyday life can seem. Ideally, you can treat yourself to a healthy and peaceful day off. You may wish to spend the day being in nature, listening to soothing music, having nourishing meals, or doing whatever else you enjoy most. Make sure to replenish your body with plenty of water and electrolytes.
During your journey, you may have had groundbreaking revelations about your partner, job, family, or living situation. You may feel like you need to make drastic changes immediately. However, the few days after your journey are usually not the best time to make major life decisions. Consider giving yourself time to reflect on the experience before taking action.
Reflecting on the experience
What kind of visions, thoughts, memories, blockages, or somatic sensations did you experience? Reflect deeply on what arose in your heart, mind, and body. You will naturally begin to contemplate what you experienced soon after you come down and for a few days after your journey day. You may find it helpful to write in a journal, record a trip report, or draw what you saw and encountered.
While reflecting on your journey, you might ponder the following questions:
● What did I see, hear, smell, sense, or taste?
● What did my body feel like?
● What emotions came up (joy, love, sadness, anger, serenity, etc.)?
● Did any of my experiences contain symbols or special meanings?
● What is my subconscious mind telling me through these experiences?
During your reflection, you may realize that a particular vision or experience is more significant than you initially thought. Or, you might find little importance in certain things you believed to be profound while journeying. Reflection is an ongoing process that continues long after your psychedelic journey, so there’s no need to rush toward definitive answers.
Making meaning
After you’ve let the experience settle, it’s time to start unpacking its meaning. Looking back at the visions you wrote or sketched, ask yourself what they mean to you rather than what they represent in the grand scheme of things. How do they make you feel? What do they remind you of? Often, the meaning lies not in what you see but in how you feel about what you see.
Learning to trust your intuition — your gut feeling — is an important practice. Intuition is often called “the sixth sense.” Intuition often feels like hints of knowing or clarity, as well as unexplained hunches or inclinations. When reflecting on your psychedelic experience, pay attention to the “unexplainable” knowledge of your intuition.
Keep in mind that learning to be aware of and listen to your intuition is a skill that takes time and practice to develop, especially for those who have experienced heavy trauma. If you don’t know what your intuition is saying yet, it’s okay. Keep an open mind and do your best to listen to whatever may come up.
The subconscious mind can remember much more about your psychedelic experience than the conscious mind. During your journey, your brain forms new connections and patterns. Sometimes, these new pathways can be too complex for conscious processing, so the mind tries to alert you on a subconscious level through memories, emotions, and images from the past. Pay attention to these. As the great poet Rumi once said, “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.”
As new meanings emerge over the following days and weeks, you’ll get to know yourself in a different light. You may become aware of certain beliefs you didn’t realize you had and begin to understand how they influence your behavior. Memories from your childhood may surface.
As you open up to your emotions, you may realize what’s truly important. You might discover parts of yourself you’ve repressed or forgotten, or admit to certain detrimental behaviors you need to address. If you encountered mystical consciousness on your journey, you might find yourself contemplating existential questions about the nature of reality. You might experience a new zest for life or a desire to change what’s not working for you.
Remembering your intentions
Remembering your intentions and reflecting on how they manifested during your journey helps you see the positive aspects of your psychedelic experience. When you see the desired outcomes of your intentions, you may come to the realization that any challenging period of your trip was worth it.
What did you want from the medicine? Were your intentions fulfilled? If you didn’t already write down your intention before the experience, you might find it helpful to do so as part of your integration process. The medicine often brings you closer to your desired results in ways you might not have expected.
How did the experience change your perspectives? Even if your original intentions were not addressed, did you learn other lessons? Sometimes the most uncomfortable and painful journeys are also the most humbling and transformative. Suffering is often the greatest teacher. Sometimes we need to feel insignificant to realize our potential. Sometimes, we need to feel powerless to cultivate gratitude.
Practice
While understanding the deeper meaning behind your experience is an important first step, it is vital to incorporate the lessons you’ve learned into daily life. In creating an action plan, you’ll want to establish integration practices that nourish you in the realms of body, mind, spirituality, community, and environment.
Integration is a great time to try new things, as your mind is more flexible and open after a journey. But make sure your integration practices are more than just another item to check off on a to-do list. This process is not about adding more stress, pressure, or rigidity to your life, but about aligning your actions with your priorities and values. Ideally, you would have implemented some supportive integration practices before embarking on your psychedelic journey, but it’s never too late to begin.
While integration is unique to each individual, sometimes the process may require additional sessions or different therapeutic modalities to bring an unfinished process to completion. This is especially relevant if old traumas resurface or you relive a birth (or death) experience. If you haven’t already, you may wish to reach out to specialists, therapists, or healers who have experience working with trauma or psychedelic integration.
As you integrate your experience, it is crucial to get connected with community. It’s much easier to process your journey with the support of like-minded people.
Zen proverb
Before enlightenment:
chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment:
chop wood, carry water.
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includes
2 x 1on1 call
1 x Question & answers
1 x Sharing circle
Signal group access
Extra support
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