What is Integration?

Integration is term often used but not always fully understood or it’s importance fully recognised, particularly in the psychedelic community where often the emphasis is on the inner work conducted in the ceremony experience itself. It is in the inner work needed afterwards where we can fully embody the teachings and blessings that we received. True integration is far deeper, and richer, than simply sitting in a post ceremony integration circle and recounting our insights and although this can be extremely powerful and useful to us in itself it should be viewed as just the first step on a much more profound journey.

True integration is a multidimensional process on the path of self realisation resulting in a deeper understanding of ourselves, our experience and how we relate to the world around us. Using the metaphor of a garden for our internal psyche, the seeds planted during our ceremony experiences need constant tending and nurturing if we are to harvest the very real, beautiful and tangible fruits in our daily lives.

In its simplest form integration can be thought of as taking the lessons learned from our ceremony and expressing them in our thoughts, words and actions. Simple but far from easy. Ceremony experiences can provide us with a reference point from which to act but they cannot do the inner work for us. True integration can be a long and sometimes tough and painful road as we seek to transform and release ourselves from years the of conditioning, trauma and behavioral patterns revealed to us in our experience.

On my own journey I have been blessed with many deep and very meaningful experiences that have certainly changed my life in many positive ways but negative patterns would continue recurring. Eventually a ceremony experience showed me a knot of blockages rooted deep in my childhood and teenage years that that needed to be unraveled but that the medicine would not do it for me. For many years it had  been easy to deny that I had even had any kind of trauma or childhood reactions to situations that had triggered inherent belief systems, stored in the body and sub conscious, that were serving as sub-routines for my life.

The medicine had shone a light on areas that I needed to look at but it was not until I began to work with a therapist and feel through, in a sober state, the layers of anger, shame and grief that I had been blocking for so long that I began to make tangible and lasting changes in my behavior.

The integration process is a key part of the ceremony experience and the weeks immediately after ceremony are the perfect time to deepen and embody our work although it can feel hard. In the period after ceremony we can be very open energetically and emotionally and more sensitive to both our feelings and our body so it is the perfect time to embody our teachings before our experience fades into memory.

What can make integration difficult?

We can often be thrust back into our daily lives and routines without the time and space to really slow down and identify and incorporate our new insights before we are once again swept up in our lives and old patterns. We are often surrounded by people it is hard to talk to about