Integration: the most important component in realizing & embodying your journey experience

A psychedelic experience is a sacred opportunity - to remember who you are, to change your life, to be empowered.

To process your journey...

To realize your experience…

To implement what you desire…

To have lasting impact, change, and remembrance…

Integration is a critical component in journeying. And it doesn't happen over night.

What is integration?

Integration is how you process, contemplate and realize your journey experience. It’s practices that help you align your life to your journey. It’s tools that lead to lasting impact where you witness the changes in your life.

When you integrate intentionally and consistently, it increases the chances of remembering and embodying what you realized.

Integration is the life journey, not a destination. It is layers and iterations. Peaks and valleys. You are always integrating with every thought, feeling, and action. So, self-compassion and a slow and steady pace are key.

Implications of poor integration

If you have a turbulent and challenging journey and don’t integrate what you learned, it may perpetuate your challenges. You may feel stuck or blocked. You may experience more challenges - fear, disorientation, even psychosis or paranoia.

If you have a pleasant and ecstatic journey and don’t integrate what you learned, it may be forgotten. It may become just another experience without true change - fleeting.

If you feel you need another journey soon after or have repeat experiences, it may be a sign of misaligned integration practices.

Integration best practices and activities 

To me, true integration is a combination of consistent self-care, decompression, and self-expression practices. These allow you to care for and connect with yourself, quiet your mind and relax your body for rest and stillness, and bring you to the present in genuine play and expression.

Two profound integration tools are rest and writing.

Intentional rest is crucial for the days following the journey to allow the mind, body and spirit to repair and integrate naturally and spontaneously. It makes space for freshness and new insights to come in.

Slowing down and mindfulness help maintain a gentle awareness when returning to the day-to-day. Thinking about the same things without quiet and intentional presence, the mind loops and becomes foggy. Slowing down and mindfulness reveals automatic patterns and allows creating new, more aligned ones.

Writing - whether freestyle or prompted - invites thorough processing of thoughts and the journey experience. Writing slows down the part of the brain that's usually overactive (default mode network) and opens other creative networks, helping recall information and find insight. There's also a catharsis that comes with processing through writing. Integration can follow naturally.

While writing may not be for everyone, there are several integration activities that work in similar ways. I find meditating in nature, trail running, and stretching/massaging helpful for me. The body component is especially potent because the body is the subconscious mind and higher-mind. It carries emotions, memories and wisdom!

Additionally, I’ve had profound remembrance and expression in art therapy - coloring and working with clay. Revisiting journey music while meditating or moving my body has also led to epiphanies re-emerging in ecstasy.

Holistic integration with an experienced guide

A holistic integration approach with support from a guide (an experienced journeyer and integrater) can have a profound impact! When I work with my clients, we talk through their experience and notice what arises emotionally and somatically. With guided inquiry, they explore similar experiences, patterns and synchronicities where they may find correlating messages and discover more.

We discuss best practices for easeful integration and determine activities that feel most supportive for ongoing reflections and embodiment.

My integration guide for your self-empowerment

Through dozens of solo journeys, I noticed ways I didn't properly integrate and learned what is most productive and effective. I've created a guide to support my clients for ease and to avoid pitfalls.

The guide includes best practices, introspective questions, and suggested activities and prompts. The questions support journaling, self-reflection or conversation with loved ones. They relate to pre, during and post journey experiences and consider the mind, body, and spirit. A list of active and passive activities and suggested prompts support ongoing integration.

True integration is self-empowerment,  regardless of the nature of the journey.

I hope to support my clients with holistic integration tools so they can be self-empowered to continually align their journey to their life, as life is truly the integration journey!