The Journey
Whether you have dabbled with psychedelics, been in ceremony with plant medicines, gone deep with breathwork or found yourself in any other form of expanded state of consciousness, you have been on a journey. This journey will have been completely unique to you, at a specific moment in your life with your history and understanding of the world. It will never be repeated exactly and will never be felt by anyone else in the way that you felt it.
It may have been blissful and full of love, maybe you felt the power of the universe and saw your place in it, maybe you understood on more than a cognitive level something profoundly and positively impacting to you. A sense of great knowing, coming home or that you are never alone.
Maybe you were terrified, maybe it was full of darkness and horror, that even thinking about it brings you out in cold sweats and a desire to flee into distraction. Maybe something emerged that you do not know how to hold or how to process and it’s rattled you to your core.
Either way is possible, and both, and everything and more in between and all around. The possibilities of expanded states experiences are limitless. There is no neat and tidy way of knowing these spaces and the multidirectional and multidimensional places we can travel.
It can feel strange or even challenging to return to our usual life carrying these experiences with us, this is why we integrate. We can find a safe way to hold, understand and ground these experiences- whether huge, subtle or deeply confusing – into our ordinary reality.
Context
It is difficult to integrate an experience without acknowledging context. It is widely understood that the ‘set and setting’ of an expanded state experience impacts how we experience it. Set being your mindset and setting being your surroundings or environment, your physical location, the people around you and how safe you feel.
Whether in a festival, a jungle or clinical research setting all of these can potentially feel safe or unsafe; this is subjective. How our ‘set and setting’ was for our journey is important and needs to be acknowledged. Ideally you would have had a safe, loving and well-held space for your journey but if you didn’t then including this becomes an important part of understanding what happened within your journey.
Considering ‘set and setting’ also comes into our return, the integration process. If you are from a culture where plant medicines are fully integrated into your family, society and culture, then the concept of needing some separate integration process may be a very strange idea.
However, if you come from a culture where you have taken an illegal drug, you have participated in an underground ceremony or maybe been quietly alone without telling anyone what you were doing due to fear of judgement, a necessity for secrecy or because your community wouldn’t understand then this is a very different process. If you have participated legally in a clinical research study, this frame and container has a particular way of working with and understanding integration depending on the study so has its own restrictions and limitations that may or may not feel like they held your experience.
At its core, psychedelic integration is the intentional process of absorbing, processing, and embodying the insights gained during an expanded state of consciousness into daily life. It is the bridge between the ‘journey’ and ‘ordinary reality’ and the ‘set and setting’ is part of this process.
Space & Time
In our western culture we have a habit of wanting to get things done and ticked off quickly. Loose ends and unfinished business do not generally have much of a place in the fast paced and full lives of most people. Commitment over time is an art we don’t all have immediate access to; it’s something we may need to remember we can find capacity for. Our expanded state experiences work on a different time zone to modern life. They tend not to want to be neatly packaged and put away, but we can get to a place where our integration seems good enough, for now. Leaving an open mind for ongoing insights as life continues to be lived and we notice shifts in how we are in the world.
Metaphor can be helpful to explain the complex. Imagine the insights you have in a journey are the seeds, they are just the beginning. Full of life and everything they need to bring forth new growth, but without the right conditions they can sit and remain dormant. This could be for months, years, decades or a lifetime.
However, if the seeds are nurtured, watered, given nutrient packed soil and allowed the warmth of the sun. Then magic happens. They sprout and at great speed something new can be seen, no longer a seed but something with thirsty growth and potency emerges. When this tending is consistent, the water comes at the right times, not too much so the ground becomes heavy and laden, not too little so it cracks and dries. When given enough light, not necessarily full sun, just a position that’s right for its needs. When compost is added when the soil becomes lacking. This is when we can see the full potential of growth. When we can realise that just one seed can grow into a majestic tree. Or, it can remain a seed, dry but not lifeless, but maybe difficult to find in the forest of life.
Integration takes many forms; it is the literal ‘tending of the soil’. You may feel you need professional support to help you land, to guide you through and help you discover what your seeds need. This phase of integration can be done with an integration therapist, or it may be enough to create space for self-reflection, journalling, a creative project, moving our body through walking or yoga or having a massage, talking with trusted friends or simply resting more and simplifying life for a while.
When we are supported by an integration therapist you have a space dedicated to your journey to support your return. For some people this needs just a few sessions, for others it may move into a longer psychotherapy relationship, depending on the content from your journey and always your choice. Most of the time the significance of an expanded state experience will continue to unfold over a lifetime, once the skill has been developed of holding a curious standpoint.
The Peak Experience Trap
For some when the skill of integration hasn’t yet been developed, they may find themselves chasing the high, desperately trying to recreate the euphoria of the peak experience and stay there. This is not a judgement, we all have our own reasons for wanting to heal, sometimes with great urgency and out of having little hope or lust for life left, sometimes the peak can be such a welcome relief from the pressures and mundanity of day-to-day life, so why wouldn’t we want more of it?
For most this can only last so long before this level of exposure starts to form cracks in how someone is functioning on this layer of consciousness called life.
Bringing our insights from expanded states back to our day-to-day, to have a meaningful impact on our own lives and those we love, is one of the most beautiful parts of being human and exploring all we can engage with in expanded states. Integration can be a bridge between worlds, and this is a blessing even if sometimes that bridging is hard won.
Becoming Whole
Carl Jung wrote extensively about individuation, a process of integrating different aspects of the self, including the conscious and unconscious, as a journey essential for personal development and understanding one’s true nature.
When we have journeyed into an expanded state this becomes part of our life experience, we can choose how we engage with it of course. When we actively engage in an integration process, we are bringing our experience more deeply into our consciousness and possibly shining a light on those more shadowy aspects we all carry that may be ready to be seen and integrated too.
The journey of becoming whole does not have an end point. We may never meet a fully enlightened being, but integration allows us to travel forward a little wiser, carrying refined skills as eternal students of the universe. Why bother? Because the world benefits from more aware, conscious, and compassionate humans. By doing the work to integrate our own expanded states, we bring that collective healing back down to Earth, and we need more of that!
A final note on The Good, The Bad & Sadly, The Ugly
It’s not just the challenging experience that benefits from psychedelic integration, the ‘good’ journeys can too. The blissful mystical experience, that is ineffable, that you cannot put into words, that feels incredible and like it will never fade and then disappointingly does after a few days or weeks and not a lot changes in life. These experiences can be difficult in their own way to integrate into day-to-day life. Integration can support us to find ways of staying connected to elements of our experience, of finding ways to cultivate something of this experience in the ordinary state of consciousness that we live.
Challenging psychedelic experiences are exactly that, challenging. These experiences usually have a great urgency for support. Challenging psychedelic experiences a.k.a. ‘bad trips’ can be disorientating, anxiety producing, you may still be experiencing visual or perception effects, you may feel deeply traumatised, be in shock, not sleeping, confused or paranoid, or terrified. Sounds hard right. People who are experiencing any of these symptoms could benefit from some professional support unless their community is very well equipped to navigate this.
It is unfortunate to say that with this surge of interest in psychedelics, there has also been a surge of unsafe practitioners and experiences. People claiming to be shamans that have not been through any initiatory process or dedicated their lives to deep spiritual work, abuses of power in clinical research settings and even friends crossing boundaries. If you have suffered abuse, violation or are unsure what happened to you in your expanded state experience then please seek professional help. This can be a deeply harrowing time and trauma-informed support could help you with the distress you are feeling.
Some links for support are below:
https://www.thepsychedelicexperienceclinic.co.uk
https://instituteofpsychedelictherapy.org/directory
