Discovering The Value of Integration
As psychedelic use has become more accepted within the cultural mainstream, we are quickly expanding our knowledge around best practices and positive outcomes, and in the process identifying some long-standing blind spots.
It turns out that it often takes more than just a dose to generate intended change, and sometimes unexpected disruptive after-effects or confusing experiences can stick with us after the trip has ended. In many cases, psychedelics are a profound mixed bag, and the “make-or-break” factor that determines the outcome of an experience is the context of the session, and the processing and care taken afterward. What we now call Integration, resolving and incorporating the new experiences back into daily life, has rightly been identified as vital for sustained growth, healing, and harm reduction.
Thinking Bigger
But as our busy minds like to place things into simple timelines, well defined boxes of tasks and checklists, there is a tendency to think of Integration as just another box to check after the trip is over. While it is a good sign when a mushroom retreat dedicates half a day for integration, some drawing, a little bit of yoga or movement, and an informative re-entry talk, this is only a short part of an ongoing and larger process.
The reality is that a successful integration practice is not an after-the-fact task, but a holistic and multidimensional structure that surrounds and supports the experience, beginning even before the trip starts. Integration is the process of building bridges and cooperative relationships between our non-ordinary state experience, and our regular self/world, and has many facets.
Before The Journey
The most successful Integration is one where groundwork was laid in advance. Ideally, a psychedelically-informed web of relationships, worldview, and environment has been cultivated to hold, validate, and nurture the experience. As many have said, the best integration practice is a great preparatory practice.
In preparation, though there can be no real knowing of what will happen, or what exactly to expect going into a trip, it helps to have strategies for approaching the experience. Entering into the experience with clear and sincere intent, an attitude of humility, curiosity, and trust, as well as a willingness to accept whatever content may emerge, make it much easier to weather tough spots and integrate when the journey is over.
Likewise, practical considerations such as establishing good Set and Setting, knowing how to follow the music, stay centered, relax your body, and setting time aside for processing afterward, are key to ensuring a good outcome.
The Worldview Container
It also helps to gradually establish a flexible worldview that can incorporate new, strange, and even impossible information into your normal way of living and thinking. Indigenous cultures, especially of Amazonia and Central America, have cosmologies and accumulated knowledge that are able to hold the coexisting psychedelic and ordinary worlds together. This container of culture prevents the kinds of inner conflicts that can happen such as when a lifelong atheist struggles with his unexpected conversation with Quetzacoatl, or when a first-timer with a very established sense of her world, relationships, and self-image finds all these called into question by an unexpected change in perception while out with her friends at a club night.
Ripples Outward and Inward
This need for supportive worldview touches upon the reality that Integration is not just a process in time, with a before and after phase, but something horizontal that expands outward through our relationships with others and the world as a whole. Many times a tripper is shocked to discover that the journey they embarked on for individualistic reasons, either recreation or personal healing, opens up to a whole world beyond themselves, and what they are experiencing is collective. And the surprise message, that healing biographical trauma or garden variety alienation, cannot happen individually, but it is the reconnection with something larger than themselves that heals. For this reason, our complete lives, all our relationships, our community, our relationships with nature, with God or spirit, and how we conceive of the big world we live in, all come into play in a trip, and are vital in the Integration.
All Together
In Mahayana Buddhism there is a core principle that the best way to achieve freedom from suffering is not to seek liberation for your own sake, but instead to be dedicated to the liberation of all beings. The Bodhisattva vow is the promise that the individual will work to free all other beings first, supplanting and bypassing even the very rational and well-meaning selfishness that drive our thirst to be free of suffering, with altruism and compassion. The takeaway is that the most powerful and efficient engine for personal healing is actually collective healing.
Whether one subscribes to Buddhist philosophy/theology, I believe that healing does not happen in isolation, and so Integration means something bigger than just bringing together elements of our personal experience that may be out of step, but also participating in a collective process that extends well beyond ourselves and puts great emphasis on how we orient ourselves in the world, relate to others, and live our lives.
Making Change Real
This isn’t just a big philosophical sentiment: relationships are feedback loops that enforce or discourage change. What makes a profound experience stick, and what makes that experience useful to our personal mission is how we are able to incorporate it into the many facets of our ongoing lives, and if and how they are able to reflect and reinforce these changes back to us, so we can keep them in motion and make them into habit. The parts of our inner experience that we are able to make real in the outer world and share with others are what support us in long term change.
This really is a holistic transformation, and if we proceed gently at a compassionate pace, affirming ourselves along the way, we can yield big benefits in our emotional wellbeing, connectedness, and resilience.