What is Psychedelic Integration?

There’s a common mantra in the plant medicine realm that goes like this—psychedelic therapy is 25% preparation, 25% the journey itself and 50% integration.

If this is true, we better make sure we craft a plan for rigorous integration. But before we break out the sharpies and flow charts, let’s take a few baby steps backwards. What is integration? What do we mean by connecting the dots of our experience? Why is it the most essential step of psilocybin therapy?

Here’s a definition I pried from the internet which I like. Integration is an umbrella term that refers to a range of activities that are conducted to maximize therapeutic benefits and minimize harm from psychedelic experiences. Pretty general, huh? 

That’s mainly because integration depends so much on the particular journey and the insight gained from the experience. While one person might integrate the journey by learning new hobbies and leaning into creative expression, another person might spend most of the time reconciling their new belief system with convictions that no longer resonate after the journey. 

WHAM! Welcome, Heed, Absorb, Manifest

In a not-so-subtle nod to the iconic 80s duo, I tend to look at all integration through the WHAM! lens. First, we need to welcome everything that surfaced during the journey, even the stuff that was downright confusing or didn’t feel very good—this is sort of like radical acceptance. Just as we trusted the medicine during the journey itself, we begin to connect the dots of our experience from the same vantage point.  

Secondly, now that we’ve laid everything out on the table, we need to heed the connections we’ve made. As we line up your intentions with different elements of the journey, we may land on some uncomfortable and difficult lessons. It’s our duty to heed those messages. 

Within the first month of the post-journey timeline, we should start to absorb the major insights of our experience. What does this look like in the real world? This is moving through the world with a more vigorous awareness of our daily routines. Once we absorb the connections we made, we can start to identify what part of our daily routine honors our new perspective and what things tend to obfuscate it? 

Finally, we manifest. This is where the rubber meets the road. When push comes to shove. [Insert your choice of outdated expression here].  When we manifest, we take concrete steps which help us embody and witness our new humanity.

All Oregon Psilocybin Services Include Integration Support

Integration is both personal and whimsical. As a facilitator, I offer up different ways of conjuring up the experience, dwelling in its message and reconciling it with our intentions.

As a client, in addition to conversations with my facilitator—where we analyze the different phases of my journey in the light of my intentions—I tend to rely on 3 different things to help me integrate. I take a concept from my journey, say gratitude, and I journal about it for an hour. Or I throw on my eye mask and headphones for an hour at a time and listen to the soundtrack of my journey. And finally, I float. I find sensory deprivation a really beautiful way to summon a past psychedelic experience. 

All this said, these are just techniques to preserve the echo of the experience and to help us make changes that make us more whole. The hard work of integration is embracing and accepting what we’ve learned and allowing those lessons to resonate in all the corners of our lives.