It's Official: I'm Pivoting to Shadow Integration
With the utmost respect, appreciation and regard for the sacred medicine traditions I’ve been blessed to participate in and receive healing from, I’ve decided to actively shift my approach and languaging around my spiritual practice.
Over the years I’ve learned that it’s incredibly important how we label things for ourselves and in the past I’ve made huge life decisions and dedicated myself to things (and people) without truly realizing what I was doing.
This has been my experience most recently with the unconscious shift I made from considering Ayahuasca and Psychedelics to be my primary spiritual path, to ‘Shadow Work’ taking on that mantle. It feels important and relevant to me, in this moment, to share about this process, acknowledge it, own it and name it… and this feels like the most apt place to do that.
I'm so deeply grateful for all of the moments and experiences that I had working with Ayahuasca, it has absolutely made me a better person and taught me an immense amount…
but I’m actively choosing to shift my relationship with it.
I’ve come to understand my past relationship with Ayahuasca as having been incredibly self destructive.
I haven’t been willing or able to publicly speak directly to this understanding because the truth of it has taken some time to unravel.
It was hard to perceive in the midst of such beauty and so many deeply integral people, not to mention my own determination and dedication that I felt so deeply to making this ’The Thing.”
I’ve chosen to take my career and my business in a new direction that feels like it’s in much greater alignment with me…
…
🔥 Shadow Integration Work 🔥
I’m sure this is a BIG shock, because I never talk about shadow integration… 😉
Psychedelics are a great tool for shadow integration and can be incredible for more reasons than I can possible convey…
But shadow integration, truly, is what broke me out of my unhealthy patterns with Ayahuasca and it’s what brought me to a place of much deeper harmony within myself and within my life.
I cannot begin to express the degree to which this work has empowered me. It brings me ever closer to being the person I truly desire, and living the life I truly desire.
When I was working with psychedelics all the time, my life was incredibly discordant and I felt totally out of harmony… out of alignment with myself.
The truth is that the entire experience of working with Ayahuasca, from the very moment I signed up to a retreat, to the days following where I felt incredibly sensitive and irritable, felt deeply triggering and wrong for me.
But it was because of that, not despite it, that I continued with such unfaltering devotion.
It was because of how hard it was that I forced myself to continue to push and push and push and drink until I was sick in and out of ceremony.
The entire experience felt like something that I had to conquer and I told myself;
“I’ll be ready to relax with the medicine when it stops being so hard to drink it.”
I believed that I had to keep doing it until it didn’t feel like torture anymore and that, if I drank enough, eventually I would get there. (To be honest, this now sounds so outrageously wrong to me that it’s hard to even admit publicly, but this is what I believed and it’s what I spoke to all the time.)
I’ve even joked on my podcast that “Most of my work with Ayahuasca is about my work with Ayahuasca.”
Well, I’ve shifted my language on that.
✨ I am ready to stop drinking the medicine when I’m willing to stop torturing myself with it.
That’s it!
The time has come.
Even now I feel the pull… the voice in my head that says that 'I’m just scared’ and 'I’m not doing enough if I’m not willing to step into the fire.'
There are so many of these voices with so many messages.
'I’m obviously not committed to self work if I’m not willing to show up for this…’
It’s All BS.
I am committed to self work and a huge layer of my self work is reclaiming my power over my process and saying, boldly, No.
Even if it means deeply reconsidering my podcast… 😬
But here’s the thing, there are loads of people out there teaching and talking about psychedelics, but there are simply not enough voices teaching and talking about Shadow Integration.
Plus, shadow integration is accessible to Everyone!
What’s incredible about shadow work (that cannot necessarily be said for psychedelics) is that I’m applying the tools and the work to the present moment… the present situation… and I’m making real time improvements to my life, my mood, and my circumstances.
This work is incredible.
I believe that psychedelics are an amazing tool and nothing will ever change that. Psychedelics have an incredibly capacity to show us things that we’ve been struggling to see and understand. I will always highly recommend them for someone who has the desire, the resources and the connections.
If you don’t have those things, or even if you do… I’m hear to tell you that there is SO much more out there for you! I continue to discover new methods and modes of healing all the time, and each of them is valid and relevant for the right person.
Thank you for your time and attention,
🙏 Lucy Baldwin