What Even IS Psychedelic Integration?

Psychedelic experiences tend to cause tectonic shifts in our internal world. We experience grand realizations about reality, existence, our connection to nature, other people and society, and countless other things. 

Upon returning from psychedelic experiences we find ourselves in an unchanged external world, thus our internal and external worlds have come out of alignment. The integration process involves the convergence between the internal and external worlds. 

Integration can be done deliberately by continuing the intentionality that was carried into the psychedelic experience, with the objective of making positive change in your life to bring it into accordance with your new perspective. 

When not pursued deliberately, integration will occur passively and tend to revert the internal world back to its pre-psychedelic state. However, the remembrance of that psychedelic and post-psychedelic sense of connection and awakening does not easily fade. Watching what you registered as one of the most profound and impactful experiences of your life recede to a mere memory can leave you feeling either as if they had no value to begin with, which leaves us disillusioned with the entire project, or as if the insights and sense of purpose must be frequently refreshed by subsequent psychedelic experiences, which leads us to dependence. 

There are two modes of integration: Re-integration describes the process of re-approaching and engaging in your daily life after a psychedelic experience. Intentional integration is the process of continuing the intentionality over the longer term to make positive and lasting changes in your life. 

Re-integration

Re-integration isn't always challenging, but it can be the time for most potential gain or most potential harm depending on the individual, the nature of the experience and how it’s approached.

Sometimes an experience is so impactful and so transformative that the discrepancy between a person's inner world and outer world feels too large to reconcile. Sometimes an experience is so jarring and frightening that a personal feels traumatized by it; this is surprisingly common and requires extra care and/or professional assistance.

Some key elements to re-integration include recuperation, avoiding stressful situations and systematically processing your experience.

Intentional Integration

The intentional integration process requires a little bit more intention (hence the name!) and commitment over a longer period of time. This is where the “work” of psychedelic medicine work comes in. The goal is to create positive and lasting change in your life by deliberately transforming your external world (life circumstances and the way you show up within them) and bringing it into resonance with your psychedelically-enhanced internal world. 

There’s a lot that goes into the intentional integration process, but the abridged approach involves identifying key insights and their significance in the context of your life, and creating structures to support the cultivation of growth guided by those insights. 

This is the essential breakdown of what integration is and a taste of what it can look like in practice. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up for my newsletter!