INTEGRATION
Psychedelic journeys are powerful experiences. They are also unpredictable, even the same journeyer does not know what to expect from one experience to the next. In form and content they are as varied as dreams. As dreams, they are unique for every journeyer. And as dreams, sooner or later, without conscious attention, they fade away, they turn into a distant memory.
How can they then become part of the journeyers body-mind- spirit system, propelling him/her to heal and to grow?
How to achieve this, to own, to become, to be what the experience has revealed?
What guidelines can be offered?
The process to retain, deepen, incorporate, put to work a psychedelic experience is the third phase of a psychedelic journey. It is known as the “Integration Phase” and it is as important as the journey itself, and as the preparation which preceded it.
Integration concerns all details worked out during the preparation phase and the qualities of the journey itself. They form a whole, one leads to the other, one is embedded into the other.
The details worked out in the preparation phase are related to who the prospective journeyer is: his/her biographical data – the country of origin, the residential country, ethnicity, religion, childhood, marital status, profession, work, worldview, values, relevant events in his/her life, the degree of maturity, of “coherence” * and are related as well to the intention for the journey, which is the compass for and the very aim of the journey.
Briefly, what the journeyer brings to the table and his/her intention for the journey.
Mostly the intention is to gain self knowledge, to heal and/or to evolve spiritually.
Caveat: avoidance, spiritual bypassing, ego-inflation.
What about the journey? What about the endless forms it can take?
The journeys are indeed very different, but recurrent themes make it nevertheless possible to group them.
One possible categorisation could be:
– Mystical
– Meaningful Existential
– Religious
– Mythological
– Healing
– Teachings
Caveat: as everything on this planet, each type above has a counter-part:
– Mystical – the Dark Numinous
– Meaningful Existential – Nihilistic Void
– Religious – Dogma Corruption
– Mythological – Dark Possession
– Healing – Poisoning
– Teachings – Concoctions, Delusions
Another, broader categorisation could be:
– Personal: content the journeyer knows already about him/herself – biographical, past events, present situation, relations; content the journeyer does not know, or does know but underestimates the significance – white and dark shadow; hidden desires
– Trans-personal:
- personal trans-personal – previous lives, basic perinatal matrices
- collective – suffering, historical events, present collective situation, other species
- transcendental – mystical, mythological
- Mystical: “Fascinans et Tremendum,” the Sacred, Awe, Wonder, Eternity, Immortality, Bliss, Light, Love, One-ness, Dissolution in an Ocean of Existence and Consciousness, Beyond Time and Space, the Big Bang – the Beginning of Creation.
- Meaningful Existential: life purpose, serving, love, illness, ageing, death and dying, suffering as initiation, core identity beyond all cultural programming.
- Religious: encounters with deities, religious figures, non-familiar creeds.
- Mythological: encounters or identification with mythological figures, playing a part in or witnessing a myth.
- Healing: soothing, mitigating, settling, solving, rectifying, disentangling, unraveling, working out personal, collective, historical wounds; witnessing traumatic events (suffering as initiation); encounters with the white and dark shadow.
- Teachings: convey wisdom.
In one and the same journey elements of many of these categories can be present.
None of these categories is conveyed intellectually, rationally, all are experiential. In this lies their power. They are like big dreams from which we wake up stirred to the core.
They plant seeds in our consciousness which, once grown, can heal and transform us and our life to much better, deeper, richer, inspired, joyous, and more. They can liberate us from existential vicious cycles.*
Mind you: they can not less lead us astray, derange our mind, plunge us in a disaster, entrench us in vicious cycles.
The experiences during a psychedelic journey are seeds planted in our consciousness.
The seeds will germinate, and eventually will bear nourishing, healing, liberating fruits if the journeyer is integer and the intention was honest and genuine.
How to prevent the seeds to dry out, the experiences to fade away?
It starts with remembering, re-living the journey.
Unraveling its different aspects.
Relate them to the intention.
Relate them to relevant areas and patterns in the life of the journeyer.
Implement what needs to be implemented.
Journaling, drawing, dancing, sculpting, contemplating, musing, feeling, reading, researching, sorting out, verifying, mourning, crying, raging, repenting, asking for forgiveness, repairing, learning, sharing what can be shared……..
The experiences need to be assimilated on physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual level.
The experiences sprout from consciousness layers the journeyer carries within. The journeyer has to assume them, to own them – “Yes, it is a part of me” – “Yes, this is also me” – “Yes, I feel this” – “Yes, this is what I think” – “Yes, I did this” – “Yes, this is how I behave,” a.s.o.
This acceptance sets in motion the process of growth, the process of deepening and expanding the understanding of what has been undergone, revealed, taught, seen, heard, felt, touched, tasted, experienced during the journey.
The experiences during the journey function as seeds planted in consciousness due to the fact that they offer glimpses of what could be. They let the journeyer experience his/her potential if healed, if more mature, more wise, more loving, more compassionate, more generous, more authentic, more self assured, more humble, more realistic, more daring, more cautious, more boundary setting, more knowledgeable, more universal, more free.
The integration then continues with becoming this person of whom the journeyer has caught a glimpse.
The process is not lineair, it unfolds according to inner laws which we can fathom out, but can’t explain rationally.
With dedication to and trust into the process, we can grow into completely being this person. We are this person naturally, no effort is any more necessary.
Most journeyers embark on a psychedelic journey to heal wounds, personal wounds, family wounds, ancestral wounds, collective wounds, planetary wounds – but mostly personal.
In this case the whole armamentarium of psychotherapy can be very helpful.
Yet, the personality of the psychotherapist is of paramount importance, not the method employed.
The psychotherapist has to answer to two main demands – besides being familiar from own experience with how psychedelics work in the psyche:
- The psychotherapist has to have a fine tuned ethical compass.
The role of ethics cannot be emphasised enough in every aspect concerning psychedelics.
When it comes to psychedelics, ethics is the life buoy.
Psychedelics are a force which “opens the doors of perception,” as Aldous Huxley formulated it.
When the doors of perception are opened, they give access to both heavenly and hellish realms hidden deeply in consciousness.
Psychedelics can not only unleash angels and demons but also confuse our minds who is who.
They open the gates to purity and vices and discombobulate the differences between them.
The chances to be led astray during a journey are as high as the chances to be led towards the truth.
This is why it is crucial for a psychotherapist working with psychedelics to be ethically fine tuned. If not, the chances are high that both the therapist and the journeyer will drawn in dark recesses of the ocean of consciousness, without even knowing it.
2) The psychotherapist has to have a sharp discernment.
This requires in turn maturity, coherence, broad general knowledge and the capacity to feel deeply.
To be confronted and to have to address individual and collective dark shadow, layers of traumas reaching deep into history, mythological and religious figures, toxic cultural programming, concoctions, delusions, terror, avoidance, self serving biases, spiritual bypassing, a.s.o. is a risky challenge.
General goals for the psychotherapist:
- help the journeyer to accept that what happened in the past cannot be reversed, it can only be overcome, transcended; to accept that which in the present situation cannot be changed, can only be endured;
- help the journeyer assume, own undesirable aspects of him/herself and his/her life, in order to create the possibility to transform them;
- help the journeyer to become more aware of his/her values, authentic needs and aspirations, true desires, his/her vision, own them, start to take steps in the outer world to align his/her life with them – to live one’s life in harmony with one’s values, pursuing one’s vision confers inner peace and a sense of purpose which brings contentment;
- help the journeyer look closely at his/her self-narratives, and dis-identify from diminishing, demeaning, damaging narratives;
- help revise constricting beliefs;
- help to mourn, help to learn self-compassion, help to understand oneself instead of blaming oneself;
- help to repent if the healing consisted of encounters with one’s dark shadow, with one’s ethical transgressions; help to repair the transgression.
Integration of a mystical experience:
- help the journeyer re-live the experience
- help the journeyer clarify his/her belief system vis-a-vis the mystical experience during the journey
- if the belief system of the journeyer clashes with the mystical experience, help the journeyer find a satisfying solution for the two opposing world views
- if the belief system of the journeyer corresponds to the mystical experience, make their underlying values more explicit, help the journeyer align his/her life with them on a deeper level – for example. by going into the world and looking at everything through the lens of these values, keeping the vividness of the experience as much as possible, nurture, cherish, nourish, nurse the seed thus planted during the psychedelic journey.
Caveat: the psychotherapist is not allowed to intervene with his/her own beliefs system.
Integration of a mythological experience:
Myths are dynamic cosmic patterns – they reveal basic patterns of creation. As the creation is a fractal, they are both outside ourselves as cosmic personages and their exploits, and inside ourselves as primary psychological energies we call then archetypes.
To experience a myth can be disconcerting, as it feels powerful and as having an objective existence, independent of us; or as having a double life, one of its own and one in deep recesses of our mind; or we can even become, during the psychedelic journey, the mythological character.
How to integrate such an experience?
The myth experience, the beliefs system of the journeyer & his present life circumstances, and the intention formulated for the journey form a triangle.
The combination of these three aspects has to become a coherent narrative in the service of the wellbeing, healing, growth of the journeyer.
To achieve this the following ingredients are necessary:
- factual knowledge about the myth
- different symbolic/metaphoric meanings it could have
- knowledge and understanding of the journeyer, his/her background, personality, beliefs system, present life situation – important: is the beliefs system inherited (cultural programming, family) or has it been worked out by the journeyer through study, reflection, contemplation, spiritual practices?
- knowledge and understanding of the intention
- relationship between the myth, the personality of the journeyer, his/her beliefs system, present life situation, and intention.
All these together have to be tied up in a whole which makes sense. The sense cannot be always formulated in words, but the sense has at least to be sensed. The journeyer has to gain from the experience something valuable, precious, something which helps him/her further in life.
- “Coherence” – main concept in Salutogenesis as developed by Aaron Antonovsky; the concept points to a coping capacity to deal both with everyday life stressors and with out of ordinary life stressors; this coping capacity requires: comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness.
- See: “On COGNITIVE FUSION; on DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PLANTS, ANIMALS, HUMANS; on EXISTENTIAL FEAR, ANXIETY; on VICIOUS CYCLES in LIFE; on ATTEMPTS to SOLVE the CORE VICIOUS CIRCLE; on PSYCHEDELICS and their SPIRITUAL POWER” – the title is long, the text is short – 511 words
Disclaimer: I do not administer any psychedelic substances in my practice.
