A psychedelic journey can be an event outside of the constraints of time, beginning long before (the moment you commit to it), and continuing long after the circle closes — potentially never-ending, depending on the depth of your integration.
Integration is many things and happens on many levels. It can be as simple as journaling for a few days about your experience, and sharing your awakenings with friends and loved ones. And it can be fully transformative, like stepping through a doorway to the rest of your life, lived more fully, more intently, more intentionally, more sacredly. Whatever you take from the experience, whatever emotions you touched, or states you attained, are essential aspects of your experience and true nature, the sub-conscious, and the super-conscious, coming into conscious awareness. Neurologically, the body/brain’s energetic and neural pathways awaken new pathways, configurations, and patterns of activity to accommodate new information, new energies, new ways of thinking and perceiving. This is the transducing of information, thought and emotion, all the energy you felt (and hopefully still feel!) in, through, and around your body, into electrical and vibrational information in the neural pathways.
The degree to which those neural pathways remember their new configurations and pathways, is the degree of our integration and transformation.
In other words, we grow in accordance with how much we choose to remember, embody, and transform.
The most impactful aspect of ceremonial experience occurs not in the mind, but in the emotion. How did it feel? How does it feel? Emotion is more powerful than thought, and can have a deeper, more lasting impact. Integration involves continuing to feel, and think, in these new configurations, with new perspectives, released from old patterns that no longer serve us. It is crucial that we learn to live in alignment with our fundamental emotional experience, feeling, honouring, releasing and learning to clear as we move through life.
The depth of our emotional connection to being determines the sacredness of our experience, on the journey mat, and in everyday life. Therefore, in addition to the release of stored emotions, the downloads of information, guidance, and specific understandings you received, remember the states you attained, and their traits – how they felt, the characteristic essences of them within your being, because these are specific parts of us seeking to be integrated, that we may know true and complete wholeness.
What you seek, is seeking you.
The greatest degree of integration happens when the ceremony stays with us, when the feelings — sensations and emotions – and states of being, become our ongoing experience. As we witness in the psychedelic experience, whatever we focus on intensifies, just as in all of life. Therefore, it becomes a conscious choice, what we focus on, what we magnify, and what we integrate into embodiment.
Neuroplasticity increases post ceremony for two weeks or longer depending on the depth and length of your integration. In a percentage of the population, this increase in neuroplasticity is quite transformative, relating to the child-like nature, radical acceptance, vulnerability, humility, surrender of the past, and consistent embracing curiosity, in order to accommodate new information, new Being.
Some ideas to ponder:
This is Integration as Conscious Evolution – ways to evolve the mind, body, and experience of consciousness.
- Change how you do things, even in subtle ways. Brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand. Spread butter on toast differently, put things away in new configurations, rearrange your fridge or entire home. Take a different route. Eat mindfully and slowly. Try it with your other hand, fingers, or different utensil. Break patterns by being in the moment and making continual conscious choices in embodiment as opposed to habitual, unconscious routine – so you can evolve how you move, stand, breathe, think, and perceive. Evolve your physical embodiment by making each moment a conscious choice to Be new. All of this change, also creates more intentionality. We force ourselves to be more present by breaking patterns and trying new things. It also allows the Universe to play with us. When we take a different route, we pay more attention to our surroundings, and become more open to new experience, new messages, which are all around us, all the time. Look for the signs that Universe is communicating with you, because it is a two way communication. Ask for what you want, and then actively participate and look for the responses.
- Create a morning ritual of awakening. Choose to ‘wake up’ every day. It’s like choosing to breathe. It happens all by itself, every single day, but we can also choose to do it consciously. Awaken on all levels of your being – create a new routine, a new ritual to awaken, refresh, and align your spirit-mind-body. Integrate all five elements- fire, water, breath, earth, spirit – into the experience of aligning all aspects of your being. Intentional movement (yoga, stretching, walking, cleaning up the kitchen), meditation (be more present in all activity, create more intention and attention). Meet the medicine becomes meeting the energetic dynamics that life brings. Choose how mindful or prayerful you want to make this experience you are living, knowing that the more you put into it, the more you will receive, and the more consciousness goes into creating the day before you.
- Fill yourself with the feeling of gratitude, to have the opportunity to experience another day here, to learn, grow, create, and help others. And then imagine how you want to spend the day doing that. Decide how you want to feel about it! Choose ways of being you want to focus on embodying more. If you have angel cards or other tarot/oracle cards, draw one or two for additional guidance or points of focused growth.
- Journal your dreams, daily experiences, and realizations each night and day. Write them down to remember them, and to tell your subconscious and higher consciousness how important they are. Life is a waking dream. We dream the world into existence.
- Re-Read your journal from ceremony – re-touching the experience, and re-awakening, re-minding yourself of the realizations, emotions, and states you experienced. Reawaken forgotten intentions and awarenesses, and create new ones. In this experience together, many aspects of life become reprioritised. Focus on what is most important Now. The love, connection, and light of awareness that you feel, in and for yourself, for those around you. What of lifes complexities and details is more important than this? Why do we allow it to be more important?
- At the end of the day, take the time to reflect on it. Nightly contemplation is a key to continual growth and awakening. Contemplate the days’ flow and dynamics. Review your inner experience and outer expression, the activity of your energetic, mental, emotional, and physical bodies, sensations, and states of consciousness and forgetfulness. How did you show up? How did you meet the day? With compassion, how you can grow and do it even better tomorrow? Feel the difference between that and “I should have, could have, or would have”. You can, and will, not ‘you should have’.
- Bring more awareness to all that you do, so that all becomes an opportunity to embody your new awarenesses. In this way, we are renewed, every day.
- Evolve how you think and feel by recognizing the relationship you have with yourself and with life. How can you Father yourself, Mother yourself, gently and lovingly guiding yourself into a more authentic and graceful embodiment? How do you speak to yourself? How do you speak to others? What is that sometimes-not-so-quiet voice inside your head saying to you, about yourself, and about the world, other people, life? Are these conversations, and language, consistent and aligned with who you want to be, and what you want to create?
- Music – listen to the ceremony playlist. The music is associated with, and will remind you of, everything you experienced and the states you attained. Create your own playlist to inspire you, energise you, help you feel more, or change the energy in your body or environment. Music is powerful!
- Speak with me, and others on the path – Join an integration group/circle. Contact me for current information about The Sanctuary’s Circle of Integration. They are also available online, via zoom and phone. we are each reminders to each other, of our collective experience. There is always support available to you. You are not ever alone.
May this benefit you, and all beings.