Many of us seek out psychedelic experiences because we’re ready for some level of inner transformation to unfold within us.
If we want to effectively translate the wisdom and guidance we receive from our plant medicine teachers and psychedelic allies into meaningful, long-lasting change, we need to commit to doing the groundwork.
This is the heart and essence of psychedelic integration.
The psychedelic journey can contribute to preparing fertile ground, planting the seeds of change within our beings. But after the psychedelic experience or ceremony comes to an end, we still need to take the necessary action to tend to our inner garden with care and nurture those seeds to grow.
For entrepreneurs, visionaries, and change-makers dedicated to the path of the Bodhisattva, seeking to work with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines consciously with intention, our integration process can also offer us a framework for learning how to:
Leverage the power of plant medicines to truly expand what we believe is possible, unlock our capacity to create with a purpose, and uncover solutions to the challenges we face for the awakening of all beings everywhere.
Committing to your plant medicine integration can help you more fully embody the transformational leader that lives within you, and help you shine your light, inspiring others to do the same.
The Importance of Psychedelic & Sacred Plant Medicine Integration
Saying that psychedelics are powerful substances is nothing short of an understatement. And as we know, the more powerful the tool, the more we need to learn how to use it responsibly. Just like a knife can be an effective and essential tool to create a masterpiece, it can easily cause trauma, harm, and long-term psychological damage if misused.
Incorporating plant medicine integration into the totality of our psychedelic experience is precisely one of the ways we can learn how to work with these powerful tools responsibly.
Whether you choose to microdose or macro-dose, focusing on integration is an essential component of the psychedelic experience. It provides a holistic framework to protect your psychological well-being, support your healing, unlock dormant forces within yourself, and open up channels of creativity and inspiration to use as a force for creation.
When we understand the enormous potential of working with these ancient and sophisticated plant technologies as powerful visionary and creative tools, we can leverage this understanding to directly teach ourselves how to transmute our inner visions and ideas into manifest reality.
When we value our experience from this perspective, we can see that the psychedelic experience reaches far beyond the ceremony or journey, highlighting the necessity for creating a daily structure that allows us to continue to incubate our ideas, visions, and insights and inspirations.
Defining Plant Medicine Integration
The word to integrate means to combine one thing with something else to form a new whole. This is precisely the focus of the post-psychedelic or plant medicine journey.
What exactly are we integrating? Primarily, we are integrating our experience of an altered state of consciousness and potentially profound, altered perceptions of reality. This experience can be both incredibly beneficial as we shed rigid ways of thinking, yet challenging as we stretch our capacity to redefine new meaning for our lives.
Leverage the Window of Heightened Mental Malleability
The latest research in psychedelic research shows that psychedelics help support the changes we wish to see unfold through the incredible support of neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is defined as:
“Neuroplasticity is the change in neural pathways and synapses that occurs due to certain factors, like behavior, environment, or neural processes. During such changes, the brain engages in synaptic pruning, deleting the neural connections that are no longer necessary or useful, and strengthening the necessary ones.”
After an entheogenic experience, there’s a grace period – a window of time where mental flexibility is enhanced, your mind us more malleable, and you can more easily nudge yourself in the direction of your choosing.
During this time, you may find it easier to make changes, as old patterns can be a little easier to interrupt. Do everything you can to implement the recommendations in this guide, so that you can leverage this time to consciously lay down a new neurological blueprint for your life.
Psychedelics can play a helping hand, empowering you to re-pattern old ways of being that no longer serve you, into new thoughts, new beliefs, new behaviors, and new choices. This can lead to entirely new ways of seeing the world, and your place in it.
Start Here: Laying a Solid Foundation For Your Plant Medicine Integration
The best place to start your integration process is by laying a solid foundation.
In this introductory guide Psychedelic & Sacred Plant Medicine Integration 101: How to Lay A Solid Foundation for Your Psychedelic & Sacred Plant Medicine Integration
This guide offers simple yet powerful suggestions to create a solid foundation for which you can build upon.
Don’t view them as “basic,” but instead as fundamental.
All of the other tools for growth and transformation that I discuss in my other articles on psychedelic integration–like my guide on upgrading your personal story to transform your life–build upon this foundation.
These suggestions will help you continue to cultivate that rich and fertile soil within your being for which many more seeds can be planted within. This is the foundation for giving birth to a beautiful garden that brings peace, joy, compassion, and fulfillment into your life and to those around you.
Know Your Intention and Reach for the Appropriate Integration Tools and Support
When it comes to psychedelic integration, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. Effective integration of your experience is an individualized process and will look different for everyone.
Successful integration can also be seen from many different angles, depending on why you are choosing to journey with these powerful, mind-altering substances.
Before choosing to embark on the psychedelic or plant medicine path, it’s worth exploring your underlying intentions, underneath any desires or intentions you might have as a leader, entrepreneur, or creative. What does your underlying “stuff” look like? Addiction? Limiting beliefs? Childhood trauma? Maybe just some lingering bad habits you’re ready to kick for good?
It’s also okay if you don’t yet know what your underlying baggage contains. The unconscious mind is powerful and often protects us from our own traumas by casting them outside the reach of your conscious awareness. This is why it’s called “shadow” work. Part of the benefit of working with psychedelics is that they can help shed light and illuminate those shadows, and then help guide you through your healing and pave a better path forward.
Once you’re aware of the energy blockages holding you back, I encourage you to broaden your thinking about psychedelic integration and reach for complementary resources and practices, beyond the recommendations in this guide. There are many tools that you can incorporate, that can help support your unique integration process.
If you are seeking out an ayahuasca ceremony because you want to support the healing of a relationship or resolve difficulties arising in your marriage, for example, your integration could incorporate the traditional Hawaiian teachings of Ho’o’pono’pono, a powerful practice in forgiveness. You can seek out books on nonviolent communication, or a counselor that specializes in this area.
If your intention is to heal deep roots of unworthiness and self-sabotaging behavior, your integration may include more spiritually-oriented practices like Maitri, a potent, loving-kindness meditation, or even Tonglen, a meditation practice focusing on compassion. If you’re looking to change deeply entrenched behavioral patterns, you may want to consider incorporating Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) into your integration process, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or psychedelic-assisted therapy.
If you are struggling with a debilitating addiction, severe trauma, or a mental health condition like depression, please consider professional integration support with a trained therapist or medical practitioner.
Change Your Story Transform Your Life: A Guide to Upgrading Your Identity With the Help of Psychedelics
Most people want to work with psychedelics because they have a desire to improve their lives in some shape or form. But as we all know, change can be hard. Instead of changing, most people stay stuck in the same loops that play out on repeat their entire lives.
But it’s a hidden attachment we all have to something we don’t usually think much about that directly sabotages our efforts and prevents us from seeing the changes we wish to take root in our lives.
What is this hidden attachment? It’s your attachment to who you are–actually, who you think you are–essentially, it’s your attachment to your self-identity that keeps you stuck.
In this guide, Change Your Story Transform Your Life: A Guide to Upgrading Your Identity With the Help of Psychedelics we’ll explore why you get stuck, how you can learn to consciously upgrade your identity, and the stories you tell yourself in order to truly transform your life, and how working with psychedelics helps lay a solid foundation for us to do just that.
