We need to utilise other methods in our preparation and our integration for these experiences.

Different methods can help set us up for insightful experiences, and then maximise benefits and keep us on a path of learning and growth. There are many, and some popular ones include: mindfulness, yoga, breathwork, and nature immersion.

Another one of the big boys is journaling. 

This is because journaling can help with self-reflection, emotional processing, and integrating insights.

As such, journaling is one of the best things one can do to support their psychedelic-assisted growth. 

So, how does it work? What are the benefits? And how can you get started today?

In this blog post, I will be talking about the benefits of journaling and how they work synergistically with psychedelic processes. Then I will be offering you a few different journaling methods to support your psychedelic-assisted growth. I will also add a few tips on each so that you can start journaling today.

My intention with this blog post is to highlight the benefits of journaling in the hopes that you might be inspired to try it yourself and to give you some concrete examples of things that you can do so you can get started today.

Let’s dive in.

Benefits of Journaling and Psychedelic Processes

Writing pen to paper forces us to slow down. Simply by taking the time to write out our thoughts and feelings, journaling offers us the chance to be aware of what makes up our inner world. We can see things from inside ourselves, quite literally, on the paper in front of us, giving us an increased awareness of them. And with that, we also have an opportunity to reflect on them. 

By allowing us to see what is on our minds and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, journaling might even be considered psychedelic — if we are going by the literal meaning of the word: mind-revealing. 

As such, it is an excellent tool to synergise with our actual psychedelic experiences. 

Journaling can be a way to integrate a more reflective and aware way of being in our days—what we might call a psychedelic way of life. It also helps clear the mind—like mental decluttering—and has been shown to have emotional effects such as reducing anxiety. Both of these effects are also going to be beneficial when we are in the preparation stage of our psychedelic experiences.

After our experiences, journaling can help us in our integration as well. Beyond documenting them, writing about our experiences gives us a chance to further unpack them, dig out insights,  and solidify them. With insights unpacked, we also have an opportunity to make plans and move forward in the integration process.

To summarise, some of the benefits of journaling related to psychedelic use include:

• Promotes self-awareness
• Enhances awareness of thoughts and feelings
• Provides opportunities for reflection
• Aids in clearing the mind and reducing anxiety
• Helps in planning sessions and logistical details
• Assists in documenting experiences and unpacking insights
• Facilitates integration of insights
• Facilitates further reflection and planning for integration

Journaling Methods to Support Psychedelic Processes

Ready to start journaling?

Here are a few different styles of journaling that you can try today.

1. Free Writing (Basic Journaling)

This is the most basic. In the simplest terms; put pen to paper and start writing.

To gain a better understanding of yourself and your emotions, try not to focus only on things that you have done or things that you see, but write about your thoughts and your feelings.

Write about what is on your mind and use that as a starting point to write further reflections and observations.

Write about your feelings. You can write about your feelings in the moment or in different situations or significant moments in your day or life. You can write about any instances where certain feelings were triggered. 

And it is as simple as that. It does not matter if what you write is petty. It does not matter if it seems boring or nothing special. Just the process of writing will help get things out and that process will help you to reflect and introspect.

One way of incorporating this method is the morning pages. The morning pages, as originally described in The Artist’s Way—Julia Cameron’s classic book on creativity— are three full A4 pages of longhand journaling each morning. Again, about anything. Just get pen to paper and write until you fill the pages.

I have found this three full pages method to be an extremely useful practice. If I have something niggling away at me or I feel like I have too many things on my mind, I find that taking time to sit down and write my thoughts out is extremely clarifying, improves my emotional state, and gives me some actionable items to move forward.

Tips for starting a free writing journaling practice: 

• Get a nice pen and journal or pad that feels nice to write with. This will help make the process more enjoyable.
• Keep the journal private so that you know that it is a safe space for you to be able to fully express yourself without fear of judgement or any kind of repercussion from anyone else.
• Remember to write your thoughts and feelings, not just objective facts.
• It can be helpful to ask yourself questions. Think about questions that a coach or therapist would ask you. Or use them to direct them back to your values.

2. Writing Letters

Often, the difficulties or problems we have in our lives come from our relationships. As social creatures who have evolved with the need to successfully socially engage to survive, it is no surprise that relationships can be the source of difficult emotions.

Sometimes in our psychedelic experiences, insights may come to us about our relationships with others. Or it might be the case that our intention for an experience is a relational issue that we are looking to process emotions around and resolve.

Writing letters to other people can be hugely helpful in supporting these processes.

The beauty of the exercise of writing letters to other people is that you have a safe space to express your emotions without necessarily having to send those letters to the people you are writing them to. 

Just the process of writing letters can help us to become more aware of our feelings and offer a lot of therapeutic value. This can be done both in preparation and integration of an experience, depending on where it is most relevant for each person. In both cases, it can again help to process emotions and gain mental clarity. 

Tips for Writing Letters to Others

• It is usually most useful to focus on people you have some difficult emotions around.
• Be completely uncensored. If there is anger, if there is pain, if there is frustration, allow yourself to feel it, and express it in the letter. Remember, you do not need to send it to them. Just let it out, and put it down on paper. 
• If you decide that it would be good to send the letter or message you have written, you might like to make some revisions. Go back once the heat is off and think about your wording and how you would like to communicate. You might consider something like non-violent communication.
• Consider using the following questions as prompts for your letter: What would you really like to say to them? What would you like them to know? If you were going to die next week, what should not be left unsaid?
• If you want to share anything from your letter in person, you can use a bulleted version of your letter for reference.

3. Writing Letters to Self

Writing letters to yourself can also be a very useful exercise.

By somewhat externalising ourselves and seeing ourselves as another person, we can get a different perspective on our problems and a new level of awareness around them.

Often it is hard for us to have perspective on our own problems because we are too close to them. It can be the case that if somebody else were to come to us with our problems  —the exact same ones—we could easily dole out the perfect advice and tell them what to do.

As the quote goes:
“Wisdom is the ability to take your own advice.”

Letters to self can also be a means of exploring your inner dialogue by writing letters to different aspects of yourself—for example, the inner child, the inner critic and your higher self. This way of seeing ourselves as made up of many separate selves or parts, and communicating with them, is fundamentally the same as popular and effective psychological techniques used in parts work and Internal Family Systems. 

Letters can also be written to our past and future selves. This can give you a chance to reflect on your journey and to look forward. 

Tips for Writing Letters To Yourself

• When writing a letter to your present self, try imagining it is a good friend. Consider: What do they (you) need to hear right now? What advice, encouragement or support would you offer to someone in your situation at this moment? 
• If writing a letter to your future self, express your hopes, dreams and intentions.
• When writing to different parts of yourself, such as your inner critic, consider making the letter a dialogue. Ask the part what it wants and write responses from it. 

Trip Reports

Writing trip reports is, I would argue, an essential aspect of integrating psychedelic experiences. I would not say that everyone needs to do it, but I will say that most people would likely benefit from doing it.

Firstly, trip reports are great for documenting your experiences and your journey over time. Beyond that, the process of writing them offers a chance to revisit and remember the experience, refresh the memory, and consolidate it further, along with any insights and lessons. 

Writing reports also offers a chance for further emotional processing. It is not uncommon that I will be brought back to tears when I am re-listening to the playlist and writing up my report.

Tips for Writing Trip Reports

• Start with basic objective details: setting, dosage, people present, time of the session, etc. 
• Write an open-ended report about your subjective experiences. Write about thoughts, feelings and perceptions.
• Allow yourself the freedom to further reflect and riff on anything that comes up.
• If you listened to music during your experience, try listening to the same music again when you are writing your report. It can be extremely effective in taking you back to the experience.

Final Notes and Tips

I hope this gives you some ideas and concrete examples of ways that you use journaling. However, it is not always easy to get started. Common barriers to journaling include perfectionism, self-censorship, or lack of time. To combat these, I will finish with some final tips:

• Allow your journaling to be imperfect. Allow it to be rubbish.
• You do not need to read your entries back. Remember that by putting pen to paper, you are doing it. The process itself will be helpful. 
• Allow yourself freedom of expression. When you are writing, do not think about sharing your deepest feelings or forbidden thoughts with anyone else. Keep your journal a free space where you can say absolutely anything
• Start small. Try to find the time in your daily, weekly, or monthly routine when you can do it. 

Final Thoughts

Journaling can increase self-awareness, improve emotional states, and facilitate introspection and reflection. For these reasons, it can be a great synergistic practice to pair with intentional and growth-oriented psychedelic exploration.

I have found journaling to be one of the most transformational and supportive practices to use alongside psychedelics, helping to bring about more valuable and beneficial experiences and also aiding in their integration. 

I hope this post has inspired you to try journaling and given you some useful prompts to get started today.

Stay safe. Keep journaling.

The post 4 Journaling Methods to Boost Beneficial Psychedelic Processes appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

When it comes to integration—the part of the psychedelic process after our experience where we try to consolidate any perceived benefits—remembering our psychedelic experiences can be a crucial part of the puzzle. Remembering helps us to reconnect to the experience and make it a part of our being. It helps to reconnect us with insights, impressions and important truths we may have encountered.

In this blog post, I will explore remembering as a part of integration. I will look at the benefits of remembering, its role in processing, and how it can help reconnect us to our experience more deeply. I will also look at a few different methods for remembering and recalling the experience so that by the end of the article you will already be able to begin this practice.

My intention with this post is to highlight the importance of remembrance and recall in the psychedelic integration process, and to give you ideas and tools on how to do this so that you may maximise the benefits from your experiences.

Let’s dive in.

Reconnecting with the Experience

When we remember an experience, psychedelic or otherwise, we reconnect with the thoughts, feelings and perceptions that arose during that experience. This is true whether remembering is through spontaneous or active recall.

In the context of psychedelic integration, this is relevant when we consider psychedelic integration as being able to carry over some of the wisdom and insight from our psychedelic experiences into our day-to-day lives outside of the experience.

Deep personal truths can become crystal clear to us in the psychedelic state. And those realisations about what is true and deep and important to us are not things we want to forget easily. Most likely, we want to hold onto them and carry them with us as we re-enter our normal lives. The act of remembering is a way to bring parts of them back into our psyche and our being.

Processing Experiences

Reconnecting with aspects of the experience through remembering can also help with processing. This can be especially important and helpful when we have had very dense psychedelic experiences that have contained huge amounts of content and information. Experiences may have had a high amount of emotional arousal or even crept over into being overwhelming. Those experiences, if left unprocessed, can result in other problems if they continue to exist unresolved in our psyches. Unresolved issues can lead to a manifestation of problems in other areas; mentally, behaviourally and physically.

By being with our memories in a state of remembering or recalling, we can touch the experience again and allow further opportunities for processing.

When experiences are fully processed, there is less ambiguity and more clarity around them. This is where we want to be when moving into action with our integration: beyond processing and ready to move into the deliberate and active part of the integration process.

Keeping The Experience Alive

There is a saying that says the moment someone dies is not when their heart stops beating or their body physically ceases to exist, but that it is the last time anyone ever thought of them. As long as people keep thinking of a person, some part of them is kept alive.

This is relevant in the context of psychedelic integration because, for deeply meaningful experiences, we want to keep them alive. Even though an experience may have finished, it can be seen to continue to live on in spirit, if it continues to influence us through our memory of it. 

Although our psychedelic experience may have ended and the pharmacological effects have worn off, we can keep it alive by recalling it, revisiting it, and remembering it. This helps to keep the experience as part of our being—rather than some thrilling experience we once had and then forgot about and that had no meaningful influence on the rest of our lives.

If there is some truth that has been revealed to us, some knowledge that has been transferred—some revelation or realization—we want to remember that and we want it to inform how we live. When we are living in full alignment with that, then in terms of psychedelic integration, we can consider that a success.

Integration Begins Immediately

This remembering process can begin even before a session is finished. It can begin after the peak, on the end of the downslide, when you are into calmer waters. Here you may already begin recalling and reflecting about what has happened at the peak of the experience. In what is often a calm, quiet, and meditative state, this is a good time to stay with your experience and begin integration by processing and reflecting on the content of the experience.

In this regard, the integration process can be seen as starting as soon as somebody begins coming down from their peak. At this time, it is highly important to stay with the experience as best as possible, and not be in a rush to leave psychedelic states or for the session to end. This means not rushing to go back to mundane things, but staying with yourself and the waves of experience that are still coming. Allowing whatever you have experienced to fully sink in. By allowing it to sink in, it can more easily become part of our mind and our being.

Methods of Remembering and Recall

There are many different ways of remembering and recalling to aid psychedelic integration. Here I will share a few.

Recalling Through The Senses Meditation

One means of aiding recall is a type of guided visualization exercise. This works by systematically going through each of the five senses, and recalling what you can. 

If you have an experience that you would like to remember, psychedelic or not, you can practice this now as you read. Begin by taking a breath and calming your mind. Then, move through the five senses.

Sight

Remember what you saw; the environment, things in the room, people that you were with, any visions or visuals that you may have experienced. These might have occurred in dreamlike psychedelic states, deep recesses of the mind, or the depths of inner or outer space.

Smell

Remember what you smelt. Were there any scents or smells in the space? Can you recall the smell of the mushrooms or the ayahuasca brew? Call all smells back to mind. 

Taste

Are there any tastes you remember? This is not usually a prominent source of memories, but maybe you can recall the taste of the mushrooms or the ayahuasca brew. Recall any tastes that you can.

Touch

Remember what you touched. Was there something that you were lying on? Were there any materials around? Recall as many details as you can and hold them in your mind.

Sound

Remember what you heard. Bring to mind any music that was playing and hear it in your head. Were there any sounds from nature or the environment around you?

When you have gone through the five senses, some of the experience should be back with you and you can move on to a final step.

Feelings 

Finally, can you remember how you felt? What were the most prominent emotions?

Sit with any emotions that come up and allow them to go wherever they may go. Allow them to enter into your being, and notice how you feel physically—the somatic sensation in your body.

This is an important step because meaning is usually accompanied by some kind of emotional content. Emotions can be a doorway through which we reconnect to key moments.

Expressing the Experience Creatively

Expressing the experience creatively via art or music can also be a great way to reconnect with it. A simple way can just be doing doodles with pen and paper. You may bust out some colours or crayons, or you might try a poem. Whatever method, just try to somehow capture and express some essence of your experience.

Revisiting Recordings

Another method of triggering recall is by revisiting any recordings that were made during the session. This can include audio recordings, photos and videos. Listening or watching back can work wonders to reconnect with the version of you that was having that experience. Preparing necessary recording equipment in advance can be useful for these means. 

More simply, you might revisit any notes that you have made with a pen and paper. Reading back over these notes can be a very simple and effective way to reconnect with the experience.

The Role of Journaling

Journaling can be an especially effective and impactful way to integrate an experience.

As part of many of the groundbreaking psilocybin studies done at Johns Hopkins, participants were required to write up a trip report in the form of an open-ended narrative. They were required to do this the same day of their experience, in the evening, and to bring it for discussion the next day. After learning about this and trying it myself, I was surprised by how beneficial it was and made this an unmissable part of my integration process. I do not write it on the same day but always schedule it for the day after.

The process of journaling about an experience after it has happened is helpful because it can help to unpack dense or content-rich experiences. In the act of journaling, we may find little nooks, crannies and crevices of the experience that we had completely forgotten about. This unpacking of the experience can help to facilitate and deepen any understandings that may have arisen. It is generally good practice to capture the experience whilst it is still fresh, either that evening or the day after.

Recreating The Context

Another thing to consider when it comes to memory recall is context-dependent memory. Context-dependent memory refers to the phenomenon whereby it is easier to recall memories when the context of the original experience is replicated somewhat.

In terms of psychedelic experiences, this could include, for example, parts of the setting. This might be done by listening to the same music or revisiting smells. It could also be the clothes you wear or how the space is decorated.

If you had any type of pre-session ritual, you might also revisit that. If you went for a run and meditated before, then to re-create that you might go for a run and meditate, and then simply smell some mushrooms. In some cases, you might even take a low dose to help connect with the psychedelic state and any associated insights.

If you are proactive in setting up your experience for easier recall, you might prepare a specific incense or blend of essential oils to be smelled during the experience. You will then be able to use them to help trigger memories in the future. 

Proactive Integration

Remember to Remember

We know the truth and the insights; we have learned something profound. Remembering to remember can be the tricky bit. Sometimes we just forget to remember our lessons.

Proactive ways to help retain a memory include scheduling periodic sessions to revisit or reflect upon an experience. This could be, for example, one month later, or on a monthly or yearly interval. You might create routines or rituals to support this. This could be a moment of recall at the end of a daily meditation session, or spending a day out in nature once a year, potentially assisted by a mini dose. It can be useful to put these events in calendars or set reminders so that we remember to remember. This type of proactive integration can be hugely valuable in maintaining a connection with a psychedelic experience and its insights over time.

Visual Reminders

Another way of supporting memory is by having associated visual reminders in your environment. For example, if you made a piece of artwork or drew a mandala based on your experience, you might hang it up somewhere in your home where you will see it often. It could also be an item that you find in nature which represents the experience in some way, or a house plant or a piece of art that was prominent or significant during the experience. 

You Can Not Remember Everything

After a deeply impactful or meaningful experience, it can be natural to want to remember every last detail. In reality, that is unrealistic. Although it is helpful to make an effort to remember the experience, it is important to accept that some aspects of it may be lost. Realistically, you are not going to be able to remember the entirety of the experience in perfect detail for the rest of your life. 

Accept that some details may be lost over time and that that is okay. That said, if you are actively recalling and revisiting meaningful experiences, fewer details will be lost, recall will be better, and this will reinforce the integration of those experiences. 

Final Thoughts

“Remember, remember” is not just for the 5th of November. It goes for our psychedelic experiences too.

Remembering can help to facilitate the processing of dense or overwhelming experiences and maintain a connection with the transformative aspects of a psychedelic experience over time. It can help to integrate profound insights and perspectives into daily life and it can allow for a deeper reflection on any lessons gained.

I invite you to try recalling your experience after your next psychedelic session. Try taking some time, even if it is just a couple of hours, to write up a report of your experience the day after. See for yourself what comes of it and if or how it deepens your process. If you already have an experience you would like to recall, try it today!

Do you practice remembering important experiences? Which of the techniques do you find most effective for recall and integration? Is there anything you read here that you would like to try? Leave your comments below. We look forward to hearing from you.

Stay safe, remember well.

The post The Power of Remembering: Enhancing Psychedelic Integration appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

I think improving our relationship with psychedelics is a key but mostly unrecognised piece of long-term integration. This piece is more relevant for the long term practitioner because you don’t need to have a good relationship with a one night stand partner. For something longer term, you do. 

If you are someone who has some kind of ongoing practice of working with psychedelics, how do you relate to them? What do you think about them? When you talk about them with others, how do you feel?

Healing and Understanding

Many users of psychedelics have feelings of guilt, shame, or embarrassment tied into their use. This is usually due to social stigma, cultural perception and drug laws, and many people remain closeted about their use.

Whilst opening up to friends and family members can be healing in some cases, it isn’t always the best option. Keeping the psychedelic part of ourselves hidden from others may often be the most pragmatic course of action. 

To enjoy a really healthy relationship with psychedelics, however, it’s important to resolve any feelings of embarrassment and shame that we have around them.

Exploring the roots of these feelings can be done by journaling. Writing answers to some simple questions, such as ‘Why am I embarrassed? What do I feel ashamed of? Why am I keeping this hidden?’ can begin to bring more clarity, understanding and healing to the relationship.

Trust

Did you ever come out of a session feeling disappointed? Maybe you felt like it was a little bit of a letdown? I certainly have many times, and trust is something I have had to learn over time.

Trusting in psychedelics, the experiences they provide, and the insights they reveal, will bring about a more fruitful journey with them. Can you let go of the seeds of doubt in your mind? 

‘You don’t always get what you want, but you get what you need”
– Psychedelics

This can also mean trusting in the process. Maybe you didn’t get what you were hoping for from a session. You still have the option to trust that on some level it was what you needed at this point, and that it will make sense within the larger context of your journey. Leaning into trust will ultimately benefit you and your relationship with psychedelics.

Patience

Through engaging with psychedelics continuously over a number of years, one of the most valuable but also hardest lessons I’ve had to learn, and am still learning, is that of patience. This is intertwined with trusting that I am being given what I need when I need it, and that ultimately, where I am is where I need to be, not at some point further along where I think I’m supposed to be. This means being patient in allowing the unfolding of my own journey, letting it unravel in its own perfect time, without trying to push it.

Patience helps us allow ourselves to be where we are

An example of practicing patience would be in the integration process. Rather than trying to fix everything at once and improve all areas of your life simultaneously, realise that you are a human and have limits. It’s wisest to choose one or two key areas to focus on. As for all the other things, be patient, they will come in time. 

Respect

Psychedelics are incredibly powerful. They can can sit us on our ass, reduce us to babbling babies, and they can propel us to the far reaches of the universe to spaces we never even knew could exist. They can transform ourselves and the realities that we exist in, both inside and outside sessions. Psychedelics deserve y/our respect.

Gratitude

Practicing gratitude is one of the most powerful things we can do. I find it hard to express in words how much I love psychedelics. But beneath that, how grateful I am that they exist at all, and how incredibly fortunate I am to be in a position where I have access to them. Many people who would like to use them simply do not have the means, ability or access. There are people suffering from heavy depression, and others suffering with terminal cancer who are seeking access and are unable to receive it. I know because I’m contacted by these people and I do find the current reality around their access to be both upsetting and hard to accept. In those moments it’s again a chance to practice patience, and also gratitude for the privileged position that I find myself in.

Final thoughts

These are all overarching principles and lessons that I have received from psychedelics and I believe it’s a fitting response to reflect them back to the wonders which have bestowed these gifts upon me. 

I believe anyone wishing to work with psychedelics over the long term can benefit from establishing a relationship with psychedelics founded upon these core elements.

.

Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful day!

The post Improving Y/our Relationship with Psychedelics appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

Keeping an Open Intention

What we think might be the highest priority when we’re heading into ceremony might not be what is truly needed for us to work on. The depths of the unconscious that emerge in the session reveal to us what really needs to be addressed. These inner depths are known as our inner healing wisdom. Each and every one of us holds this within us.

What needs to come up will come up. Leaning into that trust is an important part of psychedelic work. 

Having thoughts like “this isn’t what I’m supposed to be thinking about” or “this session was not supposed to be about this, I wanted to work on x” are counterproductive. This is resisting the experience. This is not allowing, not being open, not letting go. It isn’t dropping into the flow of experience. It isn’t trusting our inner healer.

“Consider that it may be happening for an important reason.”
– The Zendo project, on difficult experiences

Holding a more general and open intention allows space for a wider spectrum of experience to be fully embraced. It allows for a greater flexibility and a wider range of interpretation. 

Sometimes the meaning of the content will be clear and obvious. Other times it is less straightforward. It can also be downright confusing. Unpacking and integrating afterwards is especially necessary for more opaque experiences.

Crafting An Intention

The process of creating an intention can be broken down into 3 steps:

1. Start with your honest why

To start, we can simply ask:
‘Why am I doing this?’

The simple act of taking a moment to answer this will reveal basic motivations.

Try not to pass any judgement on the answer that comes up. All is valid.

If the answer that comes up seems shallow, overly specific, or otherwise inappropriate, this is the opportunity to change course or reframe. This might be a process of refining the motivation, or just looking at it from a different angle.

Other useful questions to help formulate an intention are:

• Why are you doing this?
• What are you looking for?
• What is working in your life? What isn’t? What would you like to change?
• What are you curious about?
• What would you like to learn about?
• What would you like to understand more?

These questions can then be followed up with ‘why?’, until you reach a satisfactory point.

2. Use further whys to dig deeper

Maybe your intention is looking at a specific problem or area of your life where you would like some answers. When we start the process, it can be as specific as we like; continually asking more whys helps us get us to the root of it. The process here is digging deeper. Doing this, we uncover motivations that sound more and more general. 

3. Refine into a single, simple sentence

Once we have dug deeper, we can collate and distill our answers to form a single pithy line.

To illustrate, here is a rough walkthrough of a previous process of mine, when I was using psilocybin to quit smoking.

1. Why am I doing this?

I want to quit smoking tobacco.

2. Why do I want to quit?

I am experiencing contradictory thoughts about my smoking habit. I feel guilty about smoking, but I still do it sometimes. There is a lack of clarity here. I want my mind to be clear. 

Quitting smoking is the #1 obvious thing I can do for my health. I enjoy leading a healthy lifestyle and place high value on my health. I want to be healthy. 

I’ve already quit twice in the past and the tobacco monster always finds a way to sneak his way back in. I’m tired of being on this merry go round and ending up back in a place where I’m doing something I don’t want to be doing. I experience a lack of self control and I feel ashamed of myself when I end up smoking in front of other people. I just want to be free from this addiction, once and for all.

3. Taking the key points from each of my reasons for wanting to quit, I ended up with my final intention:

‘I am clear, healthy and free’ 

My Experience

A few years ago when I was working at Myco Meditations psilocybin retreat in Jamaica, I remember a team member saying that he often heads into a session with the approach of: “show me what you got”. This is a casual way of putting it, but a general and open intention. 

To give a final personal example, my intention for my most recent session was: to listen and learn. Setting such a broad intention meant that there was no real way to fight the experience or not accept difficult parts when this was brought to mind. Whatever was going on, there would always be an opportunity for me to listen. This could be interpreted in many ways: redirecting my attention to the music, tuning in and ‘listening’ to my inner voice, listening to my body and the physical sensations I was experiencing. Including ‘to learn’ gave me a good reason why I should listen carefully. It helped me to hold and steady my focus at various points on the journey.

Intentions For Integration

Intentions can also be useful in the integration stage. After reflecting on the experience and identifying key themes, it can be worthwhile to set an intention for the next phase of life. This might be for the following days, weeks, or even months.

Some examples:

If you have realised you would like to be less guarded, you might make an intention to be more open.

If you have been keeping things to yourself; it might be to share more.

If you’ve been giving too much of yourself; to practice saying no.

If you take up a lot of space; to listen.

An intention might even be just for the day after. ‘Self care’ or something thereabouts is one I always use on the integration day directly after a session. This allows me to be kind to myself and prioritise self care, but also to do integration work such as journaling, as making that investment of energy when the experience is still fresh helps me to gain the most benefit from my session and therefore caring for my future self. 

These types of integration intentions help give us direction in our lives. Their looseness means they can be interpreted in a wide variety of ways and require us to use our intuition. They can be used as a compass for action in all kinds of situations throughout the days, weeks and months that make up our lives.

The post Setting Intentions for Psychedelic Sessions appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

One of the most common features (and frustrations) associated with the DMT experience is that despite being profound, it can also be very difficult to recall. DMT has a dream-like quality to it, in that you quickly lose your memory of the DMT trip as you return to normal waking consciousness. Terence McKenna drew attention to this quality of the experience when he said: “the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away,” adding that “[t]here is a self-erasing mechanism in it”.

Image by Pretty Drug Things

Many people who experience DMT, especially at the breakthrough levels, will find that they simply can’t remember the bulk of what they experienced. This is something quite unique to the DMT flash and I think part of it comes down to the extremely ineffable nature of the DMT experience, which you could even call hyper-ineffable, with certain aspects not only being indescribable but also unrememberable.

Some people might accept this is a DMT quirk and think nothing of it, whereas others might feel that a lot of important knowledge and insight was lost when the amnesia set in. Whatever your attitude may be about DMT and memory loss, one challenge remains: how can you integrate a DMT experience that is difficult to remember?

In this article, I’d like to share my own experiences of DMT and memory loss, relating to one experience, in particular, that took place six years ago, but which I still mull over sometimes. This has been my most profound psychedelic experience to date, yet it has also been the most difficult to remember, with essentially most of the trip (apparently) erased from my memory. However, over the years, I have still been able to integrate the experience by way of helpful discussions, enlightening books, and productive introspection. First, here’s a brief description of what my experience was like.

My Mystical DMT Experience

One day, I decided to go on a solo psychedelic journey and took 430mg of mescaline HCL. This experience was highly profound in itself, with emotional and life-affirming insights. It felt like the negativity bias had been flushed out of me, replaced instead by existential joy. At the peak of the experience or perhaps just after, however, I had the thought of smoking DMT. I wanted to aim for a breakthrough.

I got everything ready and, for the first time, I had zero anticipatory fear or anxiety, something that was usually quite prominent any previous time before blasting off. I think the lack of pre-trip jitters (and the mescaline, no doubt) helped me to go deeper into the experience than I otherwise might have.

I was ‘congratulated’ for taking the last hit by some presence or presences, to my amusement. After that, I began to lay down and remember a tsunami of colour and patterns enveloping me. I’m not sure I even remember feeling my body completely lay down; my sense of self and body was snuffed out in an instant.

From this point on, the memories are hazy and sparse. My clearest memory was having what felt to be universal knowledge. Every question was answered. There were no mysteries left to be solved. These insights felt as clear as the understanding that follows when you finally solve a problem you’ve been working on for a long time: the immediate relief of clear understanding. There came a point though where I had to leave this realm of universal knowledge and I was told (or knew) that as I was leaving, I wouldn’t be able to bring this knowledge back with me. The cosmic secrets had to remain in this realm and this realm only. A pity, I thought.

I do have a snapshot memory of then travelling through a psychedelic wormhole or tunnel, ending up in a realm with ever-shifting activity. This activity was going on for what felt like an eternity – I definitely had the sense of being away for aeons and certainly could not imagine that there would be a time or place in which this experience was not happening.

But eventually, I gained some perception of my body, feeling the pressure of the floor against my back. At this point, though, my ‘body’ felt nothing more than pulsating, pleasurable energy – everything about me seemed to have melted into the totality of the experience. As I regained more bodily awareness, at a certain point I opened my eyes, as if in shock. I saw multi-layered DMT-like patterns above me, so I was half in my room, half in this heavenly realm. I closed my eyes again and I was still somewhat back in hyperspace. There were entities engaged in all sorts of frenzied, zany activities.

After opening my eyes a second time, I went into the fetal position and began sobbing, feeling like pure consciousness. I had felt the presence of the divine: this titanic, loving, and merciful force. I had the feeling of being shot out of some cosmic womb, reborn, and given a second chance at life. I was utterly stunned and in disbelief about the whole experience. Slowly, piece-by-piece, I regained my sense of identity and my memories, realising I had a life here on Earth and had returned to it.

After the Experience

I have thought about this experience a lot since it happened six years ago, but one of my personal frustrations has been how little I remember and whether my thoughts about the experience or what I wrote down some time after the experience even approaches what actually occurred.

There are many things, nonetheless, that have helped me to integrate this experience (and other DMT experiences), despite the gaps in memory. Before describing these techniques, I’d first like to touch on why integration has helped me and how it might benefit you, as well.

The Benefits of Integration

Integrating this particular experience has helped me to sort through some of the confusion, such as endless questions and doubts about what certain elements mean. You want to remain mindful after such an intense experience, as there is often a difference between healthy introspection and unhealthy obsessive thinking.

Integration, for me, has been a process of creating a clear and meaningful narrative that benefits my attitudes, beliefs, and actions, rather than forget about the experience as something ineffectual and inconsequential. If you are struggling with memory gaps and confusion about a DMT experience, you may find peace of mind by accepting that the experience is likely to remain deeply mysterious to some degree and will always be open to re-interpretation.

Integration has also motivated me to explore different ideas and belief systems, especially those relating to transpersonal, humanistic, and Jungian psychology, spirituality, mysticism, world religions, and wisdom traditions. In these explorations, I found connections to my DMT experience, which helped to add new meaning to the experience, by providing frameworks in which to interpret it and use it to benefit myself and others.

As an atheist confronted with ‘the divine’, I also felt a need to reconcile my atheistic worldview with this undeniable experience. This is not a process that has finished (which is true of integration, in general), but so far viewing this divine quality and experience as something human and interior (rather than necessarily exterior) has been productive. You may likewise discover that integration will allow you to find more wholeness, through the reconciliation of different aspects of yourself, as well as the expression of unrealised aspects.

6 Ways to Integrate a Difficult-to-Remember Experience

1. Let Integration Happen Organically

 What I’ve found is that the process of integrating a DMT experience will happen organically when I stop trying to force interpretations onto it and when I give up obsessing about what I might or might not remember. Often, more memories may arise further down the line or existing memories can become clarified or take on a new meaning.

Integrating a DMT experience that is hard to remember might just require patience, time, and being mindful of any new ways in which the experience seems to influence your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, choices, behaviour, and lifestyle. Integration can be organically going on without you even being aware of it.

2. Read Widely

For me personally, there have also been spontaneous moments of integration or clarity when reading a book, article, or someone else’s trip report. A word, phrase, or sentence can seem to bring a memory into focus, create an emotional reaction that feels meaningful, or elicit some sort of constructive thought or insight.

I can give a few examples of books that seemed to help with the process of integration. One was the sci-fi novel Star Maker (1937) by Olaf Stapledon. It tells the story of a nameless narrator who travels through the cosmos, eventually coming into contact with the ‘Star Maker’, the divine creator of everything. The description of this meeting with the Star Maker helped to clarify my own contact with ‘the divine’ during my DMT experience.

Another book was the novel Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), written by Hermann Hesse. There were just a couple of phrases that reignited my memory of the DMT experience:

“At any rate, Goldmund had shown him that a man destined for high things can dip into the lowest depths of the bloody, drunken chaos of life, and soil himself with much dust and blood, without becoming small and common, without killing the divine spark within himself, that he can err through the thickest darkness without extinguishing the divine light and the creative force inside the shrine of his soul.”

The phrases ‘divine spark’ and ‘divine light’ helped me to recall how, coming out of my DMT experience, I felt that ‘the divine’ was something in me. The reason these phrases stood out to me, pregnant with meaning, might have been because this aspect of ‘divinity’ in the self held some importance that I should pay attention to. While I am still unsure and sceptical about what this inner ‘divine’ quality actually is, I do believe it is a positive quality and that if I can focus on that feeling of the divine, it will lead to greater well-being and more positive experiences and actions.

One more book that I’ve come across that benefited the process of integration was The Idea of the Holy (1917), written by the philosopher and theologian Rudolf Otto. In this book, Otto introduces the concept of the numinous, which stands for ‘the holy’ or ‘the divine’, which Otto conceives in a particular way.

He argued, firstly, that this experience of the divine, the “wholly other”, was at the basis of all religions, something that I understood, based on my experience with DMT. I came out of the experience thinking that my encounter with this powerful force, this divine ‘other’, reminded me of descriptions of prophets or Biblical characters being overwhelmed by the presence of God, such as Moses’ vision of the burning bush and Saul’s Road to Damascus experience, when Jesus appears to him, an experience that was so overwhelmingly powerful it caused Saul to fall to his knees.

Otto describes the experience of the numinous as involving fear, mystery, and fascination. This mixture of fear and fascination towards the power of the divine was very relatable and Otto’s elaboration on the numinous helped me to further clarify my experience, although it still remains shrouded in mystery, which, after all, seems to be an essential quality of this divine presence. 

So, if you are struggling to both remember and integrate a DMT experience, I would recommend searching for books, articles, and trip reports that relate to the particular themes of your own experience. Reading fiction, non-fiction, and anecdotes can, when you least expect it, trigger some recall or allow you to look at your experience from a different light, helping you to make sense of it. While you may not remember much of your experience, what you do remember can, as it turns out, contain a great deal of potential for meaning and growth.

3. Talk Openly About It

One of the most effective ways to aid integration, when your experience is difficult to remember, is to talk about it openly with someone else. You can turn around an experience in your head for years and wonder about what it means, but sometimes the perspective of someone else can lead you to conclusions you might not have reached on your own. This is especially true when the person you’re talking to has had similar experiences, is aware of such experiences, or is knowledgeable about areas of psychology – such as transpersonal psychology – which deal with altered states of consciousness.

When I was seeking a therapist one time during a bout of depression, I found someone who specialised in transpersonal psychology and remember thinking this person could help me examine my DMT experiences in more depth. I believed the positive nature of the experience could help me in my depressive state. When I first met the therapist, however, and voiced this intention of mine, the reaction was not what I had hoped for. Rather than view these experiences as meaningful material that could benefit me, she stressed that because I had depression I should not have used psychedelics, that I put myself at risk of harm, and that if I were to continue therapy, I would have to avoid all drug use.

Not only was this response surprising, given her training as a transpersonal psychologist, but it was also anathema to the integration I needed, as it cast the experience in a negative light, with ‘wrongness’ attached to it. I did not see this therapist again. If you are trying to integrate a DMT experience, it is crucial to be selective of who you speak to and to avoid talking about it further if you are met with any judgement. Integration is a highly personal and vulnerable process and so, if other people are to help you in this process, they will need to be open, empathetic, and non-judgemental.

Fortunately, I have seen two other therapists whose attitudes about my DMT experiences were completely different. And I am grateful that I was able to discuss these experiences so openly, especially considering that these therapists were not specifically trained (as far as I’m aware) in psychedelic integration. I talked about some elements of my mystical experience with DMT and my frustration with being unable to remember much of it.

Interestingly, both therapists had similar responses to this frustration of mine. They said something to the effect of “you will remember what is most important about the experience”, with one therapist saying that I was lucky to have had it, as it is a rare experience. I think this helped to make the process of integration much smoother, as it made me realise I didn’t have to obsess about what I do and don’t remember, or regret not being able to remember more, as the most meaningful aspects are still there, and that the experience is something to be immensely grateful for.

Again, even if an experience is hard to remember, this doesn’t mean integration isn’t going on unconsciously, affecting the way you view yourself, others, and the world at large. However, because a lot of this process is unconscious, you may find it beneficial to seek out a therapist who can work with you in becoming aware of this material and processing it, which can be conducive to personal growth.

Others find that psychedelic integration circles offer the ideal environment in which to discuss and make sense of their psychedelic experiences.

4. Write About the Experience

Writing about DMT experiences that are difficult to remember is another great way of trying to integrate them. Fleshing out ideas in writing is a different process than speaking about those ideas. You can write in a stream of consciousness sort of way, writing down whatever thoughts about the experience arise moment-to-moment. You can write in a divergent, creative way, producing as many new and interesting avenues of interpretation as you can and seeing which interpretation for you, subjectively, holds the most meaning and significance.

For me personally, writing – whether that’s privately or publicly in the form of articles – has allowed me to make a lot more sense of my DMT experiences than I think I could achieve through just introspection and conversations with others. For example, when I get some moments of clarity – moments where memories of DMT experiences start flooding into conscious awareness – I have made sure to make a note of that memory, usually as notes on my phone, or in a notepad if I have one nearby. These moments of clarity are fleeting, but trying to capture them in written form can help you create a clearer picture of the DMT experience, even if what you write down seems harder to relate to once the memory fades again.

5. Recreate the Context of the Experience

Context-dependent memory refers to the phenomenon whereby it is easier to retrieve certain memories when the context in which the memory was formed is replicated. For example, if you are struggling to remember what a DMT experience felt like, but you were listening to particular music during the trip, re-listening to that music could help you to retrieve memories of the visual, emotional, and conceptual components of the experience. The more you can do to try to recall the experience, the easier it will be to integrate.

Another aspect of context-dependent memory is state-dependent memory: the phenomenon in which it is easier to recall a memory if you are in the same state – or a similar state – in which the memory was formed. One possible reason DMT experiences can be so hard to remember is that the memories relating to such experiences (or at least some aspects of them, anyway) are state-dependent. So, if you can put yourself in the same physical or mental state in which the memory was formed, or a similar state, you may find it easier to retrieve the memories of the experience in question, which may provide you with valuable information.

You can access state-dependent memories in a variety of ways. One way would be to use DMT again, as this would mentally and physically put you in the same state in which the memory was formed relating to a previous experience. You may not even need to take a high dose, as even a light DMT experience may be similar enough in its quality to trigger the retrieval of memories.

I have not used DMT since my experience six years ago, so I can’t personally speak on the effectiveness of using DMT again to retrieve memories. However, when I occasionally used cannabis in the past, I would have vivid memories – like snapshots of hyperspace, imbued with emotions – of previous DMT experiences (although it’s hard to say which particular experiences they relate to).

Of course, if you don’t use cannabis or don’t want to, this doesn’t mean you can’t retrieve the memories in other ways. I have also remembered DMT experiences under the influence of different psychedelics, as well as experienced short moments of remembering during meditation. It seems that the ‘similar’ state you need to be in to remember a DMT experience can encompass a range of altered states.

6. Prioritise the Emotional Dimension

While many aspects of the DMT experience can be difficult to remember (e.g. the sequence of events and various details), usually one of the strongest impressions of the experience is its emotional quality. It can be easier to question and interpret how the entities and hyperspace appeared to look than how one felt entering hyperspace, traversing hyperspace, and then coming out of hyperspace.

Many strong emotions and feelings may be involved in the DMT experience, such as awe, bliss, euphoria, joy, unconditional love, gratitude, fear, panic, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. By taking the time to really feel into the emotional aspect of these experiences, you can let your mind freely engage with them, seeing what meaning arises.

Emotionally-charged memories may be connected to important insights and lessons. For instance, you might recall how you felt when experiencing love and comfort from the entities during the experience. You may realise that this was connected to greater well-being and so decide for yourself that in order to experience this greater sense of well-being in daily life, it is wise to try to treat yourself just as the entities did. Part of integrating this lesson may involve more attention placed on self-care and self-compassion. This is just one possible interpretation, of course. Integrating the emotional aspect of the DMT experience will always be highly personal.

By prioritising the emotional dimension, you may find you can remember more details of your DMT experience, as well as make more sense of it, offering you some nuggets of wisdom when you least expect it.

A DMT experience might be brief and hard to remember, but it can also be extremely powerful and rich. With patience, self-awareness, and conscious effort, you can unearth meaning and benefits from a single experience over the course of many years.

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Sam Woolfe is a freelance writer based in London. His main areas of interest include mental health, mystical experiences, the history of psychedelics, and the philosophy of psychedelics. You can follow him on Twitter and find more of his work at www.samwoolfe.com.

The post How to Integrate a Difficult-to-Remember DMT Experience appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

Self-care is an important part of integrating a psychedelic experience and in general some good practices are:

• Spending time in nature
• Meditation
• Adequate sleep
• Exercise
• Clean diet
• Journaling

However integration is an individual process and will work best if you personalise and find things that work best for you.

What is Self Care?

Self-care is often be understood as things which promote health, rest and relaxation such as going for a walk or taking hot a bath. However, a much more effective way of understanding self-care is by broadening its definition to anything that replenishes your energetic reservoir. Anything that energizes you, replenishes you or (re) charges you in some way can be considered a self-care practice. This includes activities that really light you up, nourish your soul, and invite your presence. Any activities that fall in to these categories can be considered excellent self-care practices and used to develop your own personalized integration system.

Today I’d like to share an exercise in two parts that can help you to develop your own personalized self care kit.

Creating a Personalised Self Care Kit

1. Make a To Be List

We all have long and seemingly unending to do lists, but what about a to be list? Take a moment to journal your answers to these questions:

• What are the inner experiences that you love?
• What are the inner experiences where you feel most at home?

Examples: calm, peaceful, inspired, confident, creative, playful, at ease, humorous, loving, adventurous, kind, powerful, motivated, courageous, disciplined etc.

2. Which activities?

Once you have your to be list, journal answers to:

• What nourishes those states?
• What activities help to cultivate those states?
• What are the activities that really light you up?
• What activities really serve your soul?

Examples: listening to music, travel, writing, hanging out with friends, cooking, going to see a film, creating art, exercise, cuddling, going camping, getting a massage, going on a retreat etc.

When creating your list of activities do not be afraid to really personalize it and include activities which most people wouldn’t generally expect to be a self-care or recharging practice. Somethings which may energize or inspire you may seem strange to other people but don’t be afraid to write what is true for you. This can really make a big difference and this is the big advantage of creating a personalized self care kit rather than following generic self care practices. You can build a much more complete kit for yourself by including things that are unique to you.

It could be watching a video from a specific influencer that you find inspiring, or reading a challenging book. Some things that are unique to my kit are watching a music documentary, learning to play a song on the guitar and jamming it out with the volume cranked up, and watching a movie with one of my favourite comedy actors.

“In the trance of daily life we can be so organised around shoulds that we lose touch with what we love”
– Tara Brach

Let what you love be what you do

Try to really honour yourself and create space and time for the activities on your list. If you are the type of person who tends to slip in to prioritizing work or doing things for other people ahead of yourself it can be very helpful to actually schedule in your self-care activities. Put them in your calendar and protect them as you would any important meeting. After all, it is a very important meeting: a meeting with life, for yourself. If you think that sounds selfish, consider that you won’t have anything to give to others if you are depleted and empty. Caring for others begins with caring for ourselves.

Weaving Self Care in to Integration

Making time for these activities is especially important in the days and weeks following a psychedelic experience. Psychedelics increase neuroplasticity which means that you are more able to create new connections between neurons in the brain. In plainer English, this means it is a great opportunity for re-wiring; creating new patterns of thought and behaviour. This is a way of wearing in newer, healthier and more self compassionate grooves into your day-to-day life. It can be useful to do this exercise before a psychedelic experience so you have your personalized kit ready afterwards.

Best of luck and take care, of yourself

The post Personalising Integration: Self Care appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

As I tweeted a while ago:

Returning to twitter after my recent digital detox, I asked the psychedelic twitter crowd:

What would your #1 integration tip for psychedelic first timers be?

There was a great thread which covered many areas important to integration and included: self care, quality rest, community, selective sharing, facing what came up, avoiding distractions, remembering your why, and setting intentions.

Answers came from knowledgable people around the world, including Psychedelic anchor David Wilder, Canadian author James W. Jesso, and mental health writer Sam Woolfe, so I thought I would share some of my favourites here…

Top Integration Tips From Twitter

Take Time Off

Give yourself plenty of time and space to process the experience. During that period, make self-care your top priority.

 

@think_wilder

Turn your phone off, have 2 days. One day for the experience and one to reflect and rest the day after. Remember to breathe and you’re likely more resilient than you give yourself credit for.

@DecrimNatureMN

Get Quality Rest

Don’t distract yourself for the days after. Instead feel & embody all of the emotions that come up after the experience.

@patti3001

Take time to feel into the emotional impressions left in you by the most significant moments of your journey, really feel into them, and then let yourself wonder about it. Journalling in this context is great, but be mindful to whom and how (and if) you choose to share the story.

@jameswjesso

Find Community

Beforehand, glean information from those you really trust about their experiences. Just like you know who to talk to in your circle about music or whatever, so to for the psychedelic journey. Also, integration can take forever so expect decades not weeks.

@ddaardvark

Find some like-minded people to work with and start a journal or diary for your deepest thoughts. Be prepared to be vulnerable but don’t be afraid of it

@society_welsh

Remember Your Why

Remember why you tripped. Beginning to think about what you wanted from the psychedelic can be an important first step towards using the feelings and thoughts that came up in order for you to transform your life.

@doubleblindmag

Set Intentions

Don’t be afraid of what the mushrooms are showing you. Listen to your mind & heart and proceed accordingly. Set intention. Everyone has their own journey

@TheDailyShroom

You can read the full thread on twitter here. Thanks to all the contributors and commenters.

The post Top Integration Tips for Psychedelic First Timers appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

If integration is a new term to you, start here:

Here are the contents, I’ll expand on each point below.

1. Understand What You Are Practicing
2. Manage Expectations
3. Don’t Be The Arbiter Of Truth
4. Don’t Assume (You’ve Had The Same Experience)
5. Seek Continued Development

Credits

Before beginning, I’d like to acknowledge that this piece is pulled from my notes from workshops, webinars and presentations on the topic. Primarily, from an excellent webinar on integration hosted by MAPS last summer which featured two people I consider leaders in the field: Marc Aixalà, and Ingmar Gorman. Some is also taken from a workshop with Ingmar at Insight Conference in Berlin last year. You can find out more about them at the bottom of this post.

Alright, let’s get into it!

1. Understand What You Are Practicing

Integration is a broad term and will look very different depending on a person’s needs. One factor in determining a person’s needs is when you see them in relation to their psychedelic experience.

In this scale from Ingmar, we see that there is the post acute psychedelic effect on the left end, and long term psychotherapy on the right.

The post acute psychedelic effect on the far left would be the hours and days directly following an experience, sometimes known as the ‘afterglow’ period, where as on the far right it would be a long term and ongoing therapeutic relationship. 

Working on a psychedelic retreat where you are with people directly after their experience, for example, will be on the far left of the scale. If you are conducting a follow up call two weeks later, you will be closer to the middle. If you are working with someone in an ongoing process over many months and years, you will be on the right side. 

Another factor to consider is how a person is doing following the experience: did it bring difficulties or benefits?

On this scale from Marc, we see the different ideas of what could constitute integration, from dealing with undesired effects (e.g. emergence of repressed traumatic memories) to maximising benefits (e.g. greater sense of peace, connectedness, more mental clarity).

Working on the left end of the scale requires more specialisation and looks more like a clinical practice, whereas further to the right could look more like coaching.

Knowing where you are practicing on these scales should inform your approach and help you to know what you are capable of doing. For example, for a therapist, empathy alone is not sufficient; a capacity to recognise what is happening with transference and countertransference and how to respond to that, is also necessary.

Although they can be combined, integration and psychotherapy could be very different processes, so be clear about which you are doing. Acknowledge your level of expertise and limitations, and be ready to refer when helping someone effectively is outside of your scope.

2. Manage Expectations

Psychedelics are getting hyped. Retreats are the new trend. Trips are the latest ‘cure all’. Stories of seemingly overnight change in the media are backed by incredible results from clinical studies.

A desire for fast change is fed by our cultural leanings to quick fixes and instant gratification and the idea of a ‘magic bullet’ is very appealing and draws many people to psychedelics.

Coming back to reality after a ceremony or retreat, and the realistic pace of change, can bring a surprising realisation that there is continued work to be done. 

The non-linear rate of improvement after an experience can fall short of people’s expectations, and this can lead to disappointment and frustration.

Falling back into old ways, as often happens on a path of growth, can also bring a sense of failure.

Handling these challenges can be handled well by managing expectations and bringing them to a realistic level.

Of course, hope is an important factor in the process.

So how does one manage expectations whilst maintaining a sense of hope?

It is very useful to first try to understand, what is their expectation of the outcome?

If expectations are high, then balance bringing them to a more realistic level with keeping a sense of optimism and hope.

10 Years of Therapy Insight

It’s often heard that psychedelic sessions are ‘like 10 years of therapy’ or ’10 years of transformation’. Sat next to me at Ingmar’s workshop in Berlin, Marlene Rupp of the excellent Sapiensoup put it perfectly in more real terms: ’10 years of insight’.

See Marlene’s talk at Beyond Psychedelics here:
How To Start A Psychedelic Integration Circle

Insight isn’t worth much until it is realised and actualised in the world; when it is integrated. There is a big difference between understanding a profound truth and embodying it. We could all read a quote from a text or book, but getting to the place of living in accordance with that wisdom is something else. This takes time and effort, something useful to recall in managing expectations.

A useful way of putting it that Marc shared is:

“You will have an experience.
That experience can be very useful, if you do something with it.”

3. Don’t Be The Arbiter Of Truth

It can be the case that a repressed or traumatic memory is recovered during a psychedelic session. For example, abuse from a family member.

In this scenario, the person who has experienced or re-experienced the memory may ask you if it is true, if it really happened.

Even if they don’t say it in words, they may in one way or another be fishing for a confirmation on the validity of their memory.

When it comes to recovered memories, the advice is simple: if you are in any way asked about their validity, do not confirm one way or the other.

The only correct answer you can give is ‘I don’t know’. A false confirmation one way or the other can have seriously negative consequences.

Worth mentioning here is Elizabeth Loftus and her groundbreaking work on false memories, including recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse – very interesting stuff for those inclined.

In general, be very careful when interpreting others’ experiences. This leads us nicely on to…

4. Don’t Assume (You’ve Had The Same Experience)

Someone comes to you who has recently had deep and powerful mushroom trip. Perfect, you’ve had many deep and powerful mushroom trips so you know exactly what they’re going through.

Not so fast.

Just because you’ve consumed the same substance as someone else, be it ayahuasca, truffles, acid or any other, it doesn’t mean that you’ve had the same experience. It doesn’t mean they were even remotely similar.

No matter how many similarities there may be, you can’t assume you’ve had the same experience. The width and variety of psychedelic (and life) experience should never be underestimated.

That Don Miguel was on to something

Now of course, there can be similarities (and if so, great, because then your experience and learnings will be more easily translated to the other person). But if there are, then try to uncover them with non-directive questioning and patient listening, rather than assuming them from the start and then reaching them skewed by confirmation bias.

When it comes to asking questions, I personally try to take the approach of a non-judgemental exploration characterised by curiosity – seeing the interaction as a means to explore the person’s inner world alongside them. Rather than knowing and leading, trying to go deeper and uncover more.

As an integration coach, it isn’t necessary to share your own personal psychedelic experiences. After all, this isn’t about you. What is more important is that you let them know that you understand the challenges they are facing.

Be A Good Listener

On this point I think it’s useful to emphasize the importance of being a good listener. 

“There are three things you can do to help someone. The first is to listen. The second is to listen. The third is to listen some more.”

When you find yourself talking, WAIT.
That is, remember the acronym:
W. A. I. T.
Why Am I Talking?

From Ingmar’s workshop at Insight Conference 2019

5. Seek Continued Development

Continued and sustained effort is fundamental to becoming great at anything. As Goenka would say; diligence, patience, and persistence.

As I’ve mentioned before, I believe the best way to learn comes from a combination of both study and practice, so read plenty, and seek practice where you can.

However, this final point is a tricky one. As psychedelic integration is a nascent field, there aren’t really any obvious ways to go about further development. By contrast, if you want to become a psychotherapist, for example, there are some pretty clear roadmaps to do so. How to become an integration provider on the other hand, isn’t so clear.

Globally, our only long standing traditions around using psychedelics have survived through indigenous cultures – e.g. Native American Indians, Amazonian tribes – where practice has never been totally discontinued and knowledge around practices has been passed down through ancestral lineage.

Because of the preservation of practices in those cultures, experiences are naturally integrated in to their communities. For this reason, they don’t really have models for integration that are applicable to us in the West. Here, psychedelics have only recently begun to emerge as a tool for awareness, growth and therapeutic application, and as such are not integrated in our society.

Though we currently lack these systems, they are on the way. In the meantime, seek education and practice where you can; go to workshops, start a circle, learn in related areas e.g. breathwork, mindfulness, support group and community building. Marc gave a couple hints: become a good listener, and become a good therapist in whatever school you’re comfortable in.

You can find some useful and related resources in this post:

If you have any further tips, resources, or ideas, feel free to get in contact.

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

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Resources & Credit:

As promised above, here is more information on Marc and Ingmar. I’ve been lucky enough to attend in person workshops with both, a tripsitting workshop in 2017 by Marc in Copenhagen and an integration one with Ingmar last year in my home city of Berlin. They both have a lot of experience in the field and I’d recommend both as good sources of information. 

Marc Aixalà is an engineer, psychologist, psychotherapist and certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator, specialized in supporting people who face challenging situations after experiencing non-ordinary states of consciousness. He coordinates support and integration services at ICEERS. You can find out more about ICEERS here.

Ingmar Gorman is a psychologist who specializes in assisting populations who have had experiences with psychedelics and other psychoactive compounds. He is director of the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program, and co-founder of Fluence.

The post Best Practices for Psychedelic Integration Providers appeared first on Maps of the Mind.

Integration has become a bit of a buzzword in the psychedelic world the last few years and this subfield has been growing rapidly with whole systems, protocols and philosophies being devised and developed by individuals and organisations. The number of integration circles, events and workshops around the world is growing just as fast and you can find whole tracks of talks dedicated to psychedelic integration at international conferences and forums.

This topic is huge and I could write a whole series on integration (I plan to).

But, first, the basics:

What is psychedelic integration, exactly?

What does it mean to integrate psychedelic experiences?

To begin, a definition of what it means to integrate, non-psychedelically.

integrate /ˈɪntɪɡreɪt/
: to form, coordinate, or blend into a functioning or unified whole : unite.

So if to integrate is to make whole by bringing all parts together, psychedelic integration could be seen as unifying the psychedelic and non-psychedelic sides of someone. It is to harmonize how a person is – how they feel, think and act -when they are in a psychedelic state and when they aren’t.

A definition of entheogenic integration, from ERIE (Entheogenic Research Integration & Education):

From erievision.org

N.B. Entheogen is another word for psychedelic substance.

If psychedelic experiences offer us opportunities to learn about how to live and what’s truly important, then integration is living in accordance with that wisdom, day to day, and not just thinking or theoretically understanding profound truths. 

It’s becoming unified with those moments of deep insight and understanding that can be experienced on or after psychedelic journeys. Depending on your background, culture and worldview, these moments may also be referred to as epic realisations, insights, cosmic downloads, mystical revelations, receiving of divine wisdom, messages from God, ‘aha’ or ‘eureka’ moments.

“Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behaviour and the whole system of his knowledge.”
Alan Watts

Ingmar Gorman, speaking on the integration track at Psychedelic Science 2017, described integration with the following:

• Happens after an experience
• Reflection or understanding of one’s experience
• Merging of one’s experience with daily life
• Maintaining positive benefits
• Assisting with challenging or intrusive thoughts and feelings
• Navigating relationships
• It can be very ordinary

He also made the point that it is interdisciplinary (psychology, physical fitness, artistic expression etc.) and multi intentioned (healing, spiritual, personal growth).

Katherine Maclean, also on the integration track at Psychedelic Science referred to James Lore’s definition of integration:

“is a deliberative, active participation, as well as an allowing. Integration is a process of stepping into and trusting that meaning making is an ongoing ordinary human capacity that happens throughout your life.”

This quote hints at how integration is both an organic and deliberate process. Organically, some things may change without effort; thought patterns or behaviours, or maybe something that is harder to identify more than a general feeling of freshness and rejuvenation.

Deliberately is the active participation, and to willingly participate in the integration process, one must first affirm their insights and validate the importance of the experience, and not just brush it off as a ‘trip’ or ‘some drug experience’. This is where integration circles can be beneficial, or finding a community or others who understand and are open to hearing about a psychedelic experience. As well as hearing your story, friends and community can help with support and accountability.

Weaving the mystical with the practical

Insights may be affirmed and a belief that what was experienced or understood has real value beyond the trip. The session has revealed something that is deeply felt needs to be done or changed, but still, it doesn’t all come easy. Some insights can be challenging or uncomfortable, and so require more time, effort and conscious practice to act on and fully realise. This is where planning, structure, effort and support come in. Structured practices, system implementation and habit formation can be huge in this process, and I see this deliberate part of integration as having a large overlap with the fields of personal development and self improvement. I’ll continue on this theme in another post.

Thanks for reading.

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