As every person’s psychedelic experience can be so radically different, the integration process in itself is also profoundly unique. For some people, the process might be focused around a particular theme or life pattern, such as communication, intimate relationships, career choices, personal health, while for others it might be much more specific, such as “I really need to talk with that friend from high school and create some closure about what happened between us,” or “I need to be honest with my partner about how I feel about this and share my authentic truth.”

These are just a few forms that integration work can take.

The integration follow-up work that we do, is based on your own unique circumstances, the specific intentions you had going into the retreat, and of course, who you now wish to become and where you desire to go in your life. It may be simple, complex, or even dramatic, but what’s most important to know is that every path, desire, and personal process/experience is valid, and that integration is not about dogma, judgment, or pushing anyone in one way or another – it is a process entirely for and about you.

In general, we can categorise integration work into a few primary sub-categories:

This primarily revolves around how you view yourself, others, the world, spirituality, and the relationships that you experience between all of them. As with many psychedelic experiences, some significant and deeply relevant themes may arise, which often take a lot of dedicated work to fully process and integrate into your being. 

This area of integration can take the form of looking into and working with our past, finding purpose and meaning in our present, or looking out into our future to see what we will become, and also questions about our mortality, the purpose of the universe and existence, religion, consciousness, the Earth, spiritual conundrums, past lives, and ineffable experiences generally. Psychedelic experiences can often catalyze and open us to these new and occasionally scary terrains, and psycho-spiritual integration is the process in which we organize and bring all the pieces together into one symbiotic whole.

This primarily relates to the processing of emotions and feelings that continually arise in your life. There are times when we do not want to feel our deepest feelings and be fully present and available for what they have to teach us, however, these emotions often stay lodged inside of us, just waiting to be processed and released. Trauma and fear, from this perspective, are more like energies in the body/mind which have been locked away inside of many rooms. 

Therefore, the process of emotional integration will slowly and compassionately regain access to these rooms in order to allow the energy, content, and emotional material to gradually and safely rise to the surface to be processed. There are several sub-categories to emotional integration as well, such as grief, jealousy, forgiveness, and gratitude work. However, psychedelic experiences can often shed light on the fact that our deeper emotional patterns, and the relationship we have to particular emotions, still needs work and at the same time gift us new energy and insights into how we can begin to reorient our emotional fortitude.

This is essentially anything that encourages movement of the body and the energy in the body, which allows healing and deep processing to occur for the individual through the realm of physical sensation and direct feeling. The process might revolve around yoga, trauma release, somatic experiencing, martial arts training, weight lifting, swimming, bodywork/massage, ecstatic shaking, infrared sauna therapy, cold plunging, hiking in nature, dancing, singing, and any act of physical and mental self-care.

The most important element to note about this form of integration is that it is a process in which your body and energy is being first encouraged, and then soul allowed, to begin healing on its own accord. The chosen route, therapy, and/or practice will again always be highly unique to the individual, but once your approach is found, physical/somatic integration can be a highly effective way to work through very complex and nuanced material.

The integration process is, by far, the most important element when embarking on any life changing journey. Once the hero’s journey is over, we invariably come away with many new insights, inspirations, ideas, and potentially, some new fears, doubts, and challenging realizations about what we experienced.

As we start to reflect on our experience, we also begin to unveil who we truly are and who we are becoming and most importantly, how this “new person” is going to effectively integrate itself into what used to be our previous personality.

Psychedelic experiences have the potential to open up some very dramatic, significant, and new ways of feeling and being – new ways of seeing the world, seeing others, and above all, new ways of seeing yourself. These experiences can bring to the surface new goals, things you would like to do and move towards, things you feel you need to say, how to heal with people in your life, and so much more.

Here at Plant Medicine Retreat Thailand, we believe effective psychedelic integration is simply the process of achieving wholeness. It is about noticing the subtleties of our past conditioning, karma, addictions, unhealthy tendencies, and then gently learning how to process these insights into the person we are now desiring to become in the present. Integration is the powerful element that turns your intentions into reality. It is what makes your new found reality seem more tangible and long-lasting.

As with many of the above questions, the process of integrating a powerful and life changing experience can take anywhere from a few days, to several years. In some cases, a single plant medicine or psychedelic experience for instance, may continue to require integration for many, many years, or may not even have an “end point” at all. Some experiences are so important, radical, and meaningful to us that they may permanently change our outlook and evolutionary process. This only makes sense of course, for as individuals we are always changing, and the world around us is always changing too.

The nature of the psychedelic experience itself and the content that arises within these experiences, can vary dramatically from person to person. So, how the integration process looks, and what that process entails, will be entirely unique to the individual. That said, when approached with the right intention and proper integration work at the very beginning, the process invariably becomes much smoother and easier. Sometimes, it can help you understand the true meaning behind the experience, which will allow for quicker healing.

The most important thing to remember is not to have any expectations, but rather to focus on relaxing and surrendering to the process. Integration is about allowing the lessons and insights you gained from any experience to move through you and to change you, to focus on the work you are ready to do now, and to imagine the person you wish to become.

Additionally, it is fundamental to any effective integration process that our challenging internal material be addressed and resolved, and that we learn how to avoid soaking in our past and in our pain. This is a very common tendency yet easily avoided hang up, and not getting trapped in the never-ending process of “healing work,” is what effective integration is all about.

All plant medicine or psychedelic experiences will greatly benefit from conscious integration. Many people today often continue to return again and again to plant medicines with the notion that they “need more work and healing” or that they “still need answers about this or that.” Often times, this urge and need to continually have more and more experiences and healing, can actually be a trauma in itself. This is what makes integration so important.

Integration is an essential part of any psychedelic or powerful experience, because it is the very activity that makes our insights more real, tangible, and long-lasting. It is the work that moves the insight from the conceptual to the actual. Any life changing experiences require time and patience in order to fully understand and see the deeper nuances and meanings embedded within it.

The intimations and meaning of a truly life changing experience is, by its very nature, almost never immediately apparent, for the amount of data and information being processed is immense, even overwhelming. This too is part of the process. Without integration, which essentially starts when the experience or “trip” is over with, you will most likely not create any long-lasting change in your life. You may feel good and clear for a while, but the integration process is the thing which actually allows our deeper insights and revelations to be embodied and become fully alive within us and within our lives.