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9 Tips for Integrating Your Psychedelic Experience
Posted under: Latest News, News and Science
Whether you had a solo journey or took a psychedelic trip with your friends, whether it was plant medicine in a ceremony or hallucinatory drugs in a clinic, proper processing of these transcendental experiences is both valuable and necessary. Despite what it can feel like, real healing often comes after the trip.
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What is Integration?
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As a general definition, integration is about bringing parts together to make a whole. Making space for integration allows you to distill the wisdom of the trip and implement it in your day-to-day life, gathering the puzzle pieces collected during the psychedelic trip and placing them within the larger picture.
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It’s an individual process and there’s no one-size-fits-all advice for how integration looks, yet the following techniques, tools, and tips can help you to make the most of your psychedelic experience, allowing the lessons learned to settle deeper and potentially sprout into new ways of being and relating.
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1. Rest
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First and foremost ─ rest! A psychedelic experience can be profound and deeply moving, uncovering different aspects of our nature dredged from the depths of our psyche. On a neurological level, psychedelic substances cause your brain to fire in totally new ways, creating different perspectives and insights to come to you.
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Your mind goes through a lot during all this. It is super important to give yourself plenty of space to rest after this mental marathon. Contrary to what you may believe, integration can often happen best when you’re not consciously ‘doing’ anything.
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2. Document the experience
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This doesn’t mean you have to recall every single aspect of your journey, but it can be very helpful to find a medium through which you can document some of your experience.
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Jot down key concepts and takeaways ─ be it emotions, realizations, or visuals. Whether through writing, an audio recording, or a visual drawing… anything works as long as you can return to it later.
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The act of documentation can often help the experience to settle in our system, and ideas or visions that may make no sense at this moment can reveal something of importance later. Don’t worry about capturing everything… you will retain the information that you need.
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3. Community
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While your spiritual journey and psychedelic experience are entirely your own, the integration process is something that can (and perhaps should) be shared. Finding a supportive place where you can speak about your experience can be an incredibly healing part of helping it to ‘land’ and support the sense-making process.
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Also meeting people who are also interested in conscious expansion and psychedelics can be a great way of forming new and enriching connections.
You could find these likeminded people in organizations such as:
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4. Homework
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It is a total misconception that psychedelics are a fast track to enlightenment or a type of shortcut for your healing process. While the experience can go much deeper and trigger more insights than traditional therapy, it is important to do your homework afterward ─ there is no such thing as a fast track when it comes to healing.
Perhaps your journey has shown you habits or patterns that are limiting you in life. It’s then on you to do your homework and make the changes that are necessary.
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5. Musical Memories
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Music has a unique and profound effect on our species. A great way to revisit your psychedelic experience from a sober state is to replay the music that accompanied your journey. This can invoke memories, insights, or flashbacks of the experience which can support integrating them into your normal (as opposed to altered) state.
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If you are looking for music to accompany your psychedelic experience, you are in luck, here is our blog post about How to Pick the Perfect Playlist
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6. Healthy Habits
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Following from above, your psychedelic experience may have shown you ways in which you can improve your quality of life. If your trip was largely physical ─ ie) plenty of purging ─ then you can establish some new habits like changes in diet and implementing more movement to transform the physical layer.
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If the trip showed you loops in your mind that limit you, then adopting tricks from CBT and forming new connections in your brain can be the way to go. Here are a few tips about how to integrate CBT techniques into your life.
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7. Profesional Support
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Psychedelics can be incredible tools for healing unresolved trauma, but they can also bring new, challenging topics to the surface and out of the shadows. Reaching out for professional support to help understand and reconcile this new information can be a great help. The best professional support would be therapists that are in the know about psychedelics, and if possible, that have experienced the effects of these sacred medicines.
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Take a look at the Nectara Community, they are a psychedelic support ecosystem that helps you translate your retreat experience into positive and long-lasting everyday life change.
They are in service to you with ongoing expert guidance, resources, and community spaces to help you grow, connect, and blossom.
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8. Meditation/Spiritual Practices
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Psychedelics and meditation go hand in hand. Both have been used for centuries to enter altered states of consciousness and both are used for the expansion of self-awareness. These experiences lead to reduced activity in the default mode network (DMN) — a region of the brain whose overactivity correlates with depression and anxiety.
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Beginning, or continuing to have, a steady spiritual practice of some sort can further enable the feelings of oneness, peace, bliss, and that gentle detachment to the ego that may have started during your psychedelic journey.
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9. Have Patience
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A single psychedelic experience ─ no matter how profound ─ probably won’t change your life overnight. And there is no magic pill that can help us heal all our inner wounds. However, cultivating positive change and integrating the awareness and insights you gained from your psychedelic experience can have noticeable shifts further down the line. Have patience with the process and try to enjoy it!
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Note: If you’re suffering from a mental illness and are curious about using psilocybin or any other psychedelic therapy, please consult one of the relevant medical authorities first. Do not self-prescribe, it’s vital to have the right support and guidance when using psychedelics as medicine.
February 13, 2023