What is Psychedelic Integration

Psychedelic experiences don't end when the medicines wear off. Psychedelic integration is the practice and process after a psychedelic experience of recalling, assessing, analyzing, understanding, realizing, assimilating, and processing of the content encountered in a given psychedelic experience. It is a way of bringing together various and disparate facets of the experience in a homogeneous way that one can see as one unified picture.

Psychedelic substances have been used for many millennia by people and cultures all over the world, for ceremonial/ritual, healing, spiritual, and self-discovery goals and intents. These powerful molecules can call to the surface any number of human experience and phenomena, from interactions with spirits and ancestors and “entity” contact, to exploration other worlds, both inner and outer, to dissolving and reconstituting our sense of self. The possibilities are endless.

Given such a wide array of possible experiences, especially of a nature removed from our pragmatic reality, it's important to take time away from the hustle and bustle of life to bring these experiences and their content into better focus.

Why it's important

While it is possible to have experiences in which there is very little to nothing to integrate, in general, not moving through an integration process can leave one feeling unbalance, uncentered, unresolved, depressed, anxious, and sometimes lost. Content can arise that takes time to unpack and process, sometimes due to complexity of symbolism, other times because whatever has come to the surface is difficult to engage with (such as past traumas).

While psychedelics are generally regarded by many as medicines, that does not mean that they come without risks. Psychedelic integration also happens to be a good practice for overall harm-reduction and risk-management in mitigating such risks and reaping the most from the work that one puts in. At the end of the day, we still need to do the work. This post experience practice is how we apply what we have discovered and learned into ourselves and our lives.

Without integration, we run the risk of having wasted some of the best parts and insights of our psychedelic experience.