Ayahuasca Integration Time
Through experience knowledge can transform into wisdom.
Why is a mindful integration important when working with plant medicine?
Integration extends the healing and learning process and is key for any change in life. It's the time of harvesting the new fruits and bringing them home. It's the time when we care for the new seeds and when we plant a new garden of consciousness into our daily life. It's the cultivation of new habits and new patterns. It's about connecting all the puzzle pieces together and being able to recognize the bigger picture for yourself.
Best Practices for Integrating Ayahuasca
Integration means daily practice. It means to be able to observe and reflect on self in an honest and clear way. There are many methods, techniques and options regarding how you design your inner personal integration time.
There is a True-Journey Integration Guidebook available. For True-Journey Retreat participants the ebook is free. If you are not a retreat participant, you can click here to email me to purchase the book.
Integration work extends the transformation beyond the experience.
It's the time when we can connect our felt experience with the plants with our daily life.
Everything that we change inside will reflect outside. The integration time is the time when we have the chance to transform and change towards our personal goals.
It's said about our brain’s neural system that "What you fire gets wired". To change habits, we must learn to find new ways to fire, so that new neural networks get wired and connected. To make a change in our brain is one part of the work of creating sustainable change. Dr Joe Dispenza says it takes 90 days for new neural pathways to be created, if we practice (fire) daily.
For many people, the integration from the experience with sacred plants is a long path, and the “harvest” goes on a long time. It's a process that can last weeks/months/years. A playful and creative approach to this process can be very helpful, as it not only gives joy, but also benefits our brain development.
When we go through a transformational phase in our life, some time is needed to integrate the new awareness in our daily life. If we do deep work or go through an experience where our consciousness gets expanded, the work of integrating it and making it sustainable starts afterwards.
It can be challenging to implement and integrate the experience of new outcomes and realizations. Letting go of identifications, exploring dynamics, identifying patterns, changing relationships, and so on is a process, which needs again and again your recalibration.
There is the need to find ways to integrate mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically, socially etc.
Examples for integrative practice:
Journaling, Vision board
Allow presence to move and flow through you if you write/draw/paint etc.
Art – Drawings
Continue singing to and with the plants
Make space & time to take care of self / your responsibilities. What do you consciously declare as your responsibilities?
Create a loving space in your home to be: a nice mat, candle, pillow, incense, phone off, tea, music, nice painting....etc.
Clearing your house/flat. Throwing out things, creating new open space, changing pictures/paintings, bringing new colors in, new plants....etc.
Look for like-minded communities
Join classes
Sweat lodges
Dancing
Flow activities
Sensory deprivation tanks
Mediation
Mindfulness training
Plant medicine integration Coaching & Professional Guidance
And many more ideas you can find in the True-Journey Integration Guidebook or you can explore with me in our 1:1 sessions or Sharing Circles.
An Integration Coach can be a supportive guide to help you to understand the process. Together you can find integrative activities, explore ways to stay in your process during your daily life, and discover how to stay focused on your goals. To get confirmation and reflection on your actual states of being from someone who knows the integration process very well can be key for your own journey of transformation and self mastery.
Integration is about cultivating change. It's a creative process where you can connect new aspects of your reality, parts of yourself, and new realizations together to create a new bigger picture of truth and wholeness in your life.
What can you expect to happen after the ayahuasca integration process & what are the stages of integration
The effect of receiving deep new realization often can overload our state of feeling and thinking. Our perception and our whole energy system needs to integrate the new information. During this integration phase we can feel like riding a rollercoaster.
Disappointment, judgement, doubt, insecurities, regret and all kinds of emotions can show up in certain parts of our integration. On the other side, we also might experience liberation, connection, confirmation and synchronicities. Experiences of releasing burdens and attachments are beautiful phases of the process.
There are some common phases which can show up in an integration process. It´s very helpful to be informed and guided through them, so you can feel more safe and more easily trust in the process.
Knowledge, assurance and reflections from someone who is familiar with the process of integration also helps you to deepen your own self mastery.
With an Integration Coach who understands the process and has experience, it can be much easier to stay focused on your individual path of transformation and renewal.
Dr. Daniel Siegel defined Integration as linking different parts together.
Integration needs a conscious daily practise in life.
“When people are not integrated, they move to chaos or rigidity” (Dr Dan Siegel).
Integration is Healing
Integration is liberating. Integration means connecting. Integration means harmony and balance.
Integration is not a linear process. It is helpful to be aware of this.
Emotions & Energy Releases
Sacred Plant Medicine can unlock and release energies in your system and deeper levels of pre-existing issues can rise to the surface during integration time.
It's important that you are prepared and aware that personal themes and unknown emotions can show up later on.
Very often after the work with entheogens old traumas and wounds show up and come to the surface.
It’s important to build skills for dealing with these strong emotions, and for processing the reflections which come up from all sorts of things in your personal world. (read Preparation)
Everything that comes up gives you the chance to look at it and work with it. This inner work is about connecting to every part which is in you and not about suppressing uncomfortable parts (emotions/thoughts), as maybe you used to do your whole life, consciously or not.
Healing means to become whole again :-)
Healing means to accept and embrace whatever is in you.
After a Master Plant Dieta, the plants are continuing to work with you. There is "the Dieta", and then there is a whole other chapter, the "After dieta”.
Integration coaching/mentoring can support you to understand your process better, to bring balance and equilibrium into the movements and to be open to receive new personal insights and realizations. Using certain tools will help you to trust in the process, to feel self empowerment and to build skills for self mastery.
Everyone encounters in some part of the journey a kind of resistance.
Important questions: Do we become aware of our block? How do we deal with it? To transform a resistance can cause a huge change in life. Often many different fields in our life are connected to just one blockage. It can be very exciting to explore them and to untangle them. Life can unfold in completely new ways afterwards, if we are able to let go.
In the opposite way, if we don't become aware of them, we can be kind of caught up and we can remain stuck in a process or go back to the comfortable zone of used habits.
There are many people who’ve done work with Ayahuasca, other Sacred Plants or other transformative methods but they missed the chance right afterwards to integrate and transport the experience into their real practical life. They missed the harvest and without Integration Work there were no big changes afterwards.
I honor the strength, the wisdom and the truth which one can find on the journey with Sacred Plant Medicine.
There might be phases during the journey of transformation where it's not about feeling better, it's about better feeling. There is no way around, only a way through if we want to meet truth.
The Shipibo Maestros often say: “Trust in the process, be patient, be present and concentrate".