integration is a process in which the client integrates the insights of their experience into their life. It is perhaps the most overlooked and misunderstood aspect of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Integration is as important as the psychedelic session itself. Within the psychedelic session, clients experience profound insights into what needs seeing, holding, compassion and healing within their lives. However, if there is not an understanding of how to integrate these new and profound insights into their daily life, it can leave clients feeling more hopeless and defeated in their attempts to heal what needs healing.

It is essential that a client is guided in grounding what was experienced, remembered and learned in the absolute experience of a psychedelic experience into their relative experience of day-to-day life. As my mentor, Sunny Strasburg states in her book The Theradelic Approach, the medicine session brings a client to the highest mountain peak to see the big picture of their life and integration is leading the client back down the mountain and guiding them through the process of integrating their new understandings into their life so they may experience themselves in the world from a more integrated and healed place. Without integration, you are simply having a psychedelic experience, however a psychedelic experience paired with integration begins the steps of actively bringing what was learned in the psychedelic session and incorporating those insights into clients’ everyday lives, allowing for radical improvements in one’s overall quality of life.

 Integration is most effective when it is experienced within twenty-four hours of a psychedelic session to harness the still fresh experience of the medicine journey.  As a trained psychedelic therapist, I offer clients support in coming down from the mountain top with their precious gems of greater awareness and compassion for themselves and guide them into incorporating these experiences into their present moment, beckoning forth the life they desire and deserve to live.