Psychedelic Integration
Psychedelic Integration Sessions are offered by phone or in person, in Los Angeles.
After years of working under the radar with people integrating their psychedelic experiences, I am now offering my psychedelic integration services publicly. This work is for people who have had, or intend to have, a psychedelic experience for the purposes of healing and/or spiritual development.
I do not facilitate psychedelic work, guide people to shamans or psychedelic practitioners or offer substances of any kind.
Please don’t ask!
Sorry about that. My job is to help you prepare and/or integrate these sessions. I do not accompany you on such journeys or recommend where you can do this work. Unfortunately, due to legalities, I don’t get involved in that aspect of your psychedelic exploration.
What Happens in a Psychedelic Integration Session?
Because of my decades of psychedelic experiences I have come up with ways of guiding people both before and after these life changing experiences. I am not a shaman and do not seek that path. But I am a guide into these realms beyond the ordinary. A lot of people jump into psychedelic exploration in a very haphazard way. This can be quite counterproductive. The healing that you are seeking can turn into trauma if you don’t understand what you are doing with this work.
Before the Journey
The main point of the session before the psychedelic journey is to set an intention for the ceremony. That may sound easy but it is actually best done with a lot of care. It is easy to come up with an intention like, “I want to work on my insecurity.” That would be a good intention. But the intention isn’t just about coming up with a good sentence. The way I help people set an intention, using insecurity as an example, is by exploring all of their beliefs about security and insecurity. We go into their history with these emotions and find the area of life most impacted. By discovering and discussing the deepest impacts insecurity is having on our life we program your higher self to take you to the place this emotion is held. The medicine will go right there and start unlocking the issue at its source.
During Your Psychedelic Experience
The main thing to do is breathe and allow.
You are entering a high frequency state. The healing that comes from this high frequency state comes about when the lower frequency energies (fear, self doubt, paranoia and more…) within you start getting flushed out. The confusing thing that often causes ‘bad trips’ is that you can think the substance brought about these lower frequency energies. If you let the medicine do its work, it will. Relax, breathe and allow the energy to shift. And know that it will be over soon.
Integrating afterwards
Post ceremony sessions are often about me guiding you not to take the messages you received too literally. Especially during ayahuasca ceremonies, people get messages. These messages are often profound and life changing. Sometimes these messages have an expiration date and sometimes we hold onto them beyond that date. You may be told that you need to date a certain person, for example. That may be true. It may also only be told to you to get a certain reaction out of you. For example, it may be told to you so that you can feel your unworthiness. Many of these messages are not literal. They are there to move you in a certain direction–now. It is like if someone gives you the message, “Turn left”. If you hold on to that message too tightly you will keep turning left. Then you will be going in circles.
There is much more to the process of psychedelic integration sessions but most of that work is intuitive and in the moment. It is hard to convey it in the abstract. Psychedelic exploration can be an excellent way to get to a state of emotional healing because, if you are properly guided, you learn to allow feelings to flow through you rather than get stuck.
Psychedelic Integration: Intention is Key
There is a huge resurgence in people exploring consciousness, healing and personal transformation with the help of psychedelic substances. There are past and current scientific studies showing amazing potential benefits of psychedelic substances, the most promising and magical being ayahuasca. Psychedelic integration is for people who want to put more intention to their work with these medicines. In the sixties a lot of people took LSD without the benefits of intention setting. Their trips were chaotic and sometimes negative. People had no context for what they were doing. In this work, we put a lot of focus on setting a powerful intention.
Unlike during the psychedelic era of the 1960s, many people are now working with psychedelics using a more grounded approach that avoids the excesses that gave the movement a bad name fifty years ago. Using these medicines is serious work. Anyone who has experienced ayahusaca realizes that this is not a drug or something to party with.
This work may be for you if you are planning to do any kind of psychedelic work for healing, spiritual guidance and personal transformation. Setting intentions before the experience prepares you mentally and emotionally. It aligns you to do powerful work so that you can get the most out of your experience. It is also helpful to do at least one psychedelic integration session after the experience to make sense of what happened and get grounded.
Unrealistic and Ungrounded Conclusions
Too many people come out of these psychedelic experiences with unrealistic, over-inflated expectations because of what the mind and ego do with information. Then people get upset or depressed when their insights fail to translate to changes in their life. Some people receive accurate information that is so mind blowing that they don’t know how to make sense of it. It can be difficult to be confronted by all the ways we have been living false lives. Psychedelic experiences often bring that truth in a frighteningly direct manner.
When a bad trip becomes a learning experience
In the past people had an idea of there being ‘good trips’ and ‘bad trips’. People fear bad trips because they have no context for working with them. When working with an intention to heal and transform, bad trips become productive episodes for getting to the root of issues. So called bad trips are where the real work happens. We learn to breathe and allow feelings to flow. That way we do not get stuck on fleeting thoughts that get wildly exaggerated. When our main intention is transformation we know that things can get tough.
This work is to help people who are already doing psychedelic work, not to encourage it or facilitate it in any way.
Here’s a Wall Street Journal article about psychedelics.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-science-of-psychedelics-1525360091?Paid&nan_pid=1863953623&ad_id=7972769