A Path Home
Part IV: Integration
We’ve outlined the first three pillars that can serve as a framework for men working toward personal transformation and, ultimately, internal freedom:
Groundwork, in which you develop deeper and broader awareness;
Structure, in which you evaluate and investigate your values, beliefs, and purpose in the world;
Expansion, in which psychedelics, empathogens and plant medicines become allies for insight, connection, and healing in community.
The fourth and final pillar is Integration, which literally means ‘becoming whole.’ Journeys complete when you come back home to yourself.
“We’re all just walking each other home."
Ram Dass
Integration is about how you bring these insights and experiences into your daily life. It is about continuing to make the perilous descent from your intellect down to your heart, from your narrative into your body.
There is no ideal track, or right or wrong way to integrate peak experiences.
Integration is how you practice being the human you are, having moved through pain or fear or shame, or having grieved or released that BIG thing, or realized how you’ve participated in that unhealthy dynamic. It is how you return to yourself when you realize you’ve jumped back into your old patterns. It is simply having glimpsed or penetrated your own darkness, and noticing what’s different now.
What does that actually mean, though?
Think of a meaningful memory you carry. Ask yourself the following questions about the events that surround the memory.
How do you remember this event?
What about it sticks with you?
What changed for you as a result of it?
At what point did the excitement fade, and you returned to your routine?
This same process can be applied to integrating expanded states, peak experiences, and psychedelic states.
The being with IS the maturation & change
One thing that psychedelics can do is open you to the nature of your relationships. You may begin to question, contemplate, or re-assess how you live your life, who you spend it with, what you consume, where you spend your time.
This reflection and what follows may be or contain the change that you are seeking.
Don’t make any big life decisions within 6-8 weeks of a psychedelic experience. If an insight comes through about something that needs to change in your life, sit with it for a while. Let the experience breathe and live, while you explore its angles, edges, shadows, potential consequences. Enjoy this time.
If after a couple of months, that change still really needs to happen in your life, consider taking steps to initiate it.
Making big changes from a reactive place of just having gone through something “life-changing” and the next day giving away all of your assets, or filing for divorce, or buying a retreat center in the Amazon to share this medicine with the world, does more to offer you a glimpse of yourself than to create real and lasting change.
Practice, practice, practice.
For me, Integration is all about practice. To practice is to engage mindfully in life whether you are washing the dishes, walking in the forest, playing with kids, or practicing martial arts forms. It is in the slowing down and making space for the unknown to inhabit you, or making space for you to feel creative energy coming through, or even in the way you practice calming your nervous system when putting the kids down to bed at night.
Notes on the Pillars
Although these pillars are offered as a framework for internal freedom, it is actually an amalgamation of the most powerful bits of experience that helped me on my path toward wholeness, and fatherhood.
I recommend you take this path slowly. When it comes to healing, there is no benefit to going beyond your willingness or capacity in any given moment. Make paying attention to your breath a daily practice. Take up a meditation practice, if it calls to you.
The idea is to build your capacities, your muscles, slowly, so they are reliable when you really need them.
The Deepest Truth Around
The truth is that freedom is only and always available in this very moment.
How? There is no how that applies to everyone. Systems of oppression and abuse can disavow children (thus adults) from ever accessing their agency and ability to choose. More people may fall into this category than we can know. There are different ways of learning to access it again, which takes time and great care.
There are first steps, however, that are widely accessible, and they are not without consequence:
Begin to question all that you believe about yourself, and the world around you.
Is it true?
Who benefits from my believing this?
How does my buy-in (conscious or unconscious) impact me, my family, and my community?
Be curious.
Be kind.
