* in plain, personal language
The intention of this post is to expand on the ideas I present on the psychedelic integration page. I’ve never been totally satisfied with the term “integration.” It’s a bit too abstract and smart. It begs for explanation, and then the explanations need explaining. If you resonate with that…then this is for you.
“The Personal Integration of Stuck, Stagnant Energy”
I had to cry a lot. Sob, shake, tremble. I had to collapse. I had to fold into a little ball and scream. I had to feel lonely despair. I had to sit in dumb confusion, cold emptiness, and boredom. I had to be angry and heartbroken. I had to vomit. My body needed to move in ways my mind couldn’t understand. I had to hold my therapist’s hand. I had to let my face contort with bitter disgust. I had to allow myself to feel unspeakably tender, vulnerable, and lost. I had to fail at figuring it all out and let myself fall apart again and again.
This was my past unfolding – at first before the loving eyes of my facilitators, then my therapist, my wife, my friends, and myself. It was an intimate encounter with my humanity. These were the things that needed to happen in the past, but couldn’t, because I lacked the support and capacity at the time. It felt like my job was simply to be with all of it, as if Life was simply asking me, imploring me: my dear one, please, please be with me.
“To be, or not to be. That is the question.”
“Broader Functional Integration in One’s Personal, Individual Way of Being”
Mind/body. Right/left hemisphere. Primary/secondary consciousness. Ego/higher self. Trauma.
Let’s set aside all these terms.
My experience for many years – in hindsight – was that I was dancing with my pain, and I wasn’t listening to it. I was a bad dance partner. I wasn’t connected, wasn’t responding, wasn’t really in an authentic relationship with it. I wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. I thought if I could just get the choreography right then I would win. I wanted control, to solve the problem. Pain wasn’t going to mess this up for me.
In my psychedelic work, this relationship started to flip. I started listening to the pain and allowing it to lead the dance – at first just a little, then more and more. Naturally, this was painful. It was also liberating. I could let go of control. I could stop pretending. I could let go of winning. I felt more authentic, connected, responsive, alive, and beautiful. And the pain got less painful. It became my friend. At some point it transformed into presence, curiosity, intuition, and purpose.
It was as if I was an origami crane that forgot it was a sheet of paper. The shape had served me well. The pain was locked in the creases, tucked away out of sight. Opening up hurt. It was destabilizing. It was scary. If I’m not actually a crane, who am I? Just an ordinary sheet of paper?
A whole human being, enjoying the dance.
“Integration of this Personal Self with the Broader Context”
I let go of relationships that weren’t working for me and formed new ones that are. I changed my career. I started to see everything – my younger selves, all my relations, the fucked up messy world – with more compassion. I grew in my capacity to show up as a resource for other people. I can locate and accept my role in the arc of human development as a married man raising a child, moving through middle age, scooping up a few stranded pieces of my own development as I go, with an eye toward legacy, elderhood, and, someday, death. And I see all this as a small part of the great process of Life Eternal, of the exquisite dance between the finite and the infinite, the ancestral past and the ever unfolding Now.
