Start With Your intentions
Integrating an experience with ayahuasca starts way before the ceremony itself. It starts when you first decide you want to work with ayahuasca. The motivation that leads you to make that decision is the first step of integration. Some people may even feel that they have started to connect with the medicine as soon as they make that decision. It’s as if ayahuasca is already starting to work or communicate with them. This can happen in dreams, in meditations or on every day life.
The first question I ask a client seeing me to integrate an ayahuasca ceremony is why did you choose to participate in the first place. What led you to make that decision? What were your hopes for the experience? What were your intentions for ceremony?
This is the foundation of working with ayahuasca and these reasons and intentions for participating in the first place provide a framework for understanding both what happened in ceremony and what to do about it afterwards.
Keep A Ceremony Journal
I recommend anyone doing serious intentional or healing work ayahuasca keep a physical journal that they use during preparation, throughout the ceremony or retreat, and during integration. Having a written record of your journey from beginning to end can provide valuable insight on what happened and what it means for your life. It’s also something you can look back on and refer to later to see what has changed and what still needs attention.
Reflect On The Experience
Reflecting on the experience is a necessary part of integration. This is where having a ceremony journal is helpful. Reconnecting to the ceremonies after the fact can help you to make sense of what happened, make the connections between the ceremony and various aspects of your life, and identify what the implications are for the experience. What changes need to be made in your life to reflect the insights, the releases, the healings and the new life perspective that you have? Consider how your intentions may relate to what happened in the ceremonies. What take-aways are there for your life? If you had an important intention for working with ayahuasca and you received a lot of insights around it, what do those insights mean for you going forward? It’s important to sit with these questions and deeply reflect on the experience. There is way too much happening in an ayahuasca ceremony to track it all. You need intentional time afterwards to make sense of it.
Process The Experience
Talking about what happened to trusted others can really help in processing and making sense of the experience. We are very verbal creatures. Narrating what happened actually helps us to make sense of things. This is why many ceremony circles and ayahuasca retreats offer sharing or integration circles. These are spaces dedicated for verbalizing and sharing with others what happened. It’s an important part of integrating an experience and you may find that just by talking about what happened, your understanding of it gets clearer and the insights you had are strengthened and reinforced. Ayahuasca experiences are often so powerful and intense that we can’t verbalize or narrate them in the moment. That kind of conscious understanding only happens afterwards and talking about it is an important piece.
You can talk about it with a loved one who is able to listen without judgement and who you feel safe with. You can also process the experience with a professional counselor who specializes in ayahuasca integration, or with a peer support group such as a psychedelic integration circle. I’ve provided links to some helpful integration resources at the end of this article.
Put It Into Practice
Make a behavioral change in your life that reflects, honors or strengthens a key insight or learning that you experienced in ceremony. One of the best ways to do this is to ask “how can I put this into practice in my life?” This is something you can directly ask ayahuasca during the ceremony or something you can meditate on afterwards. Examples are starting a new daily spiritual practice, cutting out a bad habit or addictive behavior, making a commitment to communicate more honestly, or making changes to diet or exercise routines. It can also include bigger life changes relating to relationships, career, or lifestyle but big changes require a lot more time, space and reflection. It is rarely a good idea to make a major life change immediately after ceremony.
In my experience, those who make thoughtful tangible changes in their life have the most transformative experiences with ayahuasca over time. And when they return for future ceremonies they are ready to tackle something new rather than retreading the same material.
Address Unfinished Business
Sometimes ceremonies leave us with new revelations, unanswered questions or an incomplete process. Perhaps the medicine made it clear that there is personal healing and growth work needed to address your intentions. Or maybe it brought to light an unresolved trauma or some other shadow work that hasn’t fully been addressed. In these cases, integration involves continued personal work on the issue. This can be done with a therapist or coach or spiritual guide or it can be done on one’s own. But the bottom line is that there is personal healing or growth work that needs to be attended to and integration in these cases means doing that work. This kind of inner work takes time, especially if personal healing work is new to you.
Some people feel a strong urge to do another ceremony right away to address the unfinished business with ayahuasca. But in my experience, you will be best served by working with it on your own before deciding to return to ceremony to address it further. The medicine will meet you where you are. When you’ve worked on it and have done your part, it will take you further. But if you are given clear insight about personal healing work and you don’t act on or address it you may very well retread the same issues next time you sit with ayahuasca and get the same message albeit in a bit sterner a fashion.
Continue The Work
Just because you’re done with ceremony doesn’t mean you can’t continue to work with ayahuasca. To the contrary, you can call on ayahuasca to help with your intentions or other issues in your life at any time. By attending even one ayahuasca ceremony you have established a relationship with the medicine as a teacher, healer and guide. Once you’ve made that connection, you can continue to work with the spirit of ayahuasca regardless of whether you ever sit in another ceremony again. Having an established spiritual practice really helps with this. If you have a meditation practice, a shamanic journey practice, a breathwork practice, or a dreamwork practice, you can use them as ways to connect with ayahuasca and seek its guidance and help. Just like with ceremony, have a question or intention for the medicine before starting your meditation or your journey or before going to sleep and just be open to whatever comes up. Answers can come in the most surprising ways. Use a journal to track your process just as with ceremony.
Integration Resources
This approach to integration is based on my many years of working with ayahuasca as a participant, a shamanic apprentice, a guide and a facilitator as well as my experience as an integration therapist guiding people through their ayahuasca journeys.
Below are some resources that may be helpful for integration:
Spiritual Workshops: Center for the Sacred Stream
Directory of Psychedelic Support Counselors: https://psychedelic.support
Psychedelic Peer Support Line: Fireside Project