Integration IMPORTANCE

“The day you can fully embody your truth, you can completely let go of the technique - in the meantime, you keep practicing.” - unknown

Integration needs to claim its rightful place in the light of importance. It is not just a realization in a moment but a responsible commitment, daily dedication, and devotional awareness of life.

The word integrity has the same root as the word integrate. So to live with integrity means that the wholeness is expressing itself uniquely as you, through you. This does not require you to become something else or progress or fix or improve yourself. Those are all based on the ego.

Integration asks something paradoxical. To let it all go. To drop all the boundaries and self-limiting beliefs you carry about whom you think you are. It requires you to let go of all the protection armor you picked up along the way and the outward validation you feed your identity.

When you experience an altered state of consciousness (at a retreat or spontaneously) you are faced with a choice.

Either you are going to let this insightful moment sink into a memory, or you will put in the work to transform it into living wisdom.

The latter requires a willingness to shift things in your life and a deep and genuine evaluation of your core values, priorities, beliefs, and habitual patterns. A ruthless self-honesty is necessary as well as someone that can point out some blindspots in a compassionate way.

Let's say you return home after your retreat (medicine ceremony or yoga) and enter back into the matrix of your life. The net of mindsets, support, environment, etc. there is no way to avoid the gravitational pull old patterns and paradigms will have on you.

When we are in a certain state of consciousness, we usually fail to notice it because we are looking with that state. So most of the time we are unaware of what is happening and fail to see ourselves sliding back into our old version. The people around us also invite us back into old versions of ourselves as that is the idea they hold about us and know nothing else.

The same triggers, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors ruminate in your life and the “aha” moments fade into a distant memory.

The ego saved itself!! The mind played its part in correlating false safety in the familiar, but the heart and soul drown in these false pretenses and identity games.

This is the point new beliefs are formed and structured into the psyche and the ego is 1st in line to make detailed notes about these newly formed insecurities and life perceptions.

The “I am not good enough” cabinet is opened and more evidence is added. I can not do plant medicine correctly. I can not integrate. I can not change. I can not get better. The unfamiliar is not safe. The uncomfortable is not worth it. There is something wrong with me. I am useless.

Sound familiar?

All of this turns the gravitational pull towards an older version up a notch and with this, awareness shrinks significantly like a dried-out grape.

This will alternatively also grow your yearning to seek for wholeness, to feel good enough, to be happy, to avoid discomfort, and to chase desires with the pseudo understanding that fulfilling the desires will lead to fulfillment.

This brings us to the second dilemma that sometimes occurs.

The power play.

This is where all the power is placed only in the medicine or the guru or the retreat, instead of noticing that in yourself. This fuels the seeking journey in an insane way of doing the same things while expecting a different result. You can look at a nutritious meal all you want and read and hear how good it is for you, but it offers you absolutely nothing if you don’t eat it and actually digest it.

Integration is the digestion of the altered states of consciousness. It is not really a doing but more so an allowing. Allowing the discipline of doing the work every day to digest the experience and abide in the benefits at hand.

It is so important to notice that language has very little to do with integration. This is the most common misunderstanding. People try to take an experience that is beyond words in a sense (as words only point to the experience but can never be it) and they try to confine it into a label or symbol that they then attach meaning to. Without realizing that the meaning attached to the experience is mostly just already existing beliefs and constructs superimposed over the experience. This provides a blanket of comfort to the mind in its want to understand, but it is pure mental masturbation.

There is not really a true responsibility to please the mind in its need for doing but we have been taught to make the mind the master for so long that we think it has to call the shots or things won’t happen or fall apart. When that belief is nothing more than a thought you agreed is true. When we identify with a thought, we fail to recognize it as a thought. Now it has become an essential part of us and the ego will defend it and look for proof to make it appear true. The mind will try to make it permanent - as the mind is always seeking for permanence in this ever-changing experience. The easiest way it can do that is through identification because the body and situations are changing too fast.

This happens whether we are aware of it or not. This even happens with our scars (physically and mentally). Think about this for a moment, your skin completely renews itself every 4 weeks. So why is it that you still have the same scars from childhood? Those too are new cells and are replaced every month. Yet the body has a memory and recreates scar tissue cells in that exact same place, every month. How fascinating!

The same goes for mental scars. When you encounter someone having a bad day and they criticize you, your mind tries to make that moment permanent by adding a scar to your heart and convincing you to carry that burden with you as part of your identity for years or for some, forever.

Here is the core root of any problem from this perspective and why altered states of consciousness can correct it when integrated fully.

The misunderstanding and agreement to believe in the false sense of separation are what cause suffering. It is from here that all other branches of suffering grow.

Altered states of consciousness (through sacred plant medicine, breathwork, or other) offer you a direct experience of the true inseparable unity. This experience indeed comes with the discomfort of vulnerability. You have to drop the protective mechanisms and attachments to separation. This is not always experienced with the 5 senses alone and even the 5 senses are experienced in ways that language fails to describe. Your mind might already be asking why…

I can mention some pointers but language will fall short here every time. When the illusion of separation is dissolved, time and space go with it because that is the very construct holding that illusion in place.

This means no cause and effect, no here and there, no this and that comparisons. All duality and measurement are now one/none. This reveals the timeless and spontaneous essence of you & life.

You are life.

This means it is beyond experience because experience always has a beginning and an end - time-bound.

So you surrender beyond experience and into pure existence. You know you exist, no one has to tell you or reflect back to you that you exist. That in you that knows you exist is not that obvious and can not be observed. There is this intelligence as knowing - true creative essence. Pure being.

Sacred plant medicines/ meditation have the ability to open a portal in consciousness through the veils of illusion back to unity (after never having left in the 1st place). It is important to realize that they do so only because you carry that potential/capacity inside and that you are already that unity.

On a biochemical level, if there are no receptors, the substance can not bind. This means if you take something that your body can not manufacture naturally, there will be no binding place for them to interact with the body. It will either just flow through or the body will see it as a foreign substance and surround it for protection purposes until it can excrete it safely.

Integrating that knowing and unity into your perception of separation:

• Awakening discernment becomes the key to unlocking the only realization needed.

• Knowing the nature of thoughts.

• Noticing the difference between identifying something vs identifying with something.

• Seeking is counterproductive

• Awakening shouldn’t be a goal

• Triggers are indications, not enemies. They are strong road signs on the highway of separation. You may follow that road or turn back.

• Becoming aware of core wounds and how you chose to agree to believe in the illusion of separation is how you break the trance.

So there is no need to put your journey or any altered state of consciousness into words. Be ok with the fact that it can not be described fully. Silence is powerful and says a lot. Listen to that silence. Realizations are not for sharing, they are for you. They are not to convince or even inspire others. That is more ego.

Allow the knowing and realization of knowing to inform your perception.

Let it purify your ability to perceive and rest in clarity without distortion.

It is like you go to watch a movie. Will it matter what movie if you are blind?

What if your eyesight is very bad?

To add to that, what if you are unaware that your eyesight is bad and to you, that is just an unquestionable acceptance? This has been your experience your entire life, so no motivation for investigation arose.

You mistake common for normal and you fail to question because you do not know what you do not know.

This is where plant medicine and meditation offer their gifts.

Anything that plant medicine can do meditation can do.

The truth is that the discipline to sit in meditation has been lost due to the busy lifestyle and addiction to distraction.

But don’t underestimate the power of these 2 together and how a glimpse of an altered state of consciousness can fuel a meditation practice.

Integration will look different for everyone, but if you are not prioritizing it every day, then you are choosing to stay ignorant. And ignore all the ways you have stayed in the trance of separation.

Integration is a gentle surrender instead of crystallizing attention. A letting go into a non-referential space of being. Surrendering your heart wide open to float into the arms of divinity, allowing the idea of you to dissolve.

Do yourself a favor and start integrating every day.

If you don’t know how to integrate, be honest with yourself and lean in for support from someone that knows. Despite your mind telling you you can not let go and surrender or ask for help. This is not true and it is an unconscious protective mechanism imposed by the ego to preserve its own apparent existence as a seemingly separate self.