Psychedelic Integration, part 4 - Narrating Your Experience

DISCLAIMER - Psychedelics are still largely illegal in the United States. I am not a medical doctor and cannot recommend any types of medication. This post is not intended to encourage anyone to engage in illegal activities or consume illicit substances, and I cannot provide the substances themselves or any help in obtaining them. The decision to try such substances should only be made with careful consideration and in consultation with your physician, as there can be an array of complications including negative interactions with other psychotropic medications. But if you are considering using these substances in your own healing work, then you should have scientifically accurate information about them, and about how to get the most from these types of experiences.

You’ve planned your journey and prepped your body-mind. You’ve set your intention. And you’ve gone and had the experience. Now the real heart of the integration process starts. And the first step here is just recalling and documenting your experience. These kinds of journeys can be intricate, multi-dimensional, and often have multiple phases where very distinct kinds of things are happening.

So it’s a good idea, as soon after the trip is done as you are able, to write down as much as you can remember about what happened. Give yourself some time to do this - depending on the substance these experiences can be quite prolonged, and as you write you will probably start to remember other parts of what happened. I would suggest also capturing as much of your in-the-moment reaction as you can recall. That is, if a part of your trip left you feeling scared and thinking about that time you got left at the mall then make note of that in your trip log.

Also, it can be extremely helpful to be tracking what your experience is like during the process of writing. If you are putting words to particular parts of the journey and you find yourself elated, or uneasy, or distracted, you should make a note of that. If you start experiencing sensations in your body as you write - tensions, tingles, movement impulses, dry mouth, and so forth - that is also worth recording. Same thing with memories or images that show up. All of these associations are information that will be valuable to you as you start to integrate the experience into your day to day life.

In fact, by telling the story this way you are already beginning to integrate what happened, and starting to weave a narrative around the experience and how it relates to your day-to-day life and personal history. Narrative is a powerful tool that our minds use to make sense of the world, as well as to create a consistent picture of ourselves. Without a sense of narrative you just have a random jumble of happenings, like a poorly scripted movie that is difficult to follow because there’s no throughline to hold it together. 

But narrative is discovered and deepened through the telling and re-telling of events, coupled with the emotional, somatic, and imagistic aspects of experience. So by writing out the story in this way, even if it feels like a jumble at the time, you are starting to pull those altered-state experiences into the stories that shape your day-to-day world. And this process is EXACTLY what we mean by integration.

Once you’ve done this, you can start to reflect on the kinds of changes you might need to make in your life, which is what we’ll talk about in the next entry in this series!