Integration

After a psychedelic journey, a crisis, a loss, or a change that rearranged things

Some experiences rearrange a life faster than they can be taken in: a medicine journey, a breakup, a diagnosis, a death, a fire, an episode that knocks the floor out. They look different from the outside. From the inside, in my experience, they tend to share a shape: an opening, a disorientation, parts of us flaring up (often to protect us), and a window where more is possible than usual. Sometimes nothing seems to open at all and life just goes flat, and that belongs here too. And sometimes it's still going on: a long illness, a divorce in progress, a move that hasn't landed yet. The work can start in the middle of it, and people also come years later. Integration is the work of staying with that window: befriending what's reacting, letting what opened land, and finding your feet in the life that's now here.

What can open the window

• a medicine journey, easy or hard
• a relationship crisis: breakup, divorce, betrayal, estrangement
• health: a diagnosis, chronic illness, injury, disability
• bereavement
• disaster: fire, flood, evacuation, losing a home
• mental health: an episode, a hospitalization, the other side of one
• work and identity: job loss, burnout, retirement, a vocation ending
• coming out, to yourself and then to others, about something core: sexuality or gender, autism or ADHD, addiction and recovery, a mental-health diagnosis or disability, leaving a faith or a high-control group, a different shape of relationship, naming harm you survived
• spiritual emergency or awakening
• big transitions: becoming a parent, an empty nest, aging, a move
• collective weight: climate grief, political fear, a world coming apart
• living through or witnessing violence, personal, political or structural
• or something not on this list

What the work is

Integration shares a root with integrity: making whole. Mostly it's slow, and fairly ordinary. We meet the parts that flared up, the panic or the numbness or the one that wants to leave town, and get to know them. We track what the body is doing and go at its pace. Some of what surfaces is old, and that's often where shadow work comes in: parts of ourselves we learned to keep out of sight, coming back into view while the window is open.

After a medicine journey

Psychedelics can open a great deal at once, beautiful or frightening and often both. A hard journey, what people call a “bad trip,” can leave material in the body, the emotions and the mind that keeps surfacing for months or years, even in familiar surroundings. Many “bad trips” are more indication of poor set and setting, and poor or lacking assessment by facilitators that don't understand the risks. An easy one can leave its own puzzle: something real was seen, and ordinary life doesn't seem to have a place to put it.

I've focused on integration as perhaps more valuable than the fireworks-laden insights of the journeys themselves. Integration here tends to be a deep process, and it usually goes best over a run of sessions. If a journey is still ahead, sessions before it can help with intention, set and setting. I also work with people who want to reach these states without medicine.

Ways in

• One-to-one integration, in two sizes: a shorter arc, or a deeper one for big openings, heavy material, or when the ground feels thin.
• Single sessions, one at a time.
• A steady sprint: regular sessions over a set stretch of weeks, then a pause and a review. It's often where people continue after an arc.
• An intensive: a half day on up to several days, woven with self-care, nature, meditation, journaling, IFS, somatic work and quiet time.
• Small groups (pods), where available: a few people supporting, healing and awakening together (what pods are). Ask for availability.
• Alongside your therapist, if you have one. With your signed release, I'm glad to talk with them.

Sessions are online, or in person in Los Angeles; other locations are open to discuss.

Background

I'm an Internal Family Systems (IFS) certified and Somatic Experiencing (SE) certified practitioner, trained in Pathwork and in bodywork in various modalities, from Rolfing to craniosacral therapy and energy work.

Psychedelics have been part of my own path since my teens. Along the way, a series of psychedelic psychotherapy sessions with a long-time practitioner took my own inner work deeper than anything before it: old material surfaced in the body, and over many sessions it began to heal. I'd already been doing journeys for a while, but I didn't understand what sitting meant until he sat with me.

For many years, starting in 2000, I sat with others through their journeys, hundreds of sessions, in what would now be called “underground” sitting. In those many sessions with high dose psychedelics, often accompanied by crisis and ego death, I realized that I learned something about walking with people who were in crisis of all sorts. How to help them to orient to reality and to themselves through things like power, love, and presence, each a lens that they could sit with and find what parts were caught up in the place they found themselves in, and use those tools to help them navigate during the experience and to integrate it into ordinary consciousness and life in the days and weeks and years following.

In 2016, by which time I had been sitting with people for sixteen years, I was invited to train as a sitter for the MAPS phase 3 MDMA trials. I spent a week in training with Michael and Annie Mithoefer, the lead trainers, along with Rick Doblin and Marcela Ot'alora. Later I taught a one-day Somatic Experiencing primer to the Los Angeles team, then the Bay Area team.

Scope

I'm a practitioner, not a licensed therapist, and I don't diagnose. I don't provide or prescribe any substance, and I don't guide or sit with anyone during a psychedelic experience any more. Sessions happen sober, unless a medication is prescribed by your doctor.

The first step

The discovery session is free. It's a conversation about what opened, where things are now, and whether this work fits.

Book a free discovery session

Some words on this page, like parts, befriending and shadow work, are explained on the words page.