The process of Ayahuasca healing doesn’t end with the close of the ceremony. Integration is as much – if not more – important than the ceremonies themselves.
The power of plant medicines lies not only in the depth of the experience but also in post-ceremony exploration, processing, and application of insights.
What you do with the lessons you’ve learned and the healing you’ve received is what really determines your authentic growth.
At Arkana, we provide the tools and environment necessary to begin your integration work while you are with us. We’re helping you navigate the sometimes murky waters of personal transformation.
We also let you know that the really hard work starts when you get home.
There is no doubt that upon your return to your normal life, you will face challenges that test your experience with medicine.
This is why we developed our 7Ps of Integration, a framework that helps you elucidate the lessons and insights from your time with Ayahuasca.
Practice
Pause
Patience
Pruning
Pilgrimage
Preach-Not
Plaughter (Play + Laugh)
1. Practice: Putting into Practice
The first step towards integration when working with plant medicines consists of identifying the teachings you have received and then putting them into practice.
It’s wonderful that you have received insight and wisdom. Now, the most important part of your work is to put this into practice in everyday life. The knowledge that is not put into practice becomes a burden and hardens the ego.
This is when revisiting your journal becomes helpful to contemplate the teachings from your notes, keeping an open mind to receive new insights to further document.
It is important to implement the knowledge you have received to achieve a true and lasting change in your life, in your experience.
We recommend against making any big decisions within the first week to one month of integration after a retreat. Allow energies, lessons and insights to settle first.
Practice! Practice! Practice!
Make this a tangible experience.
Practice takes many forms. Recognize them. They might be any form of regular discipline:
walking everyday
practicing yoga and meditation
learning a new language
studying
doing exercise, eating good food
breathing with awareness
enjoying your breath
Identify the way you can practice what you have learned. Consistent and disciplined practice will soon bear the fruits of a real, long-lasting transformation.
2. Pause: Take a Pause and Verify Your Inner State
This practice doesn’t refer to slowing down (which is a great practice on its own).
It refers to taking a pause, verifying your inner state, modulating it, expanding it, and making more space for contemplation. Do it as many times as you can during the day.
Let’s do a simple exercise now. Close your eyes. Ask yourself:
What is my predominant inner feeling?
What am I carrying within myself?
Take a pause and verify your inner state.
Just notice what comes up.
Expand your state.
Make more space.
Reconnect with the vast space in your Heart.
Remember that circumstances do not determine your state.
You have the POWER to choose how to feel every instant of your life, in the present moment.
Taking a pause allows us to create the time and space to choose consciously to respond rather than react. By making this a constant practice, little by little, our inner state naturally becomes lighter, more expanded and uplifting.
The current COVID crisis among many things is a blessing in disguise.
It is nothing more than mother nature forcing us to take this Pause from the madness of modern life to reflect on what is important and how our actions affect others and our environment.
Take a pause and have a good look at what's inside.
3. Patience: Practice Patience
As you go back to your daily life after a retreat, be patient with yourself and your own process.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Not everything is going to change overnight.
We are adjusting to new ways of being with ourselves and with our reality.
Ayahuasca helped you gain new neural pathways but these take time to unfold in yourself.
Part of integration is doing the work to strengthen them.
Start speaking to yourself kindly and gently allows those new pathways to really take root.
Do not be afraid of making mistakes. Mistakes can be the best teachers if we learn from them.
Sometimes you have to let life cut your head off and get a new one.
Being kind and gentle to ourselves gets us much further in our path of healing and growth.
Practicing Patience goes hand in hand with TRUST, with contentment and confidence.
Again, treat yourself gently and kindly to do the best and truest effort you can make and acknowledge yourself for it.
Small changes are okay too.
Start with baby steps, and slowly you will build some momentum and will notice lasting changes in you and those around you.
Do something every day that will keep the flame going that the medicine ignited in you.
4. Pruning: Practice Pruning⠀⠀⠀
Pruning literally means to cut or detach.
After working with Ayahuasca, it is important to cut away the habits we don’t benefit from.
Remove all forms of toxicity from your lives:
Thought patterns
Habits
Addictions
Belief systems
Conditioning
Relationships
This way we make room for love, light, healing and expansiveness.
As we implement these changes in our lives we might get pushed back by friends and family members. Sometimes as we live in a new space inside, others might feel abandoned for their own shortcomings or attitude.
Offer your best effort to renew a relationship by transforming what needs to be transformed. If this does not work, it is fine to cut them off.
It’s okay to prune from the lives that keep us separate from our true selves.
This doesn’t always have to be a permanent separation, sometimes we just need to create time and space within relationships so that we can come back later and refresh the terms of the relationship.
You don’t have to explain your process or justify your work to anyone.
It’s important to protect and care for your connection to yourself.
Of course, the most important relationship is the one you keep with yourself.
Are you a good company to yourself?
What are your thoughts?
What are the mantras you constantly repeat to yourself?
Prune the habit of putting yourself down and think highly of yourself and others.
5. Pilgrimage: Find Yourself
Pilgrimage literally means to put ourselves in motion geographically to visit:
sacred place
sanctuary in Nature
temple or shrine
a deity
Once there the pilgrim’s mind stops and experiences transcendence and union.
When it comes to the 7Ps of Integration, we refer to the Inner Sacred Pilgrimage of finding yourself.
This means taking some time to sit down and use the breath to go inside.
This is meditation, turning within, letting your breath show you the way.
Start a daily meditative practice of some sort. Just a few minutes a day.
Make time during the day to focus the mind and see what comes up, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for the integration process.
In this P, inner pilgrimage, you actually take your body and let it be still for some time, so you can explore the inner realms.
By nurturing your ability to contact these profound spaces within, you will become more familiar with them and develop the ability to stay in that space keeping the awareness inside.⠀
The more you come in contact with this space, the more you will find it easier to go back at all times.
Regardless of the outer circumstances.
Regardless even of the inner circumstances.
If the mind is restless, just observe it.
You will be learning about the nature of the mind.
Slowly, you will be detached from its thoughts.
It will lose its grip on your experience.
You will be free from the influence of the contents of your mind.
Have a date with yourself every day.
Making it a constant practice and you will soon reap the benefits.
6. Preach-Not
Upon the completion of a life-changing ayahuasca retreat and having experienced an awakening of some sort, people are very excited to share their experiences with everyone.
We recommend being careful with this until it's the right time and place.
This P (Preach-Not) refers to holding the energy inside to protect it.
Be mindful that others have not been here and will not necessarily understand what you have been through
When you speak a lot, energy disperses
Protect your attainment
When others see a true transformation in you - they will come and ask about it
When someone approaches you with genuine interest - share generously
The power of silence is stronger than words
The power of speech is directly proportional to the silence you observe⠀⠀⠀
Share, preach not.
Become the embodiment of the teachings you have received, your actions will speak louder than your words and will contribute to making this world a better place.
You will know when the time is right.
7. Plaughter: Play & Laugh
Someone once offered me good advice on how to find the right shaman: “If your shaman does not have a good sense of humor, keep looking until you find one that does.”
Wise words I carry everywhere I go.
Play is so important!
Sometimes the integration work can feel heavy or challenging and keeping a playful attitude helps to deal with this.
The work only ends when our time in this body ends. It is very important to approach life, the integration work, with laughter and a light heart.
With a conscious effort in your personal inner work, practice having a playful attitude.
When you catch yourself taking yourself too seriously, laugh about yourself.
It is important to try out different forms of play:
If you don’t know how to play observe children
Children are masters of play and we can learn a lot from them
Get down to their level, talk to them, ask them questions
Find the form of playing that brings you to a more light-hearted state:
color mandalas
play with pets
play with children
dance
do some gardening
whatever form of play lets you come back to that space
Find what brings you joy and the sense of that childlike freedom, whatever it may be. Remember not to take yourself so seriously.
Although this is sacred work, you do not have to be solemn.
Conclusion
The integration process is an intimate rite of passage. It is a healing partnership between the explorer (you) and the sacred plant's wisdom and intelligence.
The earlier you can start to take action on the lessons learned, the better.
At Arkana, we are honored to provide support for your whole journey: before, during, and after your retreat with us.
