What we have here is failure to integrate…

If there’s two learnings from my experiences trip-sitting for people on high dose psychedelics, it’s that our inner world is both infinitely mysterious, and that most of the healing is post-ceremony.

With all the recent hype around psychedelics due to the shifting public attitude, there have cropped up a litany of “experts” who have classes, certifications, and 6-week online courses full of rules and various propositions about what they absolutely know does and does not work.

In a culture that always rushes toward the next great pill, psychedelics have re-emerged to play right into the hand of this “fix me over the weekend” mentality.

Obsessions with “life-hacking” and “bio-hacking” and various other hack, slash, chop, approaches to quickly get the “optimum results” and “enhanced performance” have flooded the collective conversation.

I suppose that’s what happens when you combine a culture that has lost its soul with free-market capitalism and a healthcare system that hails chemical Messiahs for everything we don’t want to feel.

It’s no secret that I’m a big believer in psychedelics for spiritual growth, for physical healing, and for intellectual expansion. But I also don’t buy into a lot of the hype that seems to equate drug induced transcendence with psychological maturity.

These medicines are powerful and it needs to be said more often that some people will get WORSE on psychedelics, not better. Especially those who would rather go crush themselves in Peru for a week straight of ayahuasca ceremony rather than stay home and address the issues staring them in the face at their own dinner table.

There are way too many folks who dissolve into the Godhead for 6 hours on a few tabs of LSD and then wonder why all their relationships still suck. These disconnects are all screaming the same thing;

FAILURE TO INTEGRATE!!

Yes, the largest world yet unexplored is the inner universe, but there is a huge difference between flying over a country and actually moving there. To relocate requires a grounded plan of action broken into smaller steps and some accountability and support to make it happen. This work may not be sexy or fast or “optimized” but it’s the only way I’ve seen that transforms “flashes of illumination into abiding light.”