This article was originally published on Tripsitter, see the original post here.
“The medicine will give you 50%. You have to put in the other 50%.”
This is the advice the elder we work with at Colibri Garden, Taita Giovanni, gives to participants the morning after every yagé ceremony he leads. The real work starts when the ceremony is over and we return to our everyday lives, jobs, social circles, habits, and ways of being.
Personally, I feel that attributing 50% of the outcome to the ceremony itself is generous — for many of us, that split is closer to 80/20 or even 90/10.
As explained by ayahuasca integration therapist Kerry Moran:
“Ayahuasca shows you the light — but there is not much value in its epiphanies, however brilliant, unless they catalyze lasting change. It’s up to you to bridge the realms, to bring back the understandings you’ve been given and translate these into concrete terms in your life.”
What is Ayahuasca Integration?
Ayahuasca integration is the process of taking the insights received in ayahuasca ceremonies and turning them into long-lasting, tangible changes in your life. While miraculous healing can absolutely happen in ceremony — for example, people experiencing sickness or trauma leaving their body for good — it’s the work we put in after the fact that ensures these shifts in our being actually stick.
During ceremony, we’ll often receive insight into healthy habits that we know we should adopt, or destructive patterns we know we need to leave behind. The integration of this is fairly straightforward (though not always easy). Eat healthier food, exercise more, start a meditation practice, stop drinking alcohol, etc.
Luckily, the neurogenesis that happens post-ayahuasca creates a window of opportunity where habit change is much easier and more likely to stick — so there’s no better time than post-ceremony to implement these changes.
However, it’s important to remember that ayahuasca integration is not simply a to-do list to complete, and then ta-da, you’re done integrating!
While taking concrete actions is important, much of the healing that happens with ayahuasca involves doing the work to embody insights at the deepest level so they become ingrained as part of our state of being.
Especially with trauma healing, it’s important to remember that integration is a process that will unfold at its own pace and cannot be rushed. It may take months or years to derive meaning from or integrate a single ayahuasca ceremony.
It’s common to receive information about new value systems and perspectives on the world, our relationships, and ourselves during ayahuasca ceremonies. The integration of this type of information requires taking action.
As an example, let’s say you gained a new understanding of the importance of respecting your own needs in your relationships; putting this into action might mean you’re due for a difficult conversation with someone you need to set some boundaries with.
With that said, this type of deep personal insight may also require extended periods of self-reflection, journaling, and conversations with others on the medicine path or an integration specialist to process and understand them.
Perhaps you were previously atheist, and connected with non-material realms or spirits in an ayahuasca ceremony. Or maybe you felt self-love for the first time and are wondering how to nurture this newfound sense of worthiness in your life. Putting these sorts of insights into action isn’t so straightforward…
Ayahuasca integration involves weaving these new value systems into our understanding of ourselves and the world.
There are also destabilizing experiences that create more confusion than clarity. While not often spoken about, it’s possible to feel more distressed after an ayahuasca ceremony, wondering what on earth to do with the information that came up. Especially if you had an extremely dissociative experience or were in an unsafe space with an untrained facilitator.
Extra attention needs to be given to feel grounded again and return to a sense of safety in your body. We’ll look into these types of situations more deeply a little later on.
Here are the fundamental practices that support effective ayahuasca integration:
Space, Time, & Rest
In the immediate aftermath of an ayahuasca ceremony, it’s crucial to give yourself the space and time in your schedule to softly land back into your life.
At a minimum, take the day after a ceremony to rest, journal, and refuel on nourishing food.
Even better if you’re able to take an extra couple of days — especially if you were working with the medicine over multiple ceremonies at a retreat — before you have to return to work and the social demands of life.
Oftentimes, we continue to receive information from the medicine in the days that follow a ceremony, so taking this time for yourself will help you keep that channel open for more insights to unfold.
It’s also important to remember that you are very energetically open after a ceremony, so you may be more susceptible to people and places that can feel intense or overwhelming.
Tips to follow during the rest period after an ayahuasca ceremony:
- Minimize screentime
- Dedicate at least 8 hours to getting quality sleep each night
- Journal and reflect on your experience
- Stick to the ayahuasca diet and avoid substances or alcohol
- Avoid busy places with denser energies, such as bars or nightclubs
- Stay connected to nature where possible
- Avoid difficult conversations or making big decisions
- Keep your experience to yourself, or share it only with others who have also drunk the medicine
Journaling & Reflection
Ayahuasca can trigger such huge downloads that the information can be difficult to hold onto or remember. While you shouldn’t stress too much about forgetting some of the information (many practitioners believe it’s remembered on the cellular level), it’s useful to journal as much as possible about your experience as soon as it finishes.
Writing can help you process and derive meaning from the content of the ceremony and create the space for more information to come through later.
Then, in the following days and weeks, reflect on how this information relates to your original intention, how you see it playing out in your life, or any new realizations you may have about the experience.
Some useful post-ceremony journaling prompts:
- What happened during the ceremony? What came up for me?
- What did I feel in my body? How do I feel in my body now?
- What did I learn about myself?
- What would I like to cultivate more of in my life? (emotions, habits, behaviors, values)
- What would I like to leave behind that is no longer serving me? (beliefs, patterns, habits, behaviors)
- What concrete actions will I take to cultivate these new habits, beliefs, and values?
Rachel Harris PhD, psychologist and author of Listening to Ayahuasca: A New Hope for Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Anxiety, advises reflecting on the following 3 questions:
- How does this experience inform my life?
- What did I learn?
- How do I manifest this new perspective in my daily life?
Connect to Your Body
Healing with ayahuasca is a deeply somatic and body-oriented process. During the experience itself, we can experience somatic release in the form of vomiting, crying, shaking, laughing, yawning, pain and discomfort, and temperature fluctuations.
Faegann Harlow, Somatic Practitioner and Educator, writes:
“As new illuminations of our psychedelic and plant experiences surface to our conscious mind, somatic therapies offer an embodied process for these insights to be fully integrated into grounded, sustainable healing.”
In the aftermath of the experience, it’s helpful to engage in practices that support the continued movement of these stored energies and traumas, help you listen to the messages your body is sending you, and promote nervous system regulation. This might look like practicing body scan meditations, yoga or mindful movement, massage, grounding, or calming breathwork.
“Somatic processing of psychedelic experiences ideally is considered as vital as ceremonial work. It serves as a continuation to anchor our journeys as a well-rounded, holistic part of the process,” — explains Harlow.
Tap Into Community
During your ayahuasca ceremony or retreat, you may have developed deep connections with your fellow journeyers.
Many report having never told anybody the things they share in retreat-sharing circles — never mind to people who were practically strangers a week prior. Ayahuasca ceremonies and adjacent healing spaces facilitate deep community connection and new relationships founded on trust and vulnerability.
As you embark on your post-ceremony journey, it’s crucial to continue to cultivate this community connection and receive support and accountability from others on a similar path. Healing and growth are a collective pursuit, and integration can be much easier when we have others walking alongside us to confide in or lean on when we need support.
Some retreat centers, including Colibri Garden, run dedicated preparation and integration circles, as well as a monthly online integration circle and in-person events for our community.
If you don’t already have an established community that can support your integration process, consider looking up community integration circles in your area or online, or attending meetups or events like sound baths or yoga classes to connect with like-minded individuals.
Spend Time in Nature
Spending time in nature is proven to promote physical and mental well-being and can help you post-ceremony to regulate your nervous system and stay connected to the messages you receive from the medicine. It’s also common to feel a newfound connection to nature after an ayahuasca experience.
Engage in practices like grounding, hiking, nature-watching, sweat lodge, and planting your garden post-ceremony to help maintain this sense of belonging to Mother Earth and interconnectedness with all of life.
Seek Integration Support
Whether you received profound clarity in your ayahuasca ceremony or were left with more questions than answers, working with an integration specialist can help you put into practice everything that you learned or make sense of a confusing or challenging experience.
Integration coaching or therapy can provide guidance and accountability around implementing new habits or embodying new values in your life. It can help you decipher visions and draw meaning from elements of your experience, so you can take away the key messages. It can also provide crucial support in the case of a ceremony that left you feeling destabilized, or an unsafe experience.
If you are looking for 1:1 support preparing for or integrating an ayahuasca experience, I’d love to help. Shoot me an email, and we can set up a free 30-minute discovery call.
Managing Post-Ayahuasca Challenges
Destabilizing or retraumatizing experiences with ayahuasca can happen for several reasons. Perhaps you sat with facilitators who didn’t have sufficient shamanic training to hold the space energetically and spiritually.
Maybe you were given more medicine than you were able to handle, or a brew containing other admixtures you weren’t aware of. Or maybe ayahuasca, as she can sometimes do, took you to your edges and brought up suppressed emotions you now have to contend with post-ceremony.
One of the most important things I’ve learned from various teachers on this path, including in Kat Courtney’s Plant Medicine Integration training, is the importance of prioritizing safety in the body before trying to cognitively understand a situation. Only from a place of safety and groundedness can people start to explore and process difficult and potentially traumatic memories, including dissociative experiences with ayahuasca.
If you are feeling destabilized after an ayahuasca experience, engage in practices that help you feel safe and regulated. Somatic practices like the ones mentioned above will help, as well as getting lots of sleep, leaning on loved ones for support, and acts of self-care like wearing cozy, comfortable clothing, making yourself nourishing meals and cups of tea, and listening to calming music.
Kat Courtney also emphasizes the importance of reclaiming your sovereignty if you were in an unsafe container and connecting with gratitude for the experience and the lessons it taught you. Adopting this perspective empowers you to grow, learn, and leave behind judgment and resistance that can prevent you from moving through this difficult period.
And of course, seeking out the support of a trauma-informed integration specialist is hugely beneficial in helping you make sense of what happened and re-establishing a felt sense of safety. ICEERS’ Support Center offers free sessions to individuals struggling to integrate difficult experiences and is composed of highly skilled psychologists with decades of experience with plant medicines.
Ultimately, there is no set formula or checklist to integrate your ayahuasca experience, only recommendations that you can tailor to your own process. Ayahuasca integration unfolds at its own pace and requires patience and intentional action-taking to make it happen.
However, if you put in the work, the gifts and blessings it brings to your life can feel endless.
Did you find this article useful? Share it with a friend and check out other relevant articles:
How to Avoid Bad Experiences with Plant Medicines (& What to Do if You’ve Already Had One)
Colibri Garden x Healing Maps YouTube Series: What is Integration and How Do We Do it?