Integration is Embodiment
Integration is certainly a buzz word within the psychedelic movement. Why? Because it encapsulates the real application of pretty unreal profound experiences. How do we weave the extraordinary awakening into everyday ordinary life?
Quite simply, through the embodiment of the medicine teachings and by taking gradual shifts that align you deeper into your core truths this is the path of Integration.
When you do this your energy and health organically follows the pace as it correlates to the relaxation of your nervous system.
Every step and devotion of integrating and aligning yourself is like a big sigh of relief to your nervous system!
I often accredit Ayahuasca for healing my Lyme disease, which at the time had me paralyzed from the neck up and Ayahuasca was in fact thee major catapult into understanding the changes I needed to make for my wellbeing and served as a portal for unearthing deeply repressed emotions and trauma. Those learnings and uprootings were imperative to healing my immune system and nervous system. However, it was moreso the actual changes and actions I took and the weaving (sometimes small and subtle) daily practices that carried the healing through. Integrating those practices created a regenerative healing self.
Among my personal integration repertoire were things like yoga, Earthing, meditation, breath-work, spiritual rituals, raw plant juices, letting go of relationships, creating boundaries, resting, and overall making choices each day to care for my significantly malnourished mind, body, and heart. Pretty quickly after my first ceremony, I was elevating my wellness every day and seeing significant results. I am now eight years fully healed and in a vital state that has never gone backwards in energy. There are certainly still life challenges and invitations to continue to elevate. Each step taken in honoring who you are and what you need sends the message to your body’s regulatory functions, that you care and honor that perfectly designed system. Those messages create a more relaxed and much higher functioning healing system as a whole (integration).
Integration, as you may know, translates as “to make whole”. The wholeness of you can be very different than what the wholeness of me looks like. This is important as we live in a world where everyone wants to find the magick cure and people will sell the exact regimine and remedies that healed them. I certainly made this mistake and early on would shout to the world, “Ayahuasca healed me, it can heal you too!” However, it was the integration of small acts everyday that medicine revealed was necessary. It was indeed a lot of different choices. So I no longer push Ayahuasca but have made a career and passion from my lived experience.
Psychedelics in general are major players in waking up your truth, stirring up your system, and opening your mind to new perspectives and possibilities. But if you are not willing to do the difficult task of making adjustments in your daily life, it will simply be a dream like experience with not make wake. Initially, if you are really sick or traumatized the stirring of your system may even cause more disruption (initially) than peace. After my first ceremony, my lyme symptoms took on an acute and painful expression. I previously carried a deep trust in earth and my intuitive choices that I knew it was a good thing that happened. It can purge psychical toxins into your system. I say this to highlight it was the actions after that were super important to continue the healing work with the medicine.
Integration for me in that healing journey became a game of even deeper intuition. A part of my process more specifically was very much about listening to the intuition of the body. Sickness is often a call to deep listening of the body. Having spent a good decade disassociated from my body, it was not a simple task to come back in. There is a part of me that enjoys living in the ethers.
Navigating the astral world after all is what makes me a stellar guide in psychedelic spaces.
It has been my life’s work to heal my lower chakras. Trauma often opens the upper chakras as a way to stay protected but the difficult earth work is learning how to be in your body, how to emotionally regulate and express, how to align your will power with knowing what is aligned for you. The chakras are an excellent way to explore integration. You can fine tune where to put your focus and where to make changes.
So integration for me, to make myself feel whole again, required a lot of practices that were re-teaching me to draw my spirit back into my body. That is why I absolutely adore the word: embodiment.
Integration is Embodiment.
Embodiment is living the truth of what you learn from your catytic experiences. Psychedelics or awakening tools, like breath-work, help us see profound truths about ourselves and maybe others too. Knowing a truth is not the same as living it. Integrating the actions around the truth is what brings us into deeper alignment and embodiment. It is what we do with that truth that is the embodiment practice. For example, an awakening journey might give you a glimpse into showing the destruction of something, like alcohol for example. It may also initially assist in the physical cravings of that thing but unless you make a concsious choice to remove it from your life the path into misalignment is a very slippery and wet slope. In fact, it may require integration work that seeks to discover the why of that particular addiction.
You can see how integration is a personal and sometimes challenging path. However, we are blessed to live in a time when we have access to so many tools and so much support. Additionally, having support along the way is so essential to help maintain the path. At Ka Ma we hold online integration circles to offer the chance to stay connected in community, experience and experiment with different integration tools, and also stay within the space of accountability.
Integration is more the medicine thatn the actual medicine. It is the roots that create sustainable and lasting change. A miracle may be a shift in perspective and yet it is the perspective shift that helps crystallize the integrative action steps required to curate conditions for miracles to happen. Miracles happen when your nervous system is happy, your chakras are expressive and open, your core truth aligns with your movement in life.
In reverence,
KA
