8 Sessions Recommended
Life presents critical experiences that can dramatically redefine our perceptions or sense of purpose. These numinous events—often peak, phasic, or traumatic—can shock and transform our psychological, ontological, epistemological, and sometimes even physiological systems. The long-term outcomes of these experiences largely depend on how we process and understand them.
With the Integration service, we’ll explore the characteristics of these experiences in depth, along with the meaning and significance derived from them. Our aim is to synthesize the ultimate truths embedded within, making these truths salient so they can be systematically woven into how you perceive the world and your place in it.
Over time, you may undergo major shifts in your value systems, vocations, relationships, or self-perception. This is precisely where integration work offers a stabilizing effect throughout the transformational process. Through a contemplative approach, we’ll uncover new, more fulfilling ways of being in the world by contextualizing and orienting your experience into a worldview and lifeway informed by the wisdom found therein.
My Initial Integration Experience
My initial encounter with the concept of integration came through the psychedelic community. Here, in conversations about harm reduction, I observed peers supporting each other in contextualizing profound, often ineffable or disorienting, noetic experiences. However, the foundational importance of integration truly crystallized during a 10-day residential meditation retreat. In that stillness, I encountered a novel depth and acuity of memory. This brought a stark awareness of how salient traumatic experiences from the past can resurface. For me, a consistent inability to clearly communicate the unique associations my mind made often led to profound frustration, isolation, and despair.
The first few days of that retreat were characterized by intense waves of frustration accompanied by relatively incoherent verbalization. These eventually pacified, making space for a deeper current: the pervasive feelings of loneliness I had experienced throughout much of my life, even when in connection with others, due to an inability to reveal myself intimately with mind and heart synchronized.
In the quiet crucible of the silent retreat, as these memories resurfaced, I was able to reappraise and make sense of them, recognizing the conditions that led to their generation. I was, in effect, integrating the unprocessed energy stored in these memories. This yielded insights into how to live more harmoniously and how to meet my needs by changing my approach. Since then, I’ve had numerous other life-altering experiences, both challenging and profoundly positive, for which integration has proven to be an essential follow-up process.
Integration has allowed me to more consciously access the insights and even feelings from these experiences when intending to communicate them to others. True integration creates the possibility of communicating experiences with an embodied depth that gives others a felt sense of the experience—one that can be an education of the heart through the sharing of the soul.
