Finding Meaning Through Psychedelic Integration (Part 2)

The philosophy of integration, your inner healer and practical ways to integrate a psychedelic experience.

This is part 2 of a 4-part series on integration. Part 1 (free to read) is an introduction to psychedelic integration as a meaning-making practice. Part 2 explores the concept of the inner healer and the steps of the psychedelic integration process. Part 3 is looks at psychedelic integration as a death-rebirth process and examines spiritual bypassing. Finally, part 4 offers expert insights from psychedelic integration therapist and member of the Imperial College psychedelic research team, Michelle Baker Jones.

---

Sometime in the fifteenth century, a Japanese ruler broke his favourite Chinese tea bowl. Young Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who had only just replaced his older brother as shogun after he died from falling off a horse at the age of 10, was understandably upset. So, naturally, he returned the bowl to China to have it fixed. And the Chinese did their best: they slapped a few metal staples on the bowl, and sent it back to Japan. Of course, Yoshimasa didn’t like it, so he passed the broken bowl to his own craftsmen, who joined the broken pieces together with gold, creating a much more beautiful and prized object than before. Thus, Kintsugi was born.

The art of Kintsugi provides us not just with a pretty way of fixing our cracked pots, but also a pretty clever metaphor for how to live life more sensibly. Instead of hiding our brokenness, our darker sides, we can find beauty in how they come together to create a beautifully complex individual. One that sees its wounds and failings as valuable lessons.

And it’s a neat way of looking at integration. In Michelle Janikian’s book, Erica Zelfand describes integration as the process of integrating the human. So if psychedelic experiences can make us aware of the cracks in ourselves and our world, exposing all the scattered pieces, then integration can be our very own practice of mental Kintsugi. The broken pieces are the parts of ourselves we’ve repressed, or maybe dissociated from after trauma, surfacing to be reintegrated into the psyche. We bind the pieces together with the golden meaning of our experiences, which ultimately informs the meaning our lives take. But this gold of meaning is nothing without the craft of the practice behind it.

The philosophy behind integration therapy

While psychedelic integration therapy and regular psychoanalysis may look similar - as in, you’re sitting across from a therapist discussing your life - there’s a key difference that sets the tone for the entire process.