Ayahuasca 01: Pre-Integration and the Imperative of Intention
My ayahuasca journal.
In Peru, one can find the most beautiful journals in the world, I believe.
Integration \ ˌin-tə-ˈgrā-shən \ (n.) — an act or instance of combining into an integral whole.
Integration is the single-most important—and most frequently bypassed—aspect of psychedelic therapy. It is most often thought of as a period of processing after a psychedelic journey. An intentional space for exploring the often abstract visions, concepts, and felt sensations of the psychedelic experience, and contextualizing them, so as to make these tangible and relevant to the themes of one’s own life.
And it is. But integration, I believe, begins before the psychedelic experience itself.
How does one integrate an experience that hasn’t happened yet?
The primary work here involves intention-setting. This “pre-integration” step is imperative, I believe, for a positive, healing outcome from any psychedelic work.
For my ayahuasca integration, I sought the help of a psychologist and therapist, Dr. Ryan Lee (PsyD).
January 16, 2020: one week before my ayahuasca retreat
I met Ryan on a cool January afternoon, outside his house in Pisac, Peru. It had been almost exactly six months since I last saw him, at our auspicious meeting in my Boulder home, now over 4,000 miles away. We began walking down the dirt road towards town, but quickly turned off on a foot trail along a river. After ten minutes of hiking and making small talk, we found a nice spot to sit in the dappled shade. A grove of tall eucalyptus trees provided a gently-swaying canopy overhead, while the low, steady rush of the stream, freshly nourished by Peru’s rainy season, set a soothing soundtrack to our session.
Ryan has a disarming smile and gentle, compassionate demeanor. I felt surprisingly little resistance in verbalizing virtually all of my life’s woes up to that point. I told him things I had, to that point, always kept hidden.
Things I had struggled to talk about in the past, even with close friends.
Things about my family of origin, and relational dynamics throughout my childhood.
About memories of lying in bed at night, praying over and over “Please God, don’t let me be gay.”
And the internalized homophobia that I was just beginning to realize had been there my whole life, running me from the depths of my subconscious.
The shame I held around issues with my gut, and the self-esteem-puncturing moments caused by those gut issues.
A period of time after I came out, where I moved abroad, went back in the closet, and quickly descended in to alcoholism and self-destructive behavior.
The time I was driven to near self-mutilation, as I stood in front of a mirror, razor blade in hand, in the closet of my freshman dorm room, attempting to cut the bright red, dime-sized, inflamed welts of cystic acne off my face and chest.
The shared pattern of my only three long-term relationships with men—each of whom I loved, and each of whom cheated on me—and how this repeated cycle of pain and rejection pummeled my self-worth, and scorched any shred of healthy romantic relating I had hoped to embody.
About my utterly muted libido, and crippling erectile dysfunction I had experienced since age 14—a lasting impact from sexual trauma in my youth.
I talked about seasonal affective disorder, and depression, and the suicidal ideations—those dark clouds billowing up from the depths of my psyche recently.
About how I had been fired or burned out of every job I ever had, and the ever-deepening feeling that my life was utterly meaningless, and hopeless.
As I poured all of this out
Ryan nodded along, making eye contact and asking clarifying questions, all the while taking vigorous notes. When I finally finished, he was silent for a moment studying his notepad intently. As he reviewed his notes he moved his pen around the pad, and seemed to be drawing lines connecting different parts of my story.
After a moment he spoke:
“Do you love yourself?”
I was taken aback by this question, and hesitated in my response. Before I could speak he continued. “Because it sounds like, what’s underpinning nearly all of these issues, could be solved by cultivating self-love. I think this should be your primary intention to take in to your ayahuasca ceremonies.”
I was stunned. This was such an unexpected and simple response, delivered with a cool, matter-of-factness. And it was something I had never considered. Yet somehow I knew, at the depths of my being, that if in that moment of asking, I was unable to immediately and definitively answer “yes,” then the answer was “No.”
I did not love myself.
And in fact, I wasn’t even sure how much I liked myself. Our first intention was set:
Intention #1: How do I love myself?
We continued talking for awhile, delving into some other themes and patterns of behavior from my past, and identified two other intentions to take into my upcoming ayahuasca journeys.
Intention #2: How do I express anger skillfully?
Intention #3: How do I discover and express my authentic self?
I exhaled, and sat in the grass quietly for a moment. I was at once relieved and elated. And completely overwhelmed.
Relieved, to learn that perhaps all of my many, seemingly disparate issues were not a crushing rockslide of dysfunctions, a mass of individual boulders I would need to painstakingly remove one-by-one, in order to dig myself out.
Elated, to know that self-love was a keystone. The keystone that could possibly restore my myriad woes into a cohesive arc of human beingness, wholeness.
Overwhelmed, because “cultivating self love” felt so abstract, so alien to me, that I thought it only attainable through a daunting amount of self inquiry and soul-searching, perhaps a lifetime’s worth.
Little did I know, by the end of the following week, the completion of my fourth and final ayahuasca ceremony, I would have answers to all of these questions.*
The only notes from my first session with Ryan. When I opened this journal at a market in Pisac, I immediately knew it was the one for me #alpacas :)
As we wrapped up
Ryan provided some excellent pre-ayahuasca advice, like emphasizing the importance of a media detox and digital “dieta,” sharing anecdotes of people who, for example, only saw visions of Donald Trump in their ayahuasca experience, likely because they had filled their psyches with this imagery and news media in the weeks before their ceremony.
The other invaluable advice he gave, was to keep a journal by my side in my ceremonies. “Sometimes you will get stuck on a vision or idea, and you may not be sure what it means so you fixate on it. It may be helpful to write it down so you can continue along on the journey, and revisit this theme later.”
I am so grateful for this advice, as I used this journal to capture all of my ayahuasca ceremonies in great detail, usually within hours of the ceremony. So while these ceremonies took place nearly a year ago, I am assured that the following accounts have not been “re-narrativized” to any great extent beyond the addition of context and long-term impact.
I am excited to announce an upcoming Wanderer’s Guide to: Psychedelic Integration. Before that, please tune in for a few more posts in my ayahuasca series, where I will describe in depth the setting and unfolding of my first ayahuasca ceremony. In a subsequent post I will recount my experience of ayahuasca. As always, thank you so much for reading and sharing.
*Note: while the ayahuasca gave me answers to these questions, it did not immediately resolve them. In my experience, no psychedelic is a magic cure, a silver bullet, for ailments of the mind or spirit. The ayahuasca, I believe, can only show you an insight, surface that which is in your subconscious. The actual healing comes with integration of that insight.