Most of what a psychedelic experience offers is in what you do with it afterward. Integration is the slow translation of an altered state into a changed life — or, sometimes, the careful decision to let an experience be what it was and not try to install it as a permanent feature of who you are. This is coaching for that work.
What integration is
Integration has become a catch-all term in the psychedelic space, which makes it worth defining carefully. I use it to mean three overlapping kinds of work:
Meaning-making. What happened in your experience, and what does it mean in the context of your life? This isn't about finding a tidy narrative — sometimes the experience resists narrative — but about the honest question of what you now know that you didn't before.
Embodiment. How do you live differently, in your body and in your relationships, because of what happened? This is the harder part. Insight is cheap; changed behavior is rare. Most of integration is the patient, repeated work of letting an insight into the parts of your life it's implicated in.
Discernment. What from the experience is worth integrating, and what isn't? Not every insight from an altered state survives contact with your sober life, and trying to install something that doesn't belong can cause more harm than the experience relieved. Integration includes knowing the difference.
What this is — and isn't
Integration coaching is not therapy, and not every experience needs coaching to be integrated. Many people integrate perfectly well on their own — through a journal, a walk, a good conversation with a friend who's done this before. Coaching makes sense when the experience is either (a) significant enough that solo reflection isn't holding it, (b) difficult enough that making sense alone feels unsafe, or (c) motivating enough that you want to be deliberate about the changes you make, rather than wait to see what sticks.
I'm a trauma-informed therapist by training, which means I know the difference between an integration issue and a clinical issue. If what surfaces in the weeks after your experience is clinical — a trauma response reactivated by the work, symptoms that need therapy and not coaching, a mental-health crisis — I'll tell you, and we'll figure out the right care, which may be therapy with me inside a separate contract, or a referral.
Who this is for
A fit if:
- You had an experience recently (days, weeks, or months ago), the initial clarity is fading, and you want to do the work of keeping what mattered.
- You had an experience and it raised more than it answered, and you want structured space to sit with the questions.
- You had a difficult experience — confusing, destabilizing, or emotionally flooding — and you need more than a journal to metabolize it.
- You're planning to have more experiences and you want integration as an ongoing practice, not a one-time event.
Not a fit if:
- You're currently in clinical crisis (not emotional difficulty — true crisis). Integration isn't a crisis intervention.
- You want someone to tell you what your experience "meant." Integration is collaborative. The meaning is yours.
- You're primarily looking for someone to validate the experience as spiritually significant regardless of what it surfaced. I'll take the experience seriously; I won't decorate it.
What we cover
Every integration arc is different. Most sessions include some combination of:
Retelling. The experience gets told and retold across sessions. Details that felt peripheral the first time become load-bearing the third time. We don't rush this.
Body work. Not somatic therapy per se — coaching doesn't do that — but attention to where the experience is still living in your body, what the tissue is still doing, what breath and movement help. If deeper somatic or trauma work is needed, we move it into therapy.
Relational integration. How does what happened change how you show up with the people in your life? What gets said and to whom? What boundaries shift? What conversations have been postponed that the experience made unignorable?
Practice design. What are you doing with this, now, on a Tuesday? Integration that doesn't land in daily-life practice — movement, contemplative practice, community, journaling, whatever your version is — tends to fade. We design the practice together.