How to harvest insights after your psychedelic journey

This 9-minute exercise can help you recollect and re-connect with your psychedelic experience.

Have you ever noticed that in the days after attending a music performance, the details of your memory are already rapidly fading? The same is true, perhaps even more so, with psychedelic experiences. What can you do to keep from losing the vividness and resolution of the recollection of your psychedelic journey?

Here's a helpful definition of psychedelic integration from a recent paper:

Integration is a process in which a person revisits and actively engages in making sense of, working through, translating, and processing the content of their psychedelic experience. Through intentional effort and supportive practices, this process allows one to gradually capture and incorporate the emergent lessons and insights into their lives, thus moving toward greater balance and wholeness, both internally (mind, body, and spirit) and externally (lifestyle, social relations, and the natural world).
from “Psychedelic integration: An analysis of the concept and its practice” https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.824077/full

Through the power of recollection, you can revisit and engage with the embodied memories of your journey. The power of recollection will help you access, recall, and make meaning of the contents of your experience. And this power of recollection can be practiced, trained, and strengthened like any other capacity of the body or mind.

Here's a guided practice to help you get the most out of your previous psychedelic experience.

In your current state of increased neuroplasticity after your journey, exercising the neural pathways that access the memories of your experience deepens the grooves of those pathways. Doing this can give you easier access to the memories, insights, and embodied feelings you had, increasing the likelihood of experiencing those things going forward. As the now-decades-old adage says, "neurons that fire together, wire together."

In decades of supporting people with psychedelic journeying and integration work, I have observed that different information themes and insights emerge depending on if you journal the day of your session, the day after your session, or later. This exercise can be beneficial to practice the day after your psychedelic journey—and right before a journaling session. Here’s a journaling prompt to support your integration work:

💡 Write down a brief list of the images, memories, sensations, and beliefs that felt important as you recollected your experience. Now, please spend a few minutes writing about what they might mean. You don't have to know for sure. These could be ideas or possibilities. If you're using a pen and journal, keep the pen moving. If you're typing, let flow your stream of consciousness as you type.

In my coaching practice, I have developed a toolkit of techniques and exercises for seeing, harvesting, training, and integrating insights. To learn how I might help you, schedule a free 15-minute chat here.