Integration ~ the often overlooked time after soul-work

Ahhh summertime soul-work season is upon us! So many exciting, deep, fun, and powerful opportunities for collective yet also personal healing work. Solstice celebrations, fire ceremonies, the Conscious Goddess Festival, workshops, vision quests, plant spirit experiences, spiral dances, labyrinth walks... yummmm! Such good stuff! and yet... afterwards...
What happens after?

After such moving and personal healing work, after our heart-felt connections and tribe building, we head home. Back to our mundane world of jobs, spouses, kids, emails, bills, television, grocery store lighting, facebook trolls, rigid scheduling or simply home alone to more solitary and solo lives...alone. Yet you just had this powerful, earth shattering internal experience! and these two worlds may feel like separate realities that really have a hard time even coming close to meeting. You might feel irritated, discombobulated, frustrated, having strange dreams, or simply dying to convey your amazing insights to others who can't fathom its depth. You might even just forget - like a lost dream upon waking.

This time of Integration is often considered the hardest part of any initiatory or deep healing work.
I can tell you from my experiences as a brainwave technician, as well as my personal development, and field of shamanic practice - this happens much more often than is desirable. It happens in the realms of medical, mental health, spirituality, alternative therapies, and training schools - this western workshop mentality has forgotten how to hold people all the way through to the other side of Integration. There is a lack of guidance and support for people working to bring their new gifts, healing and insights into their regular lives. (and actually the personal process often starts BEFORE the event!)
Here are some tips to support this sensitive and important time:

• Take time if possible before jumping right back into work, parenting, or obligations. A couple/few days if at all possible. A few hours at bare minimum.
• Avoid dense energy situations like watching the news, being near people who challenge you, too much time with electronics like your cell or computer, don't tackle your taxes right away or read that email from your ex. Honour this time to complete what has already begun within you.
• Lots of water! Drink it, bathe in it, swim in it - cleanse and clear inside and out, keep this work flowing smoothly.
• Eat light & clean. Take it easy on caffeine and red meat for a time and re-introduce gently.
• STAY CONNECTED to those who attended with you, to your mentors, teachers, or the host of the event. Reach out, share, ask for support, tell stories, keep it real and alive while also nurturing and honouring your day-to- day challenges with bringing the medicine forward into your usual life.
• Journal, blog, write stream of consciousness style, create art, record your dreams, downloads and inspirations as soon after your experience as possible and for as long as they continue to unfold. This not only helps track your developments but these acts also have an integration process as your internal world is brought out into the 'ordinary' world. And this is the idea right? To bring the changes within you out into your life and community :)
• Dance, yoga, tai chi, breath work, hiking - this keeps energy moving and fresh. There is trouble when we fall stagnant in our energy fields, especially while our spiritual lives are full on shifting and moving. A cue this is the remedy? When you really don't want to. Feel low, frustrated and totally not like dancing? Just push through and begin - once you step into this energetic way of working and lose yourself to the music - Voila!
• Spend time in nature. Just BE not Do. Allow your body to harmonize with the balancing forces of the elements. This is old wisdom, but science too tells us the earth radiates a healing frequency. Ground. Sit with the trees. Let the river bring flow and clear debris. Sit with the calm of a pond. Enjoy the wind clearing your mind and body of tension.
• Observe any omens or signs to support integrating your experience. Synchronicities? Animal encounters? Cloud formations that look like something? Fortuitous happenings? Its all Spirit telling you you are supported, and keeping dialogue open. Watch for messages.
• Keep up your personal spiritual practice. Whatever that is. Journey. Pray. Create Shrines. Chant. Don't have one? Find one. If you need help with that - please reach out to me, or your trusted mentors, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or medicine people.
• REST - did I say that already? Yah. Cuz it's important. Really important.

Any feelings of discombobulation, frustration or chaotic life circumstance upon your return home is totally normal - sometimes it even means you are perfectly right on track! (and if you are all blissed out and smooth sailing that is super awesome too of course!). You may be presented with lots of opportunities that test your ability to forge a new path instead of falling into old habits. After such big soul-work it is not uncommon to hear stories of people quitting dysfunctional jobs or leaving abusive partners. When one has come into a balanced and healed state, anything less in life can become intolerable. On the flip-side, this sort of work is exactly what may be needed to bring you and your lover closer than ever, more content with your life, at peace, and ready to be the eye of calm in any storm life brings you.

Dancers at The Conscious Goddess Festival in Squamish BC