Doing the Deep Dive
& Integrating your
Plant Medicine Journey
Ensure you have the tools and awareness to integrate your plant medicine journey (be it a spiritual awakening, a reactivation of trauma, or to all that lies in between and beyond) into embodied wisdom.
The principles of Hakomi will give you the capacity to be in harmony with whatever has risen.
It's about Coherence
The modalities of Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems are well placed to hold and contain your deep 'altered state' experiences (be it psychedelic-assisted, plant medicine or a spontaneous spiritual awakening) and to enable your human-ness to reshape in a coherent way with your new view on the world and your Self.
Ram Dass, in his book Paths to God, talks about our ability to receive the downloads of knowledge from the planes of higher consciousness.
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It's all very well receiving the download, says Ram Dass, but if the knowledge does not have a coherent respository within the mindbody, then it will become like a forgotten book in a dusty library.
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This knowledge will not turn into wisdom, and it is wisdom that makes the experience meaningful, and, dare I say, useful.
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So how do we do that?
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The new insight or felt experience needs to cohere with its environment - that is, the mindbody.
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The Hakomi method is specifically beneficial to enable our body and mind to send a unified signal, rather than mixed messages, and to bring that back to a meaningful, digestible morsel of knowledge, and transform it into wisdom. An indigestible morsel becomes a conflict within us.
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So let's bite-size your experience and see what wisdom is ready to be embodied on your journey.
Coherence & Embodiment
# Body Wisdom
This is about connection to Self and becoming clear about the signals your body is sending you.
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After a big experience, our mind can make little sense of what just happened, especially if our nervous system has set off an alarm or warming of some sort, then we're left wondering what on earth we have ... unearthed??!!
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We might respond by focusing on positivity and demanding peace and ease and 'everything's alright', but clearly, something is getting activated, and without a clear appreciation of this signal, we can become more anxious, more avoidant of new experiences.
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The tide has shifted.
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Perhaps a greater sensitivity has woken up.
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Perhaps a door to your psychic basement has opened up.
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The journey-work has shifted the game. What was tolerable before is now no longer.
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That's an interesting place to land hey.
One part of the big puzzle is to acknowledge the body-story. Not to rehash or indulge, but rather to give our felt sense the honesty and time s/he needs to feel and make sense of the experience.
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Typically sense-making happens at the level of mind, but our deepest and truest wisdom is held and known in the body.
In our hakomi sessions, I will guide us towards our present moment awareness of body and become curious about what's being held there, as well as what is wanting to be let go of.
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We allow for shaking, tremors, movement, and also the more subtle practice of studying our impulses and habituated gestures and posture. It's all there, pealing back for the diamond beneath.
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We learn how to connect to Self through our present moment and body awareness to find the coherence of truth, wisdom and the healing impulse within.
Coherence & Connection
# Interbeingness
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We have spoken about Self-connection, but what about the more synergistic connection of interbeingness?
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We can explore this from multiple dimensions, the inter-being-ness of ...
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our parts (the internal constellations that makes up our psyche; see Internal family system below)
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our family constellations
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our society/culture/nationhood and collective consciousness
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our shared humanity and spiritual evolution
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our earth/gaian consciousness
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our cosmos and expanded consciousness
In our Hakomi sessions, all dimensions are in the field, and with present moment awareness we can filter and hone in to that which is coming forward for healing, through our own personal predicament, as felt in our mindbody experience.
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As we heal our own small part within the whole, we create synergistic health for the whole.
In a Hakomi session we create space for...
# Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems is sweeping through psychedelic medicine as one of the preferred modalities to help heal and restructure the psyche.
Plant medicine and IFS are an exceptionally powerful combination that allows us to explore and integrate all the fractured Parts of our identity; our Managers, our Protectors, our Exiled parts, and to facilitate the opportunity to bring all these parts home.
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In order to survive or adapt to stressors and traumas in our life, we created adaptive parts that were able to manage our experiences early on in life.
As we facilitate communication between our Parts, hearing their story and the role they have played, we are better able to invite them home and integrate them back within our core Self.
My role is to support this flow of reconciliation and reclamation.
Coherence & Integration
What is integration?
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Integration is when we return to a known community that recognises and understands that we have become a different person because of the separation and the ordeal.
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~ Michael Meade​
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A Hakomi integration session
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Before integration can happen, creating safety and an alliance with our polarised parts and our unconscious is foundational. How long this takes depends on the individual, as attachments to the trauma, and the depth of one's spiritual practice are indicators of how fast and far we can go in a session.
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An integration session might look at exploring where your behaviour with your values feel incongruent. In Hakomi we use an embodied enquiry approach into the following questions...
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What is it like to look through these new eyes at the world?
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What in your life are you finding difficult now?
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What would your life look like to be more congruent with your values?
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What Needs have more value now?
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What needs attending to now?
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Integration is when previously polarised parts of our psyche align into a sense of a co-operative whole, where we feel more at ease with our self and the world, and we can then act coherently with our values from that space.
Coherence & the
Hero's Journey
Integration & the Hero's Journey
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In The Hero's Journey, Joseph Campbell talks about the initiatory experience. It is a rite of passage with ritual and ceremony. The stages of the Hero's Journey are...
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First stage is Separation.
Second stage is the Ordeal. Or the Challenge.
Third stage is to Return.
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These stages are common to us all, however, most of us in today's society are carrying wounds like unprocessed initiatory experiences, lacking ceremony and context.
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Trauma is like that. In terms of how the nervous system responds, trauma is an initiatory experience for a person, perpetrated at the wrong place, at the wrong time by the wrong person.
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No doubt, you have had an initiatory experience. In lieu of ceremony and context, these experiences will keep happening as the psyche wants to transform. The soul wants us to be whole. And so we keep going through separation experiences until we find a separation that unifies.
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Integration is about ensuring the Third Stage is attended to, and in this way, the Hero can integrate into his or her psyche the 'new information', and contribute that knowingness back into their community.
The integration piece is about building our capacity to reside in this new state of being while also being in engagement with the world around us.
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