With more than a decade of experience running medicine ceremonies in Southern Africa, we have been consistently evolving a powerful retreat format guided by the simple question: what is needed to truly achieve tangible life-enriching ecstatic transformation? The first part of the answer has always been that we must be willing to turn ourselves inside out, purge the darkness, to shed the old skin of limiting beliefs by going through the eye of the needle in order to reclaim the sacred inner sanctum of our soul and to rebirth our true eyes.

The second part is the more tricky aspect which is that we must integrate these realisations and remembrances back into our practical lives and our relationships as an embodied experience. Herein lies the true challange. There is no doubt that millions of people around the world have received profound revelations, healings and downloads from their encounters with psychedelics and sacred plant medicines. We must be willing, however, to be authentic in admitting that in reality only a minority of those are actually able to truly integrate and embody these shifts and understandings into their relationships, daily lives and their communities. A big gap exists in turning a profound inner ‘experience’ into a tangible practice, an embodied existence and a better world. A life-changing ‘spiritual’ experience is meaningless if the transformation that follows is only surface deep. This is why the integration and embodiment is actually the key to this work.

We have observed that the first three weeks after a powerful and intensive plant medicine ceremony is the critical period of integration where the messages and teachings of the sacred plant teachers continue to unfold within us as we attempt to undertake new actions in our lives. In this euphoric and often vulnerable space we are in a high state of neural plasticity and suggestion which is optimal for cultivating new habits but also potentially detrimental for compounding disempowering ones. For many first timers in particular this can sometimes feel confusing and emotionally challenging, especially as our core paradigms are changing while we still continue to deal with our old realities. Without a meaningful, proactive and experienced structure of support it is easy to feel alone, overwhelmed and even disempowered. It all comes down to the quality, integrity and experience of the integration process, which most people typically attempt to unfold on their own after their plant medicine journey. The truth is that we are so much more powerful and effective at integrating when we are moving together in a shared guided context of support and witnessing. True awakening is in fact a group effort and is exponentially more effective with the collaborative energy and support of a like-minded tribe.