Healing Crisis After Ceremony: What it Means and How to Move Through Psychedelic Integration

What Happens in the Integration Process?

When I started on the plant medicine path, I had no idea about integration work. In my naivete, I thought that the ceremony was where all the work happens. I imagined that somehow, after the ceremony, everything would be perfect, and I would be healed and enlightened.

Imagine my surprise when, after my first Ayahuasca dieta in Peru and several ceremonies, I felt sicker and more confused than when I started my journey. I thought that what I need is to drink more medicine, so I did. But it didn’t bring any relief. In fact, I was heading into a spiritual crisis that completely broke me down, and at one point, I thought I was truly losing my mind.

Now, I questioned everything—including myself, my path, and the medicine. I was in the dark night of my soul, hanging between two worlds and struggling to hold on.

I was considering abandoning my path and my life, but the Universe had other plans.

Discovering Integration and Rebirth

When I was most desperate, I met a wonderful healer who came to my aid and told me to stop drinking medicine and focus on my integration work.

Integration what? What is that? Why has nobody told me about that?

I felt frustrated and afraid, but she explained that participating in the ceremony was just the beginning of the process. It’s like opening a door to a new me and a new path. But I need to do the inner work and go through my death and rebirth process many times—and the dark night of the soul is definitely part of that journey. This explanation gave me some relief because until then, I thought there was something so wrong with me that even the medicine couldn’t help me.

She helped me understand the integration process and gave me some great pointers to continue on my path. I didn’t drink any more medicine for nearly two years. Instead, I dove into my integration work. After that time, I truly felt reborn—it had completely transformed my life.

It was a rough time, but I am grateful for everything I went through. In fact, it had such an impact on me that I felt called to shift my therapy work into psychedelic therapy.

Supporting Others Through Integration Work

Today, I help others to do the same in my Ayahuasca Assisted Therapy program, and boy, I have co-created and witnessed so many miracles! So, I am writing this to help you understand that this journey starts way before your ceremony and lasts way after it is over.

I am here to share the most important things about integration work and let you know that if you still struggle, that doesn’t mean the medicine hasn’t worked for you. On the contrary, you are on the right path to creating the life—and that change—that started you on this path. It’s important to understand that the healing process itself is a form of purification that takes time.

One more thought before we begin: you have to understand that this medicine is not a magic pill. You cannot bypass the necessary inner work that you have to do to create that breakthrough you are looking for. With this in mind, let’s see how to navigate this beautiful and liberating path!

1. Physical Purification

If you think that throwing up and emptying your bowels during the ceremony will be the only thing that happens to your body, you will be surprised when you find yourself in pain and discomfort after your trip to the other side.

Based on my experience, these are the most common physical manifestations that occur during integration work. 

• Cold or flu-like symptoms
• Digestive issues, food sensitivities
• Skin rashes, foul body odor, excessive sweating, and releasing mucus from your body
• Headaches, muscle pain, joint pain, and intense menstrual pain
• Heart palpitations and irregular heartbeat
• Shifts in physical posture
• Tiredness, exhaustion, insomnia, vivid dreams, and lucid dreams
• Hot flashes or feeling cold from the inside
• Tremors, shaking, and muscle twitches
• Increased bodily strength, vitality, and flexibility
• Spontaneous healing of physical symptoms you struggled with before

I certainly experienced many of the above myself. For example, at one point, my body broke out in a severe eczema that I had never experienced before. Other times, my body was in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep for days. You have to understand that everything is connected. Your body needs to process what happened and keep emptying itself. 

Navigating Discomfort and Knowing When to Seek Help

If you experience any of the above, don’t be scared. In most cases, there is no need to run to a doctor or an emergency room. You need to surrender, breathe, and go with your process. You can get massages, acupuncture, homeopathy, or herbal supplements to support yourself during this time, and in general, these symptoms will improve and disappear without any medical aid.

That said, if your symptoms are not getting better at all—if they intensify and progressively worsen, or if your intuition strongly calls you to seek medical aid—please do that without haste. Over the years, I learned to discern between a healing pain of release and an emergency call from my body that tells me to see a doctor immediately. If you don’t trust yourself yet to do that, then it is best to seek help from a professional integration expert.

2. Emotional Clearing

“Feeling is healing,” and this is so true! Sadly, we learn to label and suppress certain emotions. Anger, fear, guilt, and shame—you are apparently not allowed to feel these! Society tells you to swallow them down and suck it up, then pretend that you are fine and force a smile. When you go through a deep transformational process, those emotions that you have tried so hard to deny and suppress will all come to the surface for you to let go of them. This release is a natural and necessary part of the healing process.

The following are the most common types of emotional releases that happen during integration work. 

• Intense sadness and grief, crying and shaking
• Intense anger and rage
• Feelings of emptiness, depression, and disconnection
• Experiencing guilt and shame for no apparent reason
• Intense feelings of vulnerability, rawness, a kind of emotional nakedness
• Feeling other people’s emotional states very strongly
• Uncontrollable laughter and intense joy
• Profound gratitude and reverence for life
• Deep peace, contentment, and connection
• Deep feelings of forgiveness and compassion

Embracing the Emotional Rollercoaster

Unfortunately, most people resist this type of emotional balancing—especially when they face intense emotions that they label as negative or wrong. Please understand that if you resist and suppress these arising emotions, you are going against your own good and your process. 

After my first journey with the powerful Mother Plant, I cried oceans of tears. I experienced bliss previously unknown to me and fell into a rage that was hard to contain. I felt sadness that was so deep, like a bottomless well, and also a depth of gratitude that I wanted to kiss the whole world. So if you feel like this, that’s a sign that you are on the right path. In retrospect, I call this part of the process the emotional rollercoaster.

However, this type of emotional flooding can sometimes be very scary and overwhelming. The best thing you can do is to get professional help from an integration therapist such as myself, who can support you to work through this experience and allow this purification to happen.

Another essential thing to remember is that these emotions often seem to arise from nowhere for no particular reason when, in fact, they come from your past, and someone or something in the present usually triggers them. It’s an art to contain yourself in these intense moments and to learn to release them healthily without projecting or lashing out at others. Again, there is no shame in asking for help when going through something like that.

3. Mental Purification

Your mind is such a powerful tool that it can enslave or liberate you for good. The problem is that about 90% of your mind is unconscious, meaning you are unaware of what’s going on in there. This lack of awareness is the main reason why you keep repeating the same mistakes no matter how hard you try to change things in your life. One of the many gifts of the Mother Ayahuasca is expanding your awareness and opening the doors of your unconscious. It is in your unconscious mind where the roots of your limiting beliefs are—the beliefs that perpetuate your suffering and force you to repeat destructive cycles and behaviors.

Here are the most commonly experienced symptoms of this mental clearing and purification.

• Feeling confused and lost, temporary disorientation as old self-concepts dissolve
• Thinking that you are going crazy and are losing your mind, feeling as if you are between worlds
• Questioning and doubting yourself, your choices, and your path
• Feelings of emptiness, a void, a sense of death, or a desire to die
• Temporary crisis of the meaning of (your) life
• Profound change of perception, shifting your central values and priorities
• Spontaneous insights about your past
• Shocking discoveries, recovering memories suppressed into amnesia
• A sense of regression into a child state, difficulty in articulating profound insights
• Isolation, a strong desire to withdraw and spend time alone
• Recognizing the obvious, what you didn’t see in the past but was right in front of your nose
• Enhanced creativity and problem-solving
• Understanding your purpose and higher path
• Downloads, receiving large amounts of new information without any effort

Personal Experience, Integration, and Identity Crisis

A couple of months after my first dieta in Peru, I experienced a dissolution of identity that almost scared me to death. I thought that I was truly losing my mind and would surely end up in a mental hospital. If you are properly prepared (which I wasn’t), the chance of this happening is very rare. It’s imprtant to receive the medicine in a safe space and have support during your integration work, which I didn’t have at the time.

For me, it took quite a long time of painful trial and error to figure out how to return to my center and ground all the insights I kept receiving even long after I left the ceremony. In the end, thanks to my strong desire to live and not abandon myself and the many teachers who helped me on this path, I learned how to transform this challenging situation into the biggest gift of my life.

Please understand that you create your reality through your mind. Sadly, most people are living in a mental prison that limits their true power and expression. Furthermore, these are the mental structures that keep us disempowered and in victimhood. When you start to dissolve these old structures and start taking back your power you go through a temporary identity crisis because the old structures are no more, and the new framework is not grounded yet. So, you feel like you are in a type of limbo or you might lose your mind.

Crisis of Faith and Spiritual Transformation

In my experience, you have to lose your mind to find an anchor in your heart, which is your true compass and where your true power is. Of course, you will still have a mind and an Ego, but you won’t identify with it fully. You will know that you are way more than your identity and story. This shift is what we call expansion and true transformation.

4. Spiritual Transformation

We are all spirit manifested in physical form, but most have forgotten who we truly are and where we came from. This forgetting is somehow necessary to fully immerse yourself in a human experience. For me, the biggest gift of plant medicine and Ayahuasca is a remembering of our true nature and reconnecting within to that place beyond duality and the ideas of bad and good.

Rumi put this into words in a beautiful way:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn’t make any sense.”

When you go through a transformation that touches your core, you will undoubtedly face a crisis of faith. I often questioned what was right and what was wrong until these questions didn’t even make sense to me anymore. But that journey requires another article, so stay tuned!

Closing

Healing and awakening is not an easy path. If it were, we would all be enlightened and live in paradise. It requires willingness, openness, and commitment on your part because it’s messy, painful, and intense. In my journey, I considered giving up many times on this path—but I didn’t because deep down, I love myself and want what is best for me and others.

I learned over many years and sometimes in a hard way to see the bigger picture, to surrender to temporary intensity and discomfort, and to navigate this journey like a surfer riding the waves. But I didn’t do this alone! I had many guides, teachers, and a lot of support.

The best thing you can do is to reach out for support. Today, I am proud to guide others on this path. If you find yourself struggling, please reach out for support.

If you only take away one thing from this long writing, I leave you with this:

Healing is an act of self-love, and yes, you are worth it!