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Although a psychedelic experience is intensely private and individually felt, sharing it with others through integration can be instrumental in understanding it. Integration, the process of incorporating insights from a trip, can be done communally, adding a dimension that individuated integration lacks. These groups are called “integration circles.” Although they are likely practiced informally across the country, there are a few organizations dedicated to public integration circles.
Integration circles are not psychedelic therapy. While psychedelic therapy offers the patient an opportunity to ingest a compound under a therapist’s clinical supervision, guiding them through it, integration is a post-experience activity that happens hours or days or weeks later. Psychedelic therapy is a precarious field. There are very few legitimate legal opportunities aside from experimental research studies and exemptions in some states for certain conditions. Because of this, it is inaccessible for many.
Even working on integration with a therapist, where they do not supervise the trip but instead try to advise one on how to apprehend its content, is different. Integration circles are a conversation between individuals with similar experiences.
Understanding the Ineffable
A psychedelic experience can be utterly confounding. It can be difficult to understand the ideas and visuals arising from it. Daniel Shankin, a psychedelic integration coach and founder of Tam Integration, gave an illustrative example: How should one know what it means to be turned into a tree during a trip? Integration is precisely trying to understand (what appears to be) incomprehensible, like turning into a tree during a psychedelic experience. Sharing an experience, trying to apply words to understand something, and gaining another’s perspective on an experience can lead to a new view. This is the purpose of integration.
Shankin has been drawn to psychedelic integration since he discovered it. “I wish I’d discovered this 25 years ago,” he said.
In 2018, he founded Tam Integration, an organization offering integration circles, primarily online. He described the purpose of integration circles as “giving somebody space to work out and process emotions that come up because things happen that are confusing.” This is precisely what is missing when one trips without integration—the incorporation of those emotionally powerful and confusing moments.
It is different, he said, to acknowledge that “love is the answer” in an academic sense than to have experiential knowledge of boundless love. To feel love, in this cosmic sense, is different from thinking about it. Integration leads to understanding that experience, exceeding everyday knowledge and belief.
For Shankin, the distinction between therapy and integration circles is that there is no central authority. “An integration circle is a place for equals to share their experience and reflect, as opposed to some sort of clinician that is lording over the event,” he explained.
If therapy is, by definition, hierarchical—relying on the client/clinician relationship and its inherent power differential—then integration circles are, conversely, egalitarian.
Realizing Through Each Other: A Community of Insight
There are limitations, though, to one-on-one integration. Oftentimes, an encounter with another’s ideas about their experience can bring out a new dimension. Simply, more minds, more thoughts, and more perspectives can increase the insights that can be applied to one’s own experience. A group comes with a wider range of perspectives, some of which, like the tree example, may be in common.
Shankin explains that he asked, after someone said they were confused by a trip in which they’d turned into a tree. “Raise your hand if you ever turned into a tree. Everybody raised their hands—someone said they were a bush—but you recognize that we have strange experiences and that those are pointing to some part of our unconscious that wants to be seen.”
There is, here, a recognition of our limits: the fact that we’re each tethered to a perspective, the self that refracts the world. Through encountering others, trying to incorporate a private experience through their different positionality, one can view their own experience in a new way.
Integration is, in a way, a form of interpretation directed at the self. Yet, as many learn, others can offer insights from the outside that exceed self-interpretation. People think they know themselves best. But sometimes the truth is the group, whose members have been in a similar state
Digitizing Community—Integrating a Trip over Zoom?
Most of Tam Integration’s meetings happen through Zoom, making it more accessible to psychedelic users from any distance. This does lead to a global community, collapsing the otherwise insurmountable spatial distance between attendees. National borders dissolve, and a digital communal space emerges. Tam Integration, for instance, has had participants from every continent except Antarctica.
But does a digital integration circle, conducted over Zoom, capture authentic community? Shankin acknowledged what is lost: “there’s something in person that, of course, is nice.” He also gestured towards instances where the inverse is true, where what is online cannot be translated in-person.
During the pandemic, when many interactions went entirely online, Shankin observed a strange phenomenon: virtual friendships. Those friendships flourished on screen sometimes withered when they met in real life.
Yet, Shankin also witnessed the opposite. For many, the online circle was a lifeline. It’s a bridge across the distance that allowed genuine, lasting kinships to take root. While a digital community can feel tenuous and immaterial, it offers a rare opportunity to collapse the boundaries of time and space, proving that even a virtual connection can lead to a very real sense of belonging.
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