Journaling & Other forms of self-expression and reflection

The most popular and highly encourages technique doe integration is journaling. Starting a journal before your journey and continuing to use it in the days and weeks afterward to reflect on your experience is one of the nest ways to help you find meaning. What's more, going back and reading your journal entries weeks, months, or even years later can also help make sense of a journey and give you an opportunity to reflect on your growth.

There's no formula o journaling. It's recommended to start before your journey by writing about your intentions, expectation, fears, and hopes. You can bring your journal along for your psychedelic experience to capture any realizations or insights in the moment, but this becomes harder as doses get higher, so don't feel it's necessary to write during your journey. But a great time to write about the actual journey, its sensations, visions, and insights, will be once the medicine has worn off. If you're not too tired, start capturing how you're feeling and the visceral sensations from your experience the same day as your ceremony, continue to journal, reflecting on that experience, what it meant to you, how you're feeling now in the aftermath, and any other feelings or insights you may come to. Often just by writing those things out, new lessons and realizations become clear, and reading them later can really help to reinforce or reinterpret them.

Journaling doesn't have to be only written content either. In fact, integration is more about reflection and self-expression than it is recoding ever detail of our journey. If creating art or music is more your speed, then these can be great ways to begin integrating and mining your journey for lessons. Especially if your experience is hard to put into words or to make much sense of, try drawing, painting, singing, or making other forms of art or music to being to work through it. 

One of the values in this is that it can help you physically move the experience from being something that's contained in one's mind to something that is in another position in relation to you that you can then reflect on. If your make a drawing that represents a piece of your experience, you can then look at that drawing and observe things about it that you might not notice if it's still something that you're picturing in your mind. And you may notice further details about it that you hadn't before. Drawing or writing about your experience isn't required for integration, but they are useful tools to help you gain perspective.

**Excerpt From Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, by Michelle Janikian