Psychedelics, Retreats, and Real Change

I’ve participated in retreats and facilitated therapeutic, integrative psychedelic work that genuinely shifted the way I understand myself, my nervous system, and patterns that had, unbeknownst to me, shaped my life for years. I would never dismiss the value of these experiences, but I also no longer romanticise them, because what they offered me was perspective rather than resolution in themselves. At their best, these experiences function like a key, momentarily unlocking a wider field of awareness, but the responsibility to open the door, to step through it, and to learn how to live in that new room belongs entirely to the individual. The medicine did not do that part for me, and it was never meant to.

Within these spaces, familiar narratives softened and the ego loosened, and I was able to see patterns that had previously been protected and defended. The widening of this awareness was real and, at times, incredibly moving, as it allowed me to see myself and others with less judgement and more honesty.

In the weeks that followed, what emerged was not a desire for further transcendence, nor a need to repeat the experience, but rather the necessity of integrating what had already been revealed and bringing those insights back into ordinary, unaltered reality. For me, this meant slowly coming back into my body after years of dissociation, learning to feel gravity, time, and consequence, as well as the weight of conscious choice, rather than floating above my life through insight alone.

This integrative phase in psychedelic therapy is rarely spoken about with the same reverence or resonance as the experience itself, and it is not always adequately supported or emphasised by facilitators in these spaces, which is, to me, deeply concerning, because it is precisely where the work begins and where transformation either stabilises or quietly dissolves.

Over time, I’ve come to see how easily psychedelics and retreats can be misunderstood as the change itself rather than an opportunity to step through a door. When the experience is treated as the healing, it can subtly replace the harder and far less glamorous task of living differently, which includes tolerating discomfort without intensity, staying present when nothing dramatic is happening, and allowing insight to reshape behaviour, boundaries, and choices in the real world.

When these experiences function as the tools they are meant to be, and are received as such, they offer orientation rather than escape and show us something truthful that then needs to be lived, tested, and integrated under ordinary conditions, once the altered state has passed. When they begin to function as a crutch, which often happens without the person realising it, they are used repeatedly to access states of openness, meaning, or aliveness that have not yet been stabilised within the nervous system in everyday life.

This distinction is subtle, because the experience itself can feel expansive even when it is serving an avoidant function, which makes it difficult to recognise when repetition has quietly replaced integration. I have seen this many times with clients, where the language and insight evolve while the underlying patterns remain unchanged.

At a certain point, after multiple journeys or repeated retreats, a question emerges that is not about capacity or courage, but about responsibility, and asks whether what is needed now is yet another peak experience or the willingness to finally do the work that the experience has already revealed.

Transformation, by its nature, is not meant to be endlessly repeated, because something sacred loses its potency when it becomes habitual, and repetition often signals that integration has been postponed rather than completed. What sustains real change is not continual access to altered states, but the patient, grounded process of integration, ideally supported by practitioners who understand this terrain and who work across modalities such as psychedelic integration therapy, Internal Family Systems, EFT, EMDR, and other somatic approaches.

Together, these forms of support allow insight to become embodied rather than placed on a pedestal of peak experiences that cannot be lived inside everyday life.

To finish, I would say that psychedelics cannot walk you back into the room. They cannot teach you how to live inside what you saw, and they cannot substitute for the subtle and unseen process of integration, which tends to reveal itself in nuanced moments over time. This work happens without witnesses and without ceremony, and it is precisely because of this that it is the part that actually changes things.