There was a moment, early on, when I realised something quietly devastating.
The ceremony wasn’t going to carry me.
The space had closed.
The songs had ended.
People were packing bags, hugging, leaving.
And I was still a mother.
Still a partner.
Still a woman with choices waiting for me on Monday morning.
Nothing dramatic happened in that moment. No collapse. No revelation. Just a sober clarity that landed in the body.
Whatever the medicine had shown me, it was now my responsibility.
That distinction changed everything.
What plant medicine can do, and what it cannot
Plant medicines can open doors.
They can reveal patterns with ruthless precision.
They can show us what we’ve been protecting, avoiding, repeating.
But they do not live our lives.
They don’t speak the difficult truth in our relationships.
They don’t change our habits.
They don’t hold our boundaries for us.
Life is where the work happens.
Integration is not symbolic. It’s practical.
For me, integration didn’t begin with journaling or meaning-making.
It began with noticing where my body was no longer willing to lie.
Where I was maintaining harmony at the cost of truth.
Where old survival strategies were dressed up as spirituality.
Where insight had not yet become action.
Some of the hardest integrations had nothing to do with visions or emotions.
They were relational.
Practical.
Inconvenient.
The cost of integrity
There were conversations I didn’t want to have.
Boundaries that disappointed people I loved.
Choices that removed familiar comfort before they brought any sense of peace.
There was grief in that.
Not the dramatic kind.
The quiet grief that comes when you grow up rather than break down.
This part of the work is rarely spoken about, but it’s real. And it matters.
Discernment after the medicine
I also learned something essential.
Not everything that rises after ceremony is guidance.
Some impulses are old patterns trying to regain control.
Some urgency is survival wearing spiritual language.
Intensity, I learned, is not the same thing as truth.
Discernment became a practice.
Slowing down.
Listening for what stayed true over time, not what demanded immediate action.
What lasted in the body mattered more than what felt powerful in the moment.
What integration actually gave me
Integration didn’t simplify my life.
It clarified it.
Fewer stories.
Clearer choices.
More responsibility.
And, unexpectedly, more peace.
What we see now, again and again
This is what we see repeatedly in the work we hold now.
The medicine doesn’t fail people.
And it doesn’t save them either.
It meets them at the exact depth they are willing to meet themselves, in ordinary life, over time.
That meeting point is where real change either takes root, or quietly fades.
With Gratitude,
Stacey
