INTEGRATION PORTAL

Welcome to Phase 4 of your medicine journey!

Congratulations! You’ve arrived to the beginning - the first domino - the most essential and mysterious part of the medicine work…the time when you carry the lessons of your journey home into your everyday life. The next 2 weeks of your life are unique in that you left Rootstock with some neural plasticity. Your brain is altered from your time on the medicine and you have the next 7-14 days to maximize that plasticity (and flex it!) to help anchor in some of the new facets of yourself and your consciousness that feel helpful.

This little portal is here to provide you with some reminders, tools, inspiration and support to help you navigate this important merger - physical with metaphysical, magical with mundane, being with doing - in an effort to help you ‘stick the landing’ and trust in your transformation. Keep in mind that medicine work is mysterious, alchemical, and magical. It’s also slow so, please, be patient with yourself and this process. Becoming ourselves, healing our lineage, and claiming our lives is our lifes work and it isn’t mean to happen in a weekend, a season, or even this incarnation.

The journey is the point now, not the destination.

Integration Best-Practices

  • Content Fast - Limit or turn off all forms of establishment media, social media, current event podcasts, fringe media, and even the ‘push notifications’ on your cell phone. TURN OFF THE NOISE. Allow for your heartbeat, belly, anxiousness, longing, exhaustion, excitement and whatever else is happening inside of you to be the breaking news. If you can manage this for the full 2 weeks of integration, your life will certainly change. If you find yourself needing to plug in, bring conscious awareness to how you feel and the quality of your mind/spirit while consuming that content. Below you will find a list of nutrient-dense content to help keep you rooted in your process and inspired to keep going.

  • Story Medicine - Write, speak, map, dance, sleep and dream the stories for the next couple weeks.  Keep drawing out more of your experience and memory. Talk to your journal, your dog or cat, your family, your friends and community about what’s alive in you. Take care not to repress or suppress tears or sensation when you’re talking about this experience. If you don’t feel safe to fully express yourself, pause that conversation so you don’t spend your plasticity reinforcing old patterns of people pleasing or superficiality, etc. If you find yourself always starting at the same point or saying the same thing, stop! and make some effort to try from a new angle. Fuck the literal timeline and allow yourself to be mythic or poetic in your telling. If the story you’re telling enlivens you, it’s keeping you alive. If not, dig deeper.

  • Music Memory - Listen to the playlist and visit the strange and beloved tracks with some space and consciousness.  See if you can find the same sensation in your body and try to sit with it. Look up the artists, fall into the Sportify wormhole, find the translations of the tracks that delight you, shuffle the playlist or listen to it straight through. Keep your journal nearby to gather the glimmers and knowings and rememberings.

  • Altar Building - This is an ideal time to dust off and reset your existing altar or to build a new one. Find symbols, talisman, artifacts, pictures, and quotes that embody the good and hard parts of your work here. Anchor the cardinal directions to orient yourself. Bring in all of the 5 elements as well (earth, water, fire, air, ether). Symbolize your intentions and honor your obstacles or fears. If you can, you can also make an altar outside somewhere as well to have a place in nature that you can go and focus on when you need some extra grounding or support.

  • Time in Nature - The earth medicine is still pulsing through your field and connecting with Earth during this time of heightened plasticity and openness is optimal. Even if you live in a noisy place, find a tree or window box to walk past and say hello to. Find a rock to sit on and apprentice. Find a body of water that you can reflect with, flow with, and love. When you get stumped or stuck or frustrated or tired with this whole ‘humaning’ thing, Mother Earth will help you regulate.

  • Forgiveness with your process - Forgive yourself daily for being slow to change, forgetting what you remembered, and stumbling along your healing path.  Remember that there is no destination called 'Healed' and that the journey is, in fact, the whole point.  Try and enjoy the movement and the learning and the process.  Welcome curiosity! Let the sunrise, sunset, and moments that you bring food or water to your mouth be little moments of ceremony for you for the next two weeks (or 200 lifetimes)...use these daily reminders to practice gratitude and remembering.

  • Ask for help - You do not need to bear this journey of transformation alone!

SOUL FOOD

Following are some books, podcasts, TED talks, articles, and other clickbait to occupy you while you’re content-fasting. Take what you like and leave the rest. For each of these, you can simply just take it in or, if you want to go deeper, you can ask yourself why you think this on the list of content I’m sharing. Remember, this is a good time to stretch your perspective, challenge your beliefs, open closed doors, and grow, See if any of these inspire you. If so, consider the rabbit hole option of learning more about the author, artist or channel.

TOOLS FOR SELF-REFLECTION

You have a lot of ideas about who you are and how you got to be that way AND there are other potent and interesting lenses with which to explore your identify, make-up, and story. YOU DONT NEED TO BELIVE IN ANY OF THIS to allow yourself to be open to explore it.

  • Natal Astrology - Looking at yourself through the lense of the stars is interesting and can help you see yourself though an archetypal perspective. Chani Nicolas has a free chart reader, a simple app, or a companion book called You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance that is great for beginners or folks just wanting a simple peek.

  • The Gene Keys - Calibrating yourself on the spectrum of human consciousness is another profound way to see yourself. Get your free profile and just read the words it says. Don’t worry about all the numbers and placements and deeper logic unless you want to geek out. Simply seeing your Shadows, Gifts, and Siddis written in black and white could be provocative. If you’re curious to understand more, start with the Activation Sequence either through their online course or the book. This is the #1 tool and modality that I study personally and it has changed my life.

  • Human Design - If you’re curious about the mechanics of your actual human form, how you make decisions, where your energy comes from, and what you’re here to do then Human Design is an incredible perspective. Get your free Bodygraph here and dive in. This is a highly complex synthesis of many wisdom traditions and can feel overwhelming but just looking at your Type, Strategy, and Authority could be revelatory. Some apps that I like to geek out on this with are NeutrinoDesign and HumDes

  • Numerology - Knowing ‘what time it is in your life’ is a profound insight into how to be. You can book a reading with Hanna and learn more about yourself. If you’re interested to understand your energy through the lens of the Mayan calendar, this is another perspective to calibrate yourself and your relationship to NOW.