IGOR DOMSAC | December 5, 2025
Integration is one of the most delicate moments in the ayahuasca process. Once the intensity of the experience subsides, a person is faced with the task of making sense of what happened: organizing emotions, interpreting symbols, reshaping relationships, and turning insights into concrete steps. In Amazonian contexts, this phase is naturally supported by community life, traditional dietary practices, and the role of the healer. But in contemporary urban settings — where these cultural frameworks function differently—integration requires new models of psychological and collective support.
Supporting without interpreting
Professionals such as Marc Aixalà, head of the ICEERS’ El Faro Support Center and instructor in ICEERS Academy’s Psychedelic Integration Training, agree that effective support does not depend on interpreting someone else’s experience. Rather, it requires offering a space where the person has enough internal and external scaffolding to process what they lived through. His clinical practice — built over more than a decade of working with people navigating expanded states of consciousness — highlights that integration demands steady presence, genuine listening, and respectful containment, especially in the days and weeks following the experience.
Aixalà notes that many difficulties do not come from the visionary content itself, but from rigid interpretations, projections, and symbolic readings imposed by others. For this reason, his approach prioritizes psychological autonomy, encouraging each individual to find their own metaphors, rhythms, and channels of meaning. This reduces dependency on the facilitator and minimizes the risk of power dynamics, misinterpretations, or subtle pressures that might shape the integration process.
Instead of freezing the experience into predetermined explanations, supportive integration — as described by Aixalà — invites the person to explore their questions, confront their emotions, compare their insights against everyday reality, and discover which elements of the experience truly call for attention or action. In this way, integration stops functioning as a narrative reconstruction dictated from the outside and becomes a personal process aimed at clarity, responsibility, and sustained growth.
The community dimension of ayahuasca integration
Researchers and activists such as David Nickles, known for his critical analysis of the medicalization of the psychedelic field, have emphasized that integration should not be seen solely as an individual task, but also as a social one. From this perspective, integrating means rebuilding one’s relationship with the environment, with community, and with the cultural practices that shaped our encounter with ayahuasca — ensuring the experience remains grounded rather than isolated or instrumentalized.
This view aligns with decades of ethnographic research showing that in Amazonian contexts, the experience does not end when the ceremony concludes, but when the community receives the participant again, listens to them, and reintegrates them into daily life.
Safety, ethics, and support
In contemporary urban settings, where traditional rituals leave a symbolic and relational gap, integration takes on a dimension of safety and ethics of care. Without a community to hold the experience or specialists who accompany the post-ceremony phase, many people face intense emotions, confusion, fear, or inflated expectations on their own. Post-ceremony support therefore serves not only a psychological purpose but also reduces risks and helps prevent the experience from leading to prolonged distress, isolation, or impulsive decisions.
ICEERS’ work offers a practical response to this need. Through El Faro, its pioneering international Support Center, the organization provides up to five free psychological integration sessions for people experiencing difficulties after working with ayahuasca, iboga, psilocybin, or other psychoactive plants and substances. These sessions are guided by psychologists and therapists trained in risk reduction and intercultural support, enabling them to address experiences not only from a psychological perspective but also through the cosmological and cultural frameworks that shape them.
The goal of the program is not to dictate an interpretation of what occurred or impose a symbolic framework. Rather, it aims to create a safe, confidential space where the person can organize their narrative, explore emotions, distinguish meaningful insights from more confusing content, and regain stability. By offering this temporary support, El Faro helps individuals metabolize their experiences in a healthy way, allowing the process to continue with clarity rather than becoming entangled in confusion or destructive interpretations.
This approach underscores a key idea: in integration, ethics and safety depend not only on the ceremony itself but —often even more— on what happens afterward. Where traditional frameworks no longer support the process, post-ceremony care becomes an act of responsibility toward people navigating emotionally vulnerable states. In this sense, the ICEERS Academy integration course provides an essential training framework, offering theoretical and practical tools for culturally sensitive, informed, and safe integration support. This helps facilitators and caregivers better understand the psychological dynamics that arise after the experience and strengthens the quality of support in contemporary contexts.
An art that bridges worlds
Integration can be understood as an art — a practice where psychology, ethics of care, respect for tradition, and collective responsibility meet. This art does not try to decode the sacred or lock the experience into a single interpretive framework; instead, it seeks to open pathways, connect the inner with the relational, and allow what emerged in the ayahuasca experience to find its place in daily life.
Ultimately, to integrate is to weave bridges: between vision and memory, between the individual and the community, between Indigenous ways of understanding the experience and contemporary tools for supporting it. In a world where ayahuasca practices are shifting, adapting, and multiplying, a culture of ethical, informed, and community-based integration is essential to ensure that transformation does not dissipate, but matures with depth.
Along this collective path toward safer, more conscious, and culturally respectful practices, the World Ayahuasca Forum becomes a privileged space for deepening our understanding of integration. Here, researchers, therapists, Indigenous leaders, and facilitators come together to share perspectives, methods, and learnings that illuminate how to best support the post-experience process. The Forum does more than gather diverse voices — it creates a space where ethical reflection, intercultural listening, and lived experience meet, expanding our understanding of what it means to integrate in a world where practices continually evolve.
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