aspect of your today we're going to focus a little bit more on the integration aspect does anyone here have a definition of integration they would like to give to the audience major well there are many aspects to integration many levels to integrate means to bring together into a coherent whole in one sense it also means  to make meaning of buying corporation get into your way of being in the world and i think that we address both of those and other aspects as well it means to  incorporate yourself within a community as opposed to being an isolated individual there's too much of that in modern western society there's a hyper individualisation and we're all isolated and alienated from each other to some one extent or another so integration would mean to find your place within your society within your community so it has a number of possible applications what i think of integration that i really work with  in my private practice is bring all aspects of yourself to a whole and bring me like the darkness i'm about bring consciousness and life to all these unconscious patterns about to piggyback a little bit on what rocca saying in terms of clinical practice i think about my patients as whole beings and take into account what's going on with their physical bodies their minds their spirits their motions and support them and looking at those different aspects of themselves so that they can fully develop all of those aspects in optimize their health and all those levels and not as one definition of being an integrated being as having all those aspects of oneself developed fully present and to be with them even if it's uncomfortable at times i think that integration also really takes a whole different quality to go to a school that talks about interval studies which is  irrational and making irrational and really i look at like how can we take these lessons from other worldly places phantasmagoric places and reincorporate them into what we're doing here in this world because sometimes the lessons are so strange and unusual  are just cements but you know with a little bit of creativity we could create plants and gardens and things of that nature and these are things that by looking at our society with a more creative lens through integration perhaps we can have a better society and create a better culture is  what i wonder seems like there are two different models when we talk about intra gratian we have the biomedical model of integration and we also have sort of the play teacher model you speak a little bit about a little bit at the medical whatever that is and not really not really going into the depth of or the group of what's coffee a certain behavior or a certain predisposition  and plan medicine is they take you to the root whether you want to whether you're ready for for it or not whether you're ready to see it whether you can handle it or not they will take you to the root and that is the biggest difference between between using that model and also ways of integrating in your everyday lives then the medical model that a lot of the times is just a panacea for symptoms and will not get to the root w is childhood trauma a lot of the times you bring a childhood trauma to a physician you know that just goes with the medical model or a psychiatry is to a psychologist and they will go with the symptoms which we might beings i e depression acting out and they will they will deal with the behavior but love with what caused that behavior so at different times in your life you're constantly going to be every time you having citee there's almost like there's a new symptom coming up you know or there is because you never went to the root you never dealt with what i was really going on and that is that is i think the concept and discussed how it was necessary to take a new perspective because it could represent a major evolutionary change in the life of a person but if you got into the hands of mainstream psychiatry just physicians whatever working with the biomedical model there are objects ultimately even though they're not thinking about in those terms is to reintegrate you into functional mainstream society bring you back to normal so they like medicate the daylights out of you tending to your symptoms behavior oriented so you can become a working functioning member of society again when you may have been in the process of discovering something amazing and wonderful about yourself and you need a whole change of venue so that their integration is really more a matter of  thing or is maybe an anti genack challenging trip if you will would be something that was more you know intended so if you talk about what spiritual murderously is and how do we work with that as well you know my understanding which is not necessarily correct of spiritual mercy is not exclusively a spontaneous affair it certainly could be in stan's wife christina enjoyed a sudden awakening which usually you're not ready for and it's completely upset anything and you know what to make of it so it can be something spontaneous like that but it could also be a result immediately or later from some event in your life  that affects you deeply it could be an extraordinary event some kind of trance personal experience that you've had from meditation in some kind of religious situation you were in a horrible accident you've been in a war some kind of intense trauma and it could be some concrete nation of events in your life that are not individual devastating but build you are gradually building towards a crisis where you do not feel to be even in yourself or to speak of in society and you achieve you will you come to a some some psychological crisis psycho emotional  crisis and you break down and when your structures break down suddenly you're open to a variety of transpersonal forces that you don't know how to deal with if you have if you're not in the proper container and you don't have the kind of background in our society  does not provide that background again the more greater likelihood is that the just try to return you to wherever you came from so continue doing what they think you're supposed to be doing what they think you're supposed to be doing that you're a place where people can go to and sort of allow the spiritual emergency or the antigenic experience to unpack an integrated way also being able to have chances for people to help and care for you during this time because it's obviously very vulnerable in this  absolutely and it also implies your social milieu you if you're having this emergency chances are you can't there's nobody you know in your normal daily situation that you can talk to about who's competent to deal with it in fact they you know you may find yourself under attack finding very little in the way of sympathy and people telling you chastising you to just get yourself together and get back to work or whatever so you need to be in a place where you're protected and surrounded by people who have a half a clue about what you're going through and can assist you with it for myself for instance when  of various categories of professionals all of whom understood what i was going through and so really supported my experience so that i could get the most from it homeport do you believe it is for the person who's helping you to actually had similar type of experience we had this conversation for what would be ideal is for a qualified therapist or psychiatrist who is also in the are generally experienced alas that's pretty on kong i don't think most of the people i don't think any of the people that were helping me where i went for the treatment and had themselves had that same experience but they had been they were in the first place open they knew what they were dealing with they were open to the situation and had dealt with a number of other people and seen what they've been through so they were themselves becoming experienced if everybody became very happy with the point is that they understood what we were there to do the kind of situation we were coming from what we needed to do and were trying to do by having done that and they were there to support that there was a very important one thing tonight is you know there's certainly something to be said for walking a walk walking a path walking the ropes learning the ropes on your own and there's something to be said for just the compassionate nature of the human spirit and people go into service missions in other countries where they haven't personally lived in those standards of living that might be not ideal compared to what they've been used to but they're still able to show up as compassionate beings and be effective and probably promoting love and care and service  i feel particularly with the integration work that we've done with erie in terms of integration circles there have been many people that have showed up shop to circles that haven't had a true and here genic experience in terms of just ing and the agenda but they still had some experience that was transpersonal or spiritual and some some nature that are mystical but has asked them to open their mind and have questions about the deeper mysteries of life and what i've noticed from helpers and people who've showed up but haven't necessarily had a true antigenic experience is there's there's compassion in there is love and there's a genuine caring around being in that collective experience of processing information so that hopefully everyone can walk away from that circle after it's done feel like wow i got some benefit out of just a sharing what i needed to share and be being witnessed and not judged and i think that's one of the really powerful things that eerie offers is the safe space and integration circles and as we've all talked about it's a very important part of the work that we're doing much different organizations that are promoting harm reduction and research and integration is one area where area can really take a stand that's a non offensive way to present it to the world who can really argue with giving people support and compassion the harvard option but already we're we're we're not encouraging but we're there to support once the experiences happen and it seems like there's also the really in all these experiences that typically are there people are coming to the integration circles it's because you really have to feel for the person you're going through a life changing moments and then i think i see it in the sesame but it seems like the also maybe something we can talk about is that there's lots of different ways to interfere so  one technique that i really enjoy working with this painting and i know some people do dance or other types of things are there are any ways of integration that you found that really worked successfully for you there's a place also after having been in dark places or in many places and  developing your own creative way of coming out of it in dealing with everyday life and making sense and meaning whatever experience it could be grief and loss addiction many things so there is a place where i felt like when i went through major depression through grieving through loss and despair i could connect more with someone that had been in that place just at this point we should perhaps explain integration circles because we just introduced this as a function of eerie but we have integration circles our peer support groups where people can come that we we provide a space and some of us from theory come and sit there and we provide a safe space where you can be heard and witnessed without being judged by your peers by people who have themselves been through extraordinary transpersonal experiences in the case of eerie most of us that would include some of the origin experience but it can also include other things as you're saying recover from addiction for instance and a very good point was there's a lady that's come who has never done in theologians but had a spontaneous the awakening and yet she could completely understand what we were talking about in terms of the origin experience family in the same boat having had similar experiences and so we are there to hear you and and comfort you and that's what we try to do in these circles and thus far with some considerable like you're saying earlier point of view we don't have that commute to help share with these experiences so maybe integration is specific to the west as a way or response to deal with these you know human cultural shattering because the differences are so so  big like your trust personal experiences are so different from your everyday life like an indigenous community that i'm going to speak about peru and i'm going to think it's specifically about i os god people drink a lot of guys part of their everyday life and they have the community there and they drink in community and they have common visions and they are in a communal place where there is no need to locate now i need to go to work so community and there's not such a difference between your ordinary and your non ordinary life i think that's why they don't need integration as much as we do you know and perhaps even  splinter a leashing comes from right but to claim that these experiences or these visions are just a toxic byproduct is really the wrong way to look at it all together because you're not getting to the real like spiritual aspect of what's happening or the  opening and beyond what we can see i think one of the main distinctions i see between the buy medical model and the plane which are models in this biomedical model there's a strong focus on reductionism and  mechanism and that's something that kind of stems out of the emergence of science and how it became so valued around the time of copernicus taking taking humans out of the center of the universe and saying oh there's really the sun at the center that was very upsetting for people at that time but what came out of that was this whole advance in the world of science and that has even though it's hundreds of years old it still is informing them and the majority of westernized  cultures around the world and so there's this focus in value on you know get to the one symptom find the biomedical reason ribbon duro transmitter that's deficient in causing this and look at the neurons and whatnot and that's all very interesting and valuable however when by the energetic link through our hearts are and and so the plant model just inherently has that within it whereas the science model is valuable again it offers us interesting information some of it may or may not be true but the the plant was and has been around for so long that it's offering something very different and it's offering us i feel a real gateway and a real opportunity and a tool to reconnect acknowledge that we've think that the whole twenty twelve crisis exemplifies its change of paradigm the materialist reductionist worldview out of which biomedical science arises feels that visions are aberrations and unreal fundamentally unreal that this consensual material reality is it it's the only thing that's real and there's nothing else to do in this very narrow view simply fails to explain too many things that are part of the total human experience and so we are moving i believe in the direction of  reintegrating and sold universe as part of our more worldview so that subtle energies subtle be other realms of being and forms of of pissed my logical forms of knowledge like intuition and inspiration suddenly become meaningful and more comprehensible but if you're in lockstep with the materialist reductionist worldview then none of that makes any sense and most of what we're doing doesn't make any sense but then look at the statistics look at the newspaper look at the television look at the faces of people you see on the sidewalk if you're walking along some of them are in very bad shape but even the ones that aren't are clearly living a reduced existence they're not experiencing the formless of the human potential because they're being forced into their little box of behaviorist  psychology so that if you if you have one of these experiences one of these transpersonal experiences be it in the old jenny or otherwise and you go to the wrong therapist or psychiatrist or doctor they're just going to see you as as being aberrant not fitting in with consensual reality not fitting into the whole freudian d s m psychoanalytic perspective and immediately prescribe some kind of medication try to shut down whatever change you're going through terminating any investigation that you're doing within yourself and and try to return you to a functioning producing and consuming unit in the world do you ever people have often commented that freud outlined over four hundred psychopathic pathological situations for human beings and three or four healthy conscious situations so it's really all about psychopathology and his view of human beings was really quite dark you know that we're where raging beasts with a thin veneer of civilization that's barely enough to keep us from terry each other apart regularly and that the best we can do is be less miserable this is not the kind of world view i choose to participate in and it doesn't give me a sense of really exploring having the freedom to explore in be the