A Talk on Psychedelic Integration (Ft. Ivan and Lana Rados of Intronaut, Hosted by the Flying Sage)
Nov. 22nd, 2021 - Vancouver, BC | Intronaut's head healers, Ivan and Lana Rados, were featured speakers at The Flying Sage's first Expansion Seminar in Vancouver, BC. Dr. Nicholas Wong gave the opening remarks. Below is a recap by our very own Sasha Gill. We are pleased to share some of Ivan and Lana's teachings with you, our dear readers:
Last week I had the pleasure of attending The Flying Sage’s very first “Expansion Seminar” with our Intronaut healers Lana Rados, Ivan Rados, and Dr. Nicholas Wong. Nemesis Coffee kindly hosted the event, and I couldn’t have imagined a better setting. As soon as I walked into the café I was immediately mesmerized by the elaborately carved ceiling. As Dr. Nick aptly said, it felt like I was sitting “inside a giant mushroom!”
As more and more people began to filter in, I was aware of how foreign it felt to be at a public event. After living with physical distance for so long, it felt strange to be surrounded by so many people. Strange, but wonderful, I soon realized, because the vibrant energy filling the room told me that we had all gathered for a common purpose: deep spiritual healing.
I began my own healing journey with spirit plant medicine early this year, but it wasn’t long before I noticed a reoccurring challenge. In the immediate aftermath of each psychedelic trip, I would feel such deep love and connection to myself and to everyone around me, but after just a week or two, as I returned to my real-world commitments and routine, the wild and mystical moments from my journeys that had once taken precedence as markers of my expanded consciousness, soon began to fade into distant memory, and sometimes even disappeared completely. It was journeying with Intronaut that finally lead me to understand why this kept happening; I was missing the most crucial component of any spirit plant medicine journey: integration.
Every month Intronaut offers free integration sessions with Ivan and Lana for those who have journeyed with psychedelics, and they do so because they recognize that it is an essential part of the healing process. As Ivan says, about 30% of the healing comes from the psychedelic journey itself, and the remaining 70% happens with integration. And that was the purpose of this seminar, to help us integrate those magical experiences from our psychedelic journeys into true, and lasting, healing and transformation.
“50% of the healing comes from the psychedelic journey itself, and the remaining 50% happens with integration.”
As one journeyer shared, she had ceremonied with the medicine just three weeks prior, and while she had had an enormously profound and healing experience, she soon found herself falling back into her old habits of impatience and reactivity as she encountered the challenges of everyday life. But Ivan and Lana then provided their invaluable insight: After each journey —as life happens— challenges will arise, and we will all be re-traumatized. This is inevitable. But this is exactly when integration is key.
“Integration reminds us of the Wisdom and Love of the medicine we’ve just received. Instead of falling back on reactivity, we center ourselves in the process of expansive consciousness. Centering back into this Love allows us to be relational with life, and not reactive to it. That is the gift of the medicine... and what we do with that gift is integration.”
This journeyer was just one of many who shared her questions and experiences, and just as Dr. Nick had stated earlier in the evening, every share and ask from that night was for the benefit of everyone in that room. It's no wonder then that I have always found these sessions to be hugely beneficial as a tool to integrate.
That evening I was in a room full of many faces. Some were familiar, some were strangers, some had never even heard of Intronaut before. And yet, as I listened to Ivan and Lana share their sacred knowledge, I felt (and audibly heard) deep reverberations of appreciation and resonance throughout the entire room, the very same reverberations that I felt within myself.
Events like this make it clear that we are an ever-growing community and soul family on a shared path of deep spiritual healing, and although I have come a long way, for me, this seminar was the very tip of the iceberg, just a grain of the Truth. I still have so much to learn, so much to experience, and so much to heal, and it is with immense gratitude that I thank both Lana and Ivan for their unwavering generosity and dedication to guiding those of us who are still finding our way to consciousness.
I cannot wait to attend more events like this in the future.
—Sasha Gill