Rising from Ashes to Authenticity: How to Integrate (Personal Edition) *[Pt. 2]*

Navigating the Labyrinth of the Dark Night and Integration

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Last time, I wrote about the Dark Night of the Soul – or what I’m now calling the Phoenix Era – which is the death-rebirth period when you deconstruct your old self. I was specifically writing about the crisis that ensues when you flip a worldview, embark on a spiritual path, and work on healing personal trauma, but this can be applied to any life experience that transforms you and requires time for psychological and emotional restructuring to find yourself again.

The Phoenix Era deconstructs the old labels that aren’t truly yours and helps you rediscover the labels that are – or, really, the essence of who you are behind the labels.

You don’t find your entire true self overnight. Bits and pieces reveal themselves slowly. The Dark Night of the Soul or Phoenix Era is hard because we fluctuate between the new and old self, and that causes suffering. After you unearth a piece, you have to integrate it. But what does integrating really even mean? Because of the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance,’ everyone nonchalantly throws this word around. The word integrate means to make oneself whole again. To me, it means welcoming the lost parts of yourself back into your being, and making space for them in your thoughts, identity, and life.

Okay, so, what the hell does that mean? Let’s get into it.

If you close your eyes and think about someone you know, all the discrete pieces of information about them don’t pop up successively in your head. For example, let’s say you have a best friend named Bunny. When you think about her, you don’t think, “Oh yes, Bunny. She’s 5’11”, smart, doesn’t like asparagus, drop-dead-funny, loves the color yellow, loves pilates…” Instead, you get all those bits of data all at once as a bodily felt sense for Bunny, or “all about Bunny.” You can really get a sense of this exercise by switching back and forth thinking about someone you like and someone you dislike while paying attention to how it feels in your body.*

Now think about yourself. What comes up?

You might find yourself being filled with love, admiration, or appreciation for yourself. For all you’ve been through. For all you’ve accomplished. But, you might also feel shame or hatred. If that comes up, those are the parts that you are rejecting (your shadow), excluding from the wholeness of you. That’s the work to do to. Identify those parts and ultimately welcome them in, aka integration.

To me, integration is a process that has at least two parts. The first part is about your relationship with yourself, or your self-image (what I’m calling ‘The Personal Edition’). Ideally, when you close your eyes and think about the essence of yourself, you would have a feeling of total and complete acceptance. And I mean you, not your life circumstances. It’s knowing, accepting, and being yourself unapologetically.

The second part of integration is about your relationship with others (what I’m calling ‘The Social Edition’). It’s observing what happens when you get off your meditation cushion and go about living your life after thinking you’ve completely accepted yourself. You may find that in the privacy of your own home, it’s easy to completely be and accept yourself. The real challenge comes when interacting with the rest of the world. I’ll write about this in an upcoming post.

All of what I just wrote is abstract – and I used to really hate reading this kind of thing before I understood it because… like, what the fuck does it mean?  So, let’s get into a concrete example.

For simplicity, I’ll use myself. I’m trained as a cognitive neuroscientist. I fully embraced this identity, which included (for me) rejecting anything non-physical and immeasurable like spirituality. When I encountered experiences that couldn’t be explained with science and then found a mountain of evidence suggesting that there might be a spiritual/mystical/intelligent side to the Universe, conflict and chaos poured into my life. Ultimately, after an epic internal battle, I knew that embracing spirituality felt right for me. How do I know? It felt blissful to follow my curiosity there.

Okay, so then I decided I’m going to be spiritual. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Years and years of neural pathways don’t change overnight. Effort is required to solidify this change. This is where integration comes in. You have to make a conscious effort to welcome this part of yourself.

I needed to integrate my two sides: scientific and spiritual. For me, it was noticing how my automatic thought processes leaned reductionistic and scientific, catching it when it happened. Then, making a conscious effort to incorporate some of the new ways of thinking I had learned through the spiritual, wisdom, and esoteric traditions I had been studying. Eventually, this became less effortful, and even automatic. This is the internal cognitive work.

The internal emotional work is unshaming what you had come to shame. For whatever reason, being spiritual was shameful to me. First, I had to dig into why I thought and felt that way, and then I had to write a new script. I had to feel into this new identity, feel into the old one, and feel the two come together harmoniously. This one took a long time to solidify, and I might still be working on it, to be perfectly honest.

Up next: lifestyle changes. Make time for meditation. Adopt rituals that feel meaningful. Find community. Find ways to connect with my spiritual side, like learning how to read tarot and reading mythology. This will be different for everyone, but the important thing is to learn ways to express this new way of being, or this part of yourself.

Let me give another example. In a psychedelic session, I once had the insight: “You forgot to be weird; you project who you think you’re supposed to be and your true self has been a casualty.” It was a profound insight that still gets me teary-eyed. My behavior didn’t change overnight after the session, though. First of all, I had to evaluate what ‘weird’ meant to me. Then, I had to start observing my thoughts and behaviors to catch myself editing the things I thought were ‘weird.’ It was a whole thing.

Often, what gets in the way of following your bliss is shame. There’s so much noise from society and from the egos/identities we have constructed that shout at us what our bliss should be. While there’s lots of ways to try to overcome this, I encountered a fun one this week. A recent episode of the Astrology Podcast discusses ways to unshame some of the archetypes and characteristics of each sign, which ends up being wildly applicable to just about anyone. Instead of feeling shame around something, you flip it and reframe it as, ‘having the audacity to…’ For example:

• Having the audacity to embrace your natural desire to shine.  

• Having the audacity to be weird.

• Having the audacity to change your mind.

• Having the audacity to have radical self-acceptance.

• Having the audacity to be emotional.

• Having the audacity to believe in destiny and have faith.

• Having the audacity to take your time figuring out your calling.

(p.s. ‘old me’ would be horrified that ‘new me’ is referencing an astrology podcast, but now I don’t give a flying fuck. I like the archetypes and mythology, so be it.)

I found this psychological narrative flip very empowering.

Even though this is the most important work any of us can do for ourselves and each other, it feels like no one ever praises or encourages it. So, I’m going to say it for all of us.

All of this work that you do – finding your bliss, following it, and integrating it – is extraordinarily brave. It’s also rare. In the moments when you’re still fluctuating between the new and old self, it’s important to remind yourself of how brave and rare you are. Maybe even thank yourself. Maybe imagine that you have a friend who recognizes the new you and finds a way to help you be that person by, let’s say, buying you a new tarot deck. Imagine how sweet you would think that person is! Now, do that for yourself. These little acts matter. Each one is like dropping an anchor that solidifies the change and helps you welcome all the parts.

Also, you’re not only stepping into your genuine self solely for yourself. Every time you wholeheartedly embrace your uniqueness, you ignite a lighthouse for someone else, past or present -- for every witch burned at the stake, every heretic laughed at by colleagues, and every bullied child.

Navigating the labyrinth of the Dark Night of the Soul/Phoenix Era/self-transformation is a courageous act of personal rebellion, a defiance against the superficial scripts we’ve been handed. Integration anchors every authentic turn that you make and guides the soul’s dark night towards dawn. Or, really, it guides you back to you.

* This exercise was inspired by Focusing by Eugene T Gendlin, PhD (which I highly recommend)