The Four Integration Engines That Make Any Breakthrough Experience Last
My training as a psychedelic integration coach gave me a lot. But it didn't teach me how to actually integrate.
And that’s nothing against them. They’ve equipped me with valuable education and connections that have upgraded so many areas of my coaching practice and my network. And people truly is where it’s at.
But
When I returned to Europe from Costa Rica, at the end of that psychedelic coach training, still hoping I wouldn’t lose the clarity and momentum that made me take action I earlier procrastinated on for months, the inspiration and flow of ideas, the re-connection to my intuition…
I knew my journey wouldn’t have ended there.
After all, to be a great integration coach one needs to be a great coach and to have done their own work. Which is why in 2024, I picked it back up, stopped outsourcing my power to experiences and realised that the ultimate integration toolkit wasn’t in a single training but in everything I had gathered since then.
Since 2019, I've been actively working on reprogramming my beliefs in order to be happy. My mentor at the time had one premise: "If you don’t wake up each day certain that you're happy, some of your beliefs aren't serving you." When he first met me and for a year of work together he was calling me "miserable" more than anything else. (let’s not go into his approach on this email )
These days, people reach out to me for coaching because I look happy and seem to make everything feel possible.
That shift took two intensive seminars in Peru (~300 hours, no psychedelics involved) and reading 18 pages of new beliefs out loud every single day for 3 years until my operating system rewired from self-sacrifice to making myself proud, from mis-trust into trust and a bunch of other things that totally increased my baseline happiness.
But all that work didn’t help me find purpose. That came when I decided to combine my passions, life experience, what I was good at, and the way to help others. You can get a free taster of this, one of my fav topics, inside House of Purpose.
And even with that puzzle piece, I was still, in many ways, stuck. Placing my mother’s needs above my own, living unconventionally but drowning in guilt, chronically running away from sadness. Until I enrolled in the best trauma program in the world, that completely changed my relationship to pain (and made my psychedelic journeys way more profound)
And knowing all of that still didn't help me apply it in real life.
Only coaching did. Taught me how to actually do the damn thing, stop shrinking my ambition to match the low standards of the environment, and find myself a more expansive environment (remotely, yup, it works!)
Peru, 2020
Most of us do inner work fragmented and isolated.
Some therapy when we need it (but not consistently enough for it to compound)
Information courses without application or accountability
Unburdening stuck parts from the past without a purpose for the future to move into
Having an exciting vision for the future while the nervous system isn't yet resourced enough to hold the expansion.
What actually moves the needle forward is the integration of it all. Inside an aligned community.
Here's what I've learned integration actually is:
Cognitive: reminding yourself of what you’ve learned until those new beliefs become your new operating system.
But this alone only changes your mind. Not your life.
Embodied: when your emotional state, your presence, your body starts to match what you now believe. This is where the shift becomes a habit and a skill.
Your body doesn’t know the difference between past, present, future. If you’re feeling the emotion in your body now, you’re integrating.
Applied: transformation doesn’t come from more information. It happens in application: the conversation you have differently, the boundary you finally hold, the routine you’ve recalibrated so that you work on the project that’s meaningful to you and serves others!
If you’re seeking more energy and meaning in life, it comes from contributing to something bigger than yourself! Even something that won’t be achieved within your own timeline!Relational: because you cannot grow in isolation. We’re wired for community, we flourish when surrounded by support (and stack the odds against ourselves when we don’t ask for help.) I’ve personally collapsed years of personal development into months every time I surrounded myself with an embodied mentor and people who normalised the path of good to great (and great to extra-ordinary!)
A global survey of over 1,600 ayahuasca drinkers found that isolation during integration was consistently linked to worse outcomes, and that community support was one of the strongest predictors of positive integration.
These are what I call the 4 Engines of Integration.
Most people are running one engine at a time. Maybe two if they're disciplined.
But growth rarely comes from white-knuckling it through your practices. It comes from being pulled by an environment that makes growth feel natural.
Because 50% is doing the work ourselves.
And 50% is being in an environment that makes staying in the work (way past it stopped being inspiring or convenient) effortless.
That's what The Incubator is built for: an environment where the four engines work together, so that returning to peace, presence and operating from your true self becomes easier than relapsing into unconscious patterns.
