Aha moment? When you integrate it

How do we make sure that the ‘aha’ moments in our life transform into our ways of being and doing?

Perhaps you have just come out of a transformative leadership retreat, a coaching conversation, a plant medicine journey, a meditation or yoga pose. Or you have been in the bath or walking in the mountains. Whatever the experience, you have had an ‘aha’.

A new consciousness.  Your body tingles in agreement with this truth.  You cannot unsee it. You cannot unknow it.  It is alive.

As quickly as it comes, it can as quickly evaporate.

To what extent will you let this ‘aha’ improve your life and those around you?

Models of integration

For sure, the ‘aha’ will weave its way in you whether you consciously do anything about it or not.  However if you choose to engage with it intentionally, there will be greater benefits.  Our insights need support and ongoing processing to help us evolve.

We can get stuck going from experience to experience without growing.  In my experience as a leadership coach, Kolb’s learning cycle and mindful learning has been fundamental and I pass it on here in this article “Over 20 years of experience, really?”.

I am not a psychedelic integration coach, but I appreciate the offerings of Bathje, Majeski and Kudowor who offer a synthesized model of integration in this 2022 publication. It seems it could be useful for not only integrating psychedelic experiences but perhaps could extend to all ‘ahas’.

The 6 components being:

1) mind/emotional/contemplative

2) body/somatic

3) spiritual/existential

4) lifestyle/action

5) relational/communal

6) natural world

The model includes aligned continuums on which integration activities can be placed.  For example, self-care to self challenging, active-passive, contemplative-expressive, internal-external, creative-receptive and conscious-unconscious.

The practice is the practice

The practice is finding the practice(s) that will help you integrate your experiences.

Below I share my 6 key earthconverse ways. Follow your inner intelligence that orients itself to healing, growth and wholeness, to open to the practices that work for you.

• Pausing (mind/emotional/contemplative): Integration can just start with the simple profound act of pausing. To remember our experience /insight. When we do this, whether in a micro moment or a longer deeper meditation and contemplation, we connect with it.  We trust it is working its magic.

• Marinating (body/somatic): Here we somatically re-member. We can anchor back to our experience through the senses (a smell/image/feeling/action etc) and feel the aliveness throughout our body.  I like to draw on Rick Hansen’s Hardwiring for Happiness research, which invites us to marinate even 20 seconds in the thought/feeling/experience we want to keep. I like to feel it as a gentle mist flowing over and through me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

• Taking it to the land (natural world/relational/spiritual/mind/body/soul): Being in nature is healing, informative and inspirational itself.  For integrating aha moments (indeed creating them!), we can go deeper into the practice of “taking it to the land”. I learnt this with the School of Lost Borders and talk about it often, including here on the Earth Converse Podcast. This is where we can ground experiences and literally help them move in us.  It is where we can observe what nature mirrors back to us in signs and symbols to inform our insights. Where we can create meaning-making ceremonies to further activate our learning.  Sometimes it is where we share our story with a tree or rock, let new emotions emerge and know that we are listened to by the greater web of life.

• Journaling (lifestyle/action): I have often written about the value of journaling to help us make sense of our experiences.  It is easy, accessible and personal.  As I offer here in “What will I write?”, you can find the method that suits you.

• Storytelling and mirroring (relational/communal): To tell your story to another and have it witnessed and mirrored back is a precious human gift.  When done in a wider sharing community such as a circle of trust, it is even more powerful. As my wilderness guides remind me, we want to be discerning about when and who we tell our story to. Sometimes it is wise to go to the natural world first, for it is full of non-judging listeners.

• Gratitude (spiritual/existential): And ultimately we give thanks. The great spiritual practice of gratitude is where we give thanks for it all.  What did or did not happen.  What we can and cannot integrate.  I love David Lurey and Praful’s release of the Ho’Oponopono prayer in song. We can laugh at ourselves as a work in progress..and we can always …start again.

A final word…

And even if their research is for psychedelic integration, I appreciate this final point by Bathje et al for any aha to be in service of people and planet.

“Finally, bringing forth one’s insights, values, changes, and gifts to the world are treated as a later step in the process of integration. This appears partly practical in that one needs to reflect on what they would want to share with the world and why, but can also be a strategic buffering of potential inflationary experiences where one feels compelled to evangelize or make impulsive changes based on their experiences without first adequately exploring and internalizing them. Not all the models addressed action in the world as part of integration, though we noted that the models addressing action did not take an overly linear view that one must change oneself before changing the world, when in fact these can be mutually reinforcing processes.