Integration Tips

Essentially what we are doing is reorganizing your physical and emotional structure from the ground up. This will have a profound effect on your life and lead to beautiful healing and opening.

That being said, it can also be challenging to integrate sometimes (depending on what we worked on and where you are in your journey). 

During integration periods, some notice:

  • Aches and pains

  • Headaches

  • Nausea 

  • Dizziness 

  • Tiredness and the urge to sleep

  • Mood swings / Emotions 'trickling' out

  • The desire for comfort or comfort food

  • Food sensitivity (generally to foods that aren't ideal anyway)

  • Bowel movement shifts

  • Drainage from sinus or lungs 

  • Any number of other shifts. 

This is normal as things come back into balance and alignment. Please realize that the discomfort is not necessarily NEW pain. Sometimes a new level of awareness brings your attention to parts of yourself that were numb or “disconnected” before.

Does that make sense? 

It can last for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Many new awarenesses are permanent. Sometimes it so happens that you were able to endure a painful pattern, and as you come back into your body, it becomes more difficult to endure.

Nothing has changed really, except that you've now given yourself permission to feel. 

What are you noticing? 

That's what matters. 

We are piecing together patterns, and coming into alignment in more ways than one. Once we experience one of our patterns or blockages, (EXPERIENCE in our body), it becomes difficult or impossible to unconsciously move around in that pattern anymore. 

The key during times of integration is to spend more time BEING and less time DOING. Let the epiphanies sink in. You can also journal or draw as new awarenesses arise. 

Another thing that helps is to get out in nature, even a park, and gently move through the world. And maybe get your hands on a grounding animal; a dog, cat, or horse for instance. 

As we continue to make these connections, life becomes clearer. We know what we can know about life (mind). The rest we surrender to (heart). 

Also, as the body grows accustomed to this 'rewiring' process, it gets better at integrating, and the time required to integrate generally gets shorter with each session. 

I offer these solutions in the hopes that they support. Please use them in ways that are beneficial to you. If anything else is arising, or if you have other questions about integrating or about the process, please contact me. 

In Truth, 

Steven Budden

PS. Quote to ponder:

“It’s the therapist’s job to find the client’s soul, and love it! That’s all I’m really interested in, to tell you the truth. I believe that love is the healer, and I believe that you have to see with your third eye, and hear with your inner ear in order to find the soul, because it is so stricken. It’s so stricken by oppression that it fears to come out.

People are so used to performing to obtain approval that their soul is buried. They have a feeling that their soul is unlovable- “I’m unlovable,” they say- and therefore they have to keep it out of sight, buried deep within themselves. They’ll even come in and say “Marion, I have a really good dream for you today!” See- the ego is still trying to please: “For you.” Projecting. Everything is projected out. Somebody out there is going to recognize me, says the ego.

People say that their parents abandoned them and that is the source of their problems. The fact is, we abandon ourselves. (If we have been abandoned by our parents, we learn our lesson well, and we abandon ourselves.) The task of the analyst is to find out when the betrayal, the abandonment, occurred. At that point, something split the body from the psyche. A trauma is an arrested action. At the point where it ego should go through into action, it steps. It falls into unconsciousness- it disappears, as it does in dreams- it goes into another room. In dreams, keep watching to see who betrayed the soul. That trauma is re-enacted again and again and again. Until you can move through that trauma you are stuck. Stuck in the birth canal. Original stuck. (Some people are stuck at birth, and their bodies are carrying a psychotic corner, a place where the rejected psyche is buried.) When you move into bodywork, you find where the psyche is.

So you have to be extremely careful with bodywork, because the body often carries a psychotic corner, a rejected psyche. Deadened from the neck down- the body is dense, opaque matter, unconscious. You see people walking around who experience no consciousness below the neck. Their body does not want to become conscious. Once consciousness begins to come in, the agony is terrible. They become ill. “I’m even sicker now that I ever was! I wish I had never started therapy!” The body is sometimes faced with the soul pain of a lifetime.

The body can be a dictator. It has learned its lessons well, its lessons of power. If you have been treated, and abused, with power, over – powered, you will abuse yourself with power. Most of use were brought up on power, that is the patriarchal society, the patriarchal mode. We unconsciously use it. And bodyworkers sometimes think they know what the body should do. They don’t! Any more than the analyst knows what the psyche should do. Bodywork that i an exercise in power is entirely wrong, another violation of the body. The needed bodywork is the bodywork where the soul is listened to, respected, and given its outlet. The soul loves to move, to express, to be free, and hates domination and desertion. Bodyworkers must surrender any power ideas, because the soul has taken all the power it can take. It will not tolerate any more.

Listen to the soul. Love it. Give it back its dance. Then give the soul a format for understanding, for integration, and for anchoring.”

Marion Woodward, taken from The Heart of Listening by Hugh Milne.