3 Great Books For Integrating Your Psychedelic Experience
Your psychedelic trip has ended, and now it’s time to work through your experience. But there’s one small problem: you’re not quite sure where to start with this whole ‘psychedelic integration’ thing. Or perhaps, you’ve been microdosing for a while want to track the changes you’ve noticed — and you just don’t know which books about psychedelics is best to get you started.
While there is a wide range of apps and digital solutions that offer help with the process of integrating a psychedelic experience, there’s nothing like putting pen to paper. It’s why reading books about psychedelics can be the best way to prepare for (or reflect about) an experience.
The following analog offerings provide more than just a space to write down your thoughts and feelings; find a mix of writing prompts, safety tips, and sage advice that serve to strengthen your psychedelic integration practice and prepare you for future experiences.
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‘The Trip Journal’ – By Ronan Levy, Kori Harrison, Dr. Andrew Weil
Written by Field Trip Health founder Ronan Levy and head of product Kori Harrison with an introduction by Dr. Andrew Weil, The Trip Journal offers psychedelic-curious readers and psychonauts alike an easy-to-use, beautifully illustrated guide to working with psychedelic experiences.
“At Field Trip, we offer an app, but there are a lot of people for whom digital technology and psychedelic experiences are kind of anathema, so the idea was to create something in analog that could help people through their psychedelic journeys — whether they want a bit of background, more understanding on set and setting, preparation, or how to make sense of their psychedelic experiences,” says Levy in an interview with Healing Maps.
Levy says the inspiration for the book partially comes from Tim Ferriss’ Five-Minute Journal. Additionally, the author notes that its use doesn’t necessarily need to be for an experience involving a drug.
He adds: “We use the word ‘psychedelic’ broadly: it’s anything that helps you explore your consciousness, so it could be meditation or breathwork, too.”
Most importantly, the book gives a framework for integration. “People talk about integration all the time, but it’s a very undefined concept. Writing down your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and awareness is one of the most powerful ways to integrate.”
The Trip Journal provides space for up to 10 different experiences, making it a popular book about psychedelics.
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‘The Microdosing Guidebook‘ – By C.J. Spotswood
If you’re looking for a detailed book on microdosing that provides information on everything from dosing protocols to mental health indications to contraindications, this is the book for you. Written by C.J. Spotswood, a psychiatric nurse practitioner based in Maine, The Microdosing Guidebook breaks down into three parts
- The microdoser’s handbook
- The provider’s handbook
- A workbook section, diving deep into everything there is to know about taking small, sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin or LSD.
“My book helps individuals wanting to learn more about microdosing and how they may do so in a safe manner. It is part instruction manual, part education, part workbook, and something medical providers can use as a resource to support their patients who are looking to microdose safely and effectively,” the author tells Healing Maps.
“It’s written at a level that is approachable for many, and relevant for medical professionals… This book was written to serve as a support for microdosing coaches too, as a resource for these deeper questions I suspect they often asked. While microdosing is low-risk, the risk is not zero, so it is an effort towards risk reduction.”
Spotswood has worked as a psychiatric nurse for over two decades and has been actively researching, studying, and educating on psychedelic substances for five years. His new step-by-step manual is a user-friendly starting point, offering readers a brief history of psychedelics, reasons and rationale for microdosing, safety concerns, and even a section on how to prepare microdoses.
The third and final section offers readers a chart for tracking their mood, a series of questionnaires and screening tools, a guide to setting intentions, and a menu for self-care, among other valuable tools.
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‘Integration Journals’ – By Wakeful Travel
If you like to keep information about psychedelics separate from your integration process, or you prescribe to the idea that less is more, a book containing fewer words (at least, to start) might be more up your alley. Wakeful Travel offers two varieties of integration journals made specifically for use with psychedelics, each offering a unique combination of prompts, questions, space for reflection, and even coloring pages.
The Wakeful Integration Journal is intended for plant medicine journeys, or other guided sessions, to be used as a tool to document internal experiences. It reads in different sections, focusing on preparation, navigation, and integration. Complete with space for notes on planning and reservation as well as packing lists, it’s well-suited to people who may be traveling to take a psychedelic journey.
The Wakeful Integration Journal may be for more intense experiences. However, for those looking to document their microdosing journey, the 6-Week Intention Journal is a great option. The hard-cover journal includes dedicated spaces for preparation, intention-setting tracking, insights, reflection, and integration. This makes it a fantastic book about psychedelics — whether you’re a beginner or someone with more experience.
