This article has been written in collaboration with Wakeful Travel, a brand that creates psychedelic journals that help people integrate their transformative experiences.
Disclaimer: Psychedelics are largely illegal substances and we do not encourage or condone their use where it is against the law. However, we accept that illegal drug use occurs and believe that offering responsible harm reduction information is imperative to keeping people safe. For that reason, this guide is designed to enhance the safety of those who decide to work with psychedelics.
The Wakeful Integration Journal comes at an interesting time.
Five years ago, psychedelics were for adventurous Burners or long-ago hippies. Now, there’s a ketamine clinic next to your local gym. Your friends won’t stop talking about ayahuasca ceremonies and how well the mushrooms growing in their closet are doing. You can visit mushroom dispensaries in cities like Vancouver, and you can purchase legal microdoses online. Scientists like Roland Griffiths and Robin Carhart-Harris have become almost as famous as Beyonce. What is going on?
We are on the precipice of a massive boom in psychedelic medicine. Clinical studies on MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms are barreling towards legality, and it feels like everyone is microdosing for increased creativity, motivation, and well-being.
Now, if you’ve been working in or following the psychedelic space for some time, we don’t need to explain why psychedelic integration is so important. But we do need to explain why a guided psychedelic journal is one of the best tools to support you in your experience.
What is a psychedelic integration journal and how can it help me?
Wakeful Travel’s Psychedelic Integration Journal was created to help conscious explorers prepare, navigate, and integrate their psychedelic experiences. It’s a step up—maybe 100 steps up—from a blank notebook.
Why? Trying to process a psychedelic experience in a blank notebook is like splattering paint onto an empty canvas. It might feel really good, but unless you hold a degree in abstract art, it can be very unclear what you’re supposed to take away from the final result.
This journal makes it clear. It guides you to what’s important in your psychedelic journey, which makes it much more possible for you to integrate or embody your experiences in your everyday life.
In support of your transformation, here are eight benefits to pre-ordering a Psychedelic Integration Journal.
1. It makes both sides of your brain happy
Whether you identify as right-brained or left-brained, the journal satisfies both sides of the corpus callosum. Several “Draw Your Experience” pages populate the journal, allowing you to express the elements of the psychedelic experience that go beyond language. If your drawing ability is limited to stick figures, no worries. There are intricate, otherworldly color-me-in pages scattered throughout. Our favorites are the gilded frog and the mushroom fairyland.
For the detail-oriented, the journal has all your bases covered. There are packing lists, pre-journey to-do lists, and dose tracking lists. There are pages to record your diet before and after a journey and pages to track a contemplative practice, whether that be meditation, yoga, or breathwork. And let’s say you meet an amazing friend at a retreat, but don’t want to blast everyone with blue light from your phone to take down their contact info. That’s right— the journal has whole pages just for these relationships.
2. You can organize your psychedelic journey
Do you remember the plot diagram from elementary school? Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. A plot with these five elements is what separates a story from stream of consciousness.
The journal is what organizes your psychedelic experience into a story. By mapping out the journey into the three phases of preparation, ceremony, and integration, the journal shows you where you begin, where you’re going, and where you end (although does it ever really end?).
This structure is invaluable for sense-making. Unlike a blank notebook, the Psychedelic Integration Journal can guide you to what’s important in a psychedelic journey. At a micro-level, there are questions for each phase of the experience about your intentions, your breakthroughs, and your plans moving forward.
At a macro-level, the structure of the journal makes it easier to see the big picture. In his book, Building A Story Brand, Donald Miller makes the point that story allows the brain to filter out noise and understand some central message. Psychedelic experiences can bring a lot of noise. Beautiful, awe-inspiring noise, but noise nevertheless. How do you know what the big lesson is? The central takeaway? Simple. You read the story the Psychedelic Integration Journal helps you write.
Sometimes, of course, you won’t understand that central lesson until later. Full integration can often take months, if not years. That’s ok. The journal’s got you covered with pages dedicated to those future epiphanies, too.
3. You are your own healer
In your larger journey of self-discovery and healing, if you ever meet someone who claims to know you better than yourself, they’re probably not all with the program.
In other words: You have everything you need within you. Psychedelics don’t give you answers—they guide you to where the answers exist within you. The same goes for heart-centered healers and psychedelic practitioners. They are empty vessels that use psychedelics to guide you to yourself.
The Psychedelic Integration Journal is no different. What separates it from a healer, however, is that it doesn’t have to do years and years of inner work to be an empty vessel. It’s a bunch of paper in between two pieces of cardboard. It has no ego, no agenda, no past traumas that influence its energy.
In this way, the journal is self-empowering. It is a tool whose sole purpose is to guide you to your own brilliance. It has nothing to gain other than filling its pages with the magic of you.
4. You like the idea of an entire bookshelf dedicated to journeying
Imagine. You get back to your apartment after a stressful day at work, make a pot of tea, and settle into your comfiest chair. Across from you, the sunlight warms your bookshelf. In between plants and pictures of your family, there it is: a row of Psychedelic Integration Journals (and maybe a few Mindful Travel Journals and Microdosing Journals in there, too), their spines inscribed with silver Sharpie. As you sip your tea, you reflect on all of the work you’ve done. On how brave you are. And maybe? Maybe the stress even falls away in the energy of these journals, these pages and pages of transformation, healing, and inner strength.
Unlike a visit to another country, there are no souvenir shops for psychedelic experiences. These medicines can show us higher realms, the innermost turnings of our heart, or expand our consciousness to magical, unexplainable states. But what we take back from these places remains internal, and our internal realm can often become chaotic. This clouds our memories of our transformative journeys.
That is, of course, unless you have a Psychedelic Integration Journal. Imagine the pride and strength from seeing the physical manifestation of all your inner travels before you. That one psilocybin retreat in the Netherlands that taught you self-love, that earth-shattering synthetic 5-MeO-DMT experience in California that helped you forgive the violence of the world.
Bring something solid home with you. You’ll never forget your journeys again.
5. You’ll support a solopreneur who’s been working towards her dream in the psychedelic space
In 2019, Jenalle felt the calling to create the Mindful Travel Journal: a guided journal that helps travelers transmute their wanderlust into meaningful transformation. She was weeks away from launch in early 2020, but then, of course, the Universe had other plans.
COVID hit. Jenalle lost her job in the retreat space. And the Mindful Travel Journal’s campaign ended before it could even begin…
But she didn’t give up.
Reflecting on her first ayahuasca experience in Costa Rica, she realized that transformative travel didn’t have to be external. It could be internal, exploring the terrain of the heart and soul, not just the mountains and oceans.
This was the inspiration to create the Wakeful Integration Journal and the 6-Week Microdosing Journal.
And on top of that? She’s booking into 2022 to create co-branded and white labelled integration journals for psychedelic brands, retreat centers, and clinics.
If that’s not a sign of resilience, we don’t know what is.
6. You don’t have to break the bank
The field of psychedelic integration is expanding rapidly. Resources like the Third Wave Directory and MAPS Integration List are dedicated to matching people with trusted coaches, therapists, and healers who specialize in maximizing the benefits of psychedelic medicine.
However, it can get expensive. While many offer payment scales, you’ll find that most folks charge more than $200 per session.
The journal is no match for a wise, loving human, but it’s a good first step. For under $50, it will help you clarify your intentions, guide you to the important lessons, and challenge you to implement those lessons into your life.
At the very least, the journal will help you create a foundation for understanding your psychedelic experience. That way, if you do seek out more guidance, you have a solid framework to guide the conversation.
7. You’re giving back
3% of all sales from the Psychedelic Integration Journal and the Wakeful Travel Journal go to MAPS Canada, the Amazon Conservation Fund, and the Chacruna Institute.
MAPS, which stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is one of the leading voices in the psychedelic medicine movement. They have blazed the path for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, soon to be legalized, and they are pioneering the education and certification needed for the upcoming wave of psychedelic guides.
According to the Amazon Conservation Fund, theywork “hand-in-hand with indigenous and other local people… [to] apply the power of innovation and time-tested traditional practices to protect the forests and watersheds of tropical America.”
The Chacruna Institute “provides public education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines and promotes a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science.” In other words, they serve to create one of the most important collaborations in the field: the union of the rationalist, medical model with the shamanic, indigenous model of psychedelics.
All of these institutions are heart-centered organizations that are going to play pivotal roles in the next 10 years. Wakeful Travel is incredibly proud to support them, and we hope you are, too.
8. It guides you to You
Consider every great discovery: the surface of the moon, the gene, the Komodo dragon. In every case, what people “discovered” was already there. So it might be more accurate to say that they were “revealed”—that explorers are actually revealers.
Consider you: a flawed human on the journey of wholeness through psychedelic medicines. Your vessel is the medicine, and your traumas and conditioning are the vacuum of space, the infinitesimal size of matter, the colorful islands of Indonesia. They are what you move through to reveal what was always there in the first place. The glorious, beautiful You.
The Psychedelic Integration Journal is your compass. It doesn’t matter if it’s psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, MDMA, LSD, iboga, or DMT, the journal will help you integrate your journey and point you a little closer to Home.
You are the next great Revealer. How deep will you go?
Wakeful Travel’s integration and microdosing journals are now available on Kickstarter. Back the campaign to get your hands on one of these gorgeous journals.
