The integration process is a core part of tobacco and plant diets. It is part of honouring a continual sacred space to allow ourselves to put into practice that which we have learned during our transformative journey with the plants; teachings, insight, deep personal connection and interconnectedness, lifestyle changes, profound healing, grounding again into the oneness of mind, body and spirit in daily life.
Coming out of a plant diet is delicate, there are surface and deep fragilities within us and we are encouraged and supported into being kind and gentle with oneself. Healing continues after plant diets and considerations for the multiple aspects of yourself such as foods, general health, adjustments to the physical, spiritual and emotional are significant.
Read more about Self Care Integration
Self-care is vital for any personal developmental therapy and work you are doing on yourself; it’s an integral part of healing and conscientious living. Previous conditioning and limiting self beliefs may inform you that self-care is selfish or not necessary, that to take time for yourself to rest, nourish and nurture yourself is not appropriate for a number of reasons. Linked from a societal level of expectations and programming that ‘busy is good’ and to be constantly in ‘doing mode’ distracted from our internal landscapes leaves not much room for a break or recuperation in most modern day lifestyles. Observing and overcoming these beliefs are an initial part of self-care; learning to accept, allow and give ourselves permission to disconnect from external sources that demand our attention, such as family, work, friends, social commitments, is part of the practice and process. It may feel awkward and you may notice resistance and pulls from others around you as you initiate the process but these growing pains require evening out. Free of judgement, fear of disapproval or rejection, letting others down, not being good enough; these beliefs can be superseded and rewritten. The rewards from integrating self-care with gentleness, discipline and persistence enhances empowerment and restores balance within, reflecting outwardly into your life.
Self-care can involve a mindful based activity that brings joy and nourishment. Choosing time to dedicate to yourself away from routine and commitments allows you to receive and honour your own rhythm and process. Whether it’s a whole day, half a day, at least an evening or morning, ensures sufficient time to relax and enjoy whatever activity you choose to do.
In support of self-care, beginning a dedication to do one small thing for yourself each day is a commitment to gift yourself boosting self trust and esteem. The activity can take less than 10 minutes of your day, however this practice will lay the foundations of a committed, dedicated relationship with yourself.
Self-care considerations:
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- Taking a flower bath
- Walk in Nature
- Dancing
- Playing an instrument or singing
- Any physical exercise (walk, tai-chi, yoga, sports, martial arts, cycling, swimming)
- Making a nourishing meal for yourself
- Drinking cocoa, a fresh juice or favourite herbal tea
- 10 minute meditation
- Taking a nap
- Journaling
As a conscientious lifestyle emerges through awareness, growth and integration, learning to manage your environment will likely become an increasingly important factor in maintaining harmony and balance. Considerations around what you remove from your environment, such as distractions, habits that no longer serve you and even company you choose to keep. Every interaction with the outside world, physically, emotionally and energetically contributes to our day to day human experience. As well as removing elements that are not serving, considering adjustment to what’s present in our environment and additional supportive tools to provide the support required. This can take some time to come through, but clarity prevails, honouring intuition and being open to receive.
Conscientious lifestyle considerations:
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- Foods (energy sources)
- Investigating the origins and production of foods, personal and household products
- Considering ecosystemic energy flow and managing feedback
- Inviting core principles of ceremonial work into immediate relationships (compassion, acceptance, unconditional love, simplicity, patience)
- Sourcing environments that provide sensory connection to nature
These considerations invite an exploration on a inter-personal, individual and collective level. With understanding and appreciation that one can do one’s best with circumstance, access and availability of resources, and holds ultimate power and influence within one’s own boundaries, sphere and actions. Discovering and inviting, with purpose and intent, elements into your life that support one’s authentic self is a journey to embrace and allow wisdom to choose what fits best, knowing it can be altered, reshaped, in flow at any given moment.
There are various integration techniques and guidance available which we invite you to consider.
Below we have detailed two important tools that provide support in both preparation and post integration when working with plant diets. The first tool is a daily meditative & introspective practice and the second a personal developmental therapy for further inner integration work.
Why Prepare?
The amount of the potential progress gained when engaging with plant diets is often parallel to the determination and mental organisation of the individual. The plants will reveal to you what you are ready to receive and your preparation and post integration are absolutely key to achieving long term progress and more profound insights and developmental breakthroughs.
We can set out some considerations to enhance the connection and its depth of working with master plants. These considerations can also increase the conviction of the person to the process and to take the absolute most value from our experience.
We honour that with healing, each individual has their own journey and rhythm in finding their harmony with wholeness. The considerations that we therefore propose, are to be sought in alignment with this journey and are not necessarily compatible for everyone. Personal healing is very much a self-empowered journey, and we ask you to trust in your own inner-authority when reviewing our advice given below and to ask further where required.
In order to open a dialogue with the subconscious or spiritual authority, the development of a trust relationship is required (it is not important to understand this concept at the beginning, as it will become clear as you progress with inner work). A trust relationship will allow you to confidently recognise and affirm the inner dialogue in which we are to develop.
Creating and managing the meditative space
A daily practice of introspection allows one to listen, allowing a platform in which subconscious or spiritual wisdom comes seemingly through the mist, entering the conscious mind. This introspective wisdom can come from a light meditative practice where environment and personal space are honoured, allowing the mind to relax into a state of attentive awareness aside the usual alert states of mental activity. This meditation can be performed anywhere you feel comfortable and for any duration, although longer periods may bring more insight. The goal here is to be receptive to incoming information in all the forms it may express itself.
Before listening to these guided meditations, you can spend 2-5 minutes in a meditative posture and see what sort of questions arise from this gentle experience, allow you mind to be free and honour what comes.
Guided meditation 1 – Creating the environment
This meditation is preparation for creating your sacred space and empowering yourself to discover and form your own personal practice. The intention is to lend guidance and support in building confidence, lay the foundations in a safe space, being fully open to receive what unfolds.
Transcript
Find a comfortable position to sit or lie in, minimise distractions and take a few deep breaths.
Close your eyes.
Take a deep breath, feeling your lungs fill up and without force, hold the breath gently and release slowly.
As you breathe out, release any tension you may be holding.
Continue breathing and choose a point on your body to focus on the breath.
This can be your lower belly, or the nostrils, or if you already have an established technique feel free to engage this.
Observe the incoming breath, observe the outgoing breath.
Without controlling the breath, notice how the breath feels, how it moves.
Is it steady? Heavy? Slow? Light?
Each out breath releases tension and allows you to sink into a deeper state of relaxation.
Gentle, kind, allowing this time and space for yourself.
If you find your mind is wondering, at the point where you become aware that you’ve drifted, come back to the breath. Free of judgement.
Allow thoughts to come and go, free of judgement, expectation, allow what is arising to arise and pass.
In this way you are becoming a silent witness, observing thoughts, sensations, emotions and feelings as they arise and pass.
Notice how your breathing feels in your entire body, are there any parts of your body you feel a strong pull towards?
Allow the outbreath to release tension.
Bringing this meditation to a close, I invite you to take a deep breath, gently, slowly, allowing an open free awareness of how your lungs respond to the expansion of inbreath.
When you reach a comfortable maximum, hold the breath gently for a moment, and slowly release, again, noticing how your body responds to the outbreath.
Bringing yourself back to the room, or place where you’re sitting, allow your awareness to return to the environment.
Continuing gentle breaths, observe what arises turning your awareness to this.
Take a moment to recognise your efforts and setting time aside for yourself, to be with yourself, giving thanks for this experience.
And when you are ready, open your eyes.
Guided meditation 2 – Explorative introspection
This guided meditation intends to allow an opening for an internal connection, cultivating an awareness of what is arising and passing away and introducing the imaginal realm, in addition to observing the breath.
Take your time, this meditation may need more than one practice, as you simultaneously practice these two methods of explorative introspection.
Transcript
Being familiar with a comfortable space and position to sit or lie in, with minimal distractions, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.
Take a deep breath, feeling your lungs fill up and without force, hold the breath gently and release slowly.
As you breathe out, release any tension you may be holding.
Continue breathing and turn your attention to the point of focus you’ve been using in the previous meditation.
This can be your lower belly, or the nostrils, or your own preferred area on the body.
Observe the incoming breath, observe the outgoing breath.
What do you notice in what is present?
There may be thoughts arising, emotions, feeling, no mind, sensations…
whatever it is that you are experiencing, observe, free from judgement.
Continue to observe the breath and allow your body and mind to settle.
Now I’d like you to imagine yourself standing in a field, see the grass beneath your feet, maybe you have boots on, maybe you are barefoot. How do your feet look? This is your vision, your creation, your exploration.
If the grass is tall, reach out with your hands and feel the grass, notice how it feels and what arises as you brush your hands over it.
Looking ahead you see a path in front of you and you take a step onto it and begin walking. Notice how the field and path look, are there smells present, how is the weather? what colours stand out to you, what time of day, season is it? are there any feelings attached to the picture of what you see? Emotions may arise, observe what is here.
Momentarily check in with your breath, remind yourself you are grounded here, safe in this place and observe how the breath is.
Returning to the scene,
Notice how you are walking, is it slow? light? relaxed? how does your body respond to the environment? is there a dominant sense that is present?
Is the scene one you are used to seeing, it is some place you already know exists, or is there magic present in the picture? Are you alone?
You are now reaching the end of the path and you see you’ve come to a hilltop. Looking down and all around you there is a wide, vast valley below, with others hills roaming up the other side, as far as the horizon allows you to see.
Pause and take a moment to see what is coming up for you now.
Imagining yourself in the scene stretching your arms up above your head.
I’d like you to take a deep in-breath and slowly exhale.
Observe the feeling this scene leaves you with, and any impressions and insight you observed.
Returning to where you are now, when you are ready, open your eyes.
The meditation is complete. I invite you to record and write down anything that stood out for you during the experience. It doesn’t require analysis, just an observational output. Free from judgement and filters.
Guided meditation 3 – Receiving
This guided meditation holds the intention for being open to receive what is coming up in the moment; being open to receive messages from within, cultivating inner wisdom and empowering yourself by tuning in and listening to your inner authority.
This meditation is an ongoing process of self exploration and introspective journeying, freeing yourself from blockages that can manifest when holding attachment and desires to future outcomes, or what was wished for in the past.
Transcript
Minimising distractions around you, bring yourself into your comfortable position, sitting or lying down, close your eyes and take a few deep breaths.
Take a deep breath, feeling your lungs fill up and without force, hold the breath gently and release slowly.
As you breathe out, release any tension you may be holding in the body.
Turning your attention to the breath
Observe the incoming breath, and the outgoing breath
Observe what is present
Is your breathing shallow? Fast? Calm? Heavy?
However it is, observe, free from judgement
If Judgements arise, allow them to pass, observing that they too are impermanent.
Continue to observe the breath and allow yourself to settle.
Now, tuning in to what is present, without forcing, or getting caught in a storyline, allow yourself to openly receive what is coming up, in this moment.
Maybe you are being guided to a place on your body, or a strong feeling or emotion is present. Whatever it may be, free from judgement, allow it to manifest, to arise and pass.
Remaining open to information contained in the message, free from entanglement, analysis or logical meaning, allow what is present to come and go.
Intuitively we can cultivate wisdom from our experiences here, in this moment, moment to moment, and we can safely receive information from our inner landscapes.
The information does not need to be concrete, grasped, understood even, at this point, it may be on the level of sensations, or caught in the mind where it can feel that you are walking in circles.
Continue to breathe, observing the breath and noticing what is coming up.
Allow yourself to be held, here, in this safe space.
Trusting in the journey, your path.
As we draw to a close, checking in with yourself, observe the general feeling that remains, or that is present with you now. Consciously remembering what you have received today.
Take a moment to acknowledge yourself, the gift you’ve given to yourself by being open to receive, recognition and gratitude to your inner self for sharing and communicating the information.
Returning to where you are now, when you are ready, open your eyes.
The meditation is complete. I invite you to record and write down anything that stood out for you during the experience. It doesn’t require analysis, just an observational output. Free from judgement and filters.
This meditation is a form of insight meditation, similar to Anapana (observation of respiration) – but with the addition of an imaginal (shamanic) visual space.
Personal Developmental (Inner-Child) Therapy
Personal developmental therapy is a tool where you can realise an inner subjective narrative, or story which unlocks the advices that will enable you to resolve, integrate, align your mind, body and spirit towards wholeness. The persons who developed what became known as psychoanalysis explained that this personal narrative contained all we needed to understand in order to heal.
Inner Child therapy or work is a tangible and adaptive therapy technique that can be explained quite simply and developed by oneself towards unlocking these understandings that we need if we are serious about healing ourselves.
The Inner Child is part of our internal world, working with our primary developmental stages, which is recognised across many disciplines; modern day psychology, psychotherapy and ancient spiritual practices, such as those in Tibetan Buddhism and traditional Andean shamanism.
Our Inner Child is intuition, creativity, spontaneity, play, loving acceptance of ourselves and all beings; our pure essence within.
Often we carry wounds and trauma from birth and childhood with us into adulthood and these wounds play out in habit patterns, behaviours, beliefs and thoughts that no longer serve us, trapping us in repeated loops and life lessons that we continually deny ourselves the ability to be free from.
Re-establishing a connection with our inner child takes time, dedication, patience and this workshop provides the tools to be able to make contact with your inner child, initiate a relationship with them and learn the re-parenting techniques to be able to nurture and build a trust relationship, cultivating a life practice in self healing.
Inner child work is a powerful integration tool which compliments tobacco and plants diets; it is universal, compatible with all daily practices, enhancing healing potential without restriction or limitation. Participants from our workshops have mentioned additional insights from their current practices, expansive life improvements and profound healing towards wholeness.
Online Inner Child Workshop
The online workshop practitioner guides you through establishing a connection with your inner child, providing transference of concepts, enabling participants to receive the tools and techniques with which to continue practicing, healing by themselves.
The workshop contains written exercises and guided meditations which include rebirthing, imaginal and regressions, all held within a safe space. The workshop is tailored to meet individual circumstances and needs, paced accordingly, with time for sharing and reflecting stories and experiences.
Amy Grist
Amy holds a Degree in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Investigative Forensic Psychology, is a Certified Inner-Child workshop facilitator and founder of the Inner Council workshop series, a personal Yoga & Guided Meditation teacher and a facilitator and integration consultant for Master Plant participants. She encapsulates the need for expressive intuition and provides gentle guidance for people to return to their authentic energy space and connect to their natural rhythm.
1st Session -approximately 2 hours
+ 2 hours offline time minimum to review content and exercises
2nd Session -approximately 1.5 hours
+ 2 hours offline time minimum to review content and exercises
3rd Session -approximately 1.5 hours
+ 1 hour offline time minimum to review content and exercises
Prices cover materials, 3 online sessions and a follow-up session and can be paid through Paypal.
$240 £190 ₪830
We also mentor participants into certified practitioners for those wanting to share these skills with others.
A Testimonial Story
My background experience
Before doing the workshop I had read a couple books and found some information online that gave me a basic understanding of the fundamental concepts and objectives of inner child work. I understood that there are sub personalities within myself that have their own emotional needs and expectations. The inner child being one of them can be further broken down into different aspects such as the wounded, emotional, angry child. There are also parts of ourselves that get stuck in their development due to emotional trauma. This information gave me a basic framework for exploring and beginning to communicate with these parts of myself. Most of the work I did was emotional release and understanding their needs and wounds.
Intentions and goals
I came to this workshop because I felt I was missing something in my process as there was so much releasing but little resolution.
New tools
The workshop definitely helped a great deal as it gave me more tools to effectively communicate to my inner child as well understand how I can more deeply interact with him and fulfill his emotional needs, which lead to major resolutions for these conflicted parts of myself and a greater sense of peace and calm that came as a direct result. I’m finding myself being less triggered in previously challenging situations. When triggers do cause an emotional response I’m finding it much easier to recognize the part of me that’s challenged and just be with it allowing it to be heard and felt which then dissipates the charge.
Overall experience
The experience was great for me. Amy has a calm and gentleness that radiates clearly and an understanding that shows she’s walking the path herself. I enjoyed our meetings so much and after the first, I was very much looking forward to the next ones. There was much insight, release, resolution, and growth within the sessions. There’s also been much after from continuing with the techniques. It definitely gave me a major missing piece to the puzzle that allowed me to take my own practice further.
Nathaniel, Vancouver Island
Discovery
Of an ongoing practice
I had no idea just how powerful of a process I would be getting into when I set foot into Amy’s IC workshop. I was scattered, carrying a long lasting anxiety in my heart, and in need of support. Having tried various techniques and workshops, something resonated deeply when I connected with Amy’s workshops. Through working with her I began exploring with childlike curiosity what was the reason for the anxiety and I began to recognize the unmet needs that I’ve been conditioned to ignore. What began as a workshop has become a lasting practice of joyfully tuning into my true needs and discovering the acceptance and joy that was waiting for me.
The confusion and doubts I had around my needs during the anxiety were replaced with a grounded process of checking in with myself and honoring the process, step-by-step, and with acceptance. Now I feel relieved and happy that I have a stable toolset for clarity around what I need vs external expectations I and others have set for me. Using this toolset has led me to feel more functional and allows me to discover how I choose to shine on any given day, and fully go for it, free of previous shyness and anxiety. I was also pleasantly surprised to discover the connection with my intuition increase along with the reawakening of a rich inner world that I’ve explored as a child. I was further surprised to discover how this new joy fed into being more functional in my day-to-day.
Personally knowing Amy gives me the advantage of seeing her outside of “work”, and I’ve seen just how dedicatedly she takes the practice in her own day-to-day life, inspiring me to reach new heights on the Inner Child journey.
Alex, Cusco
Online Follow Up Sessions
We love to keep in contact and support our previous participants through their journey, where we’re always here for questions and support, we offer structured follow-up sessions. We believe 3 individual lessons to be scheduled at your convenience are often the most valuable, as we can work alongside your practice and provide supporting feedback, suggesting new techniques and helping you to continue integrate towards your goals.
Connect to us below and we’ll send you more information
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