Maria Fernanda Gebara
ABSTRACT
This article is part of a special issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Studies titled Interrogating Integration, which I co-edited with Christine Hauskeller and Andy Letcher. The article begins with a simple question: Is there integration in Indigenous contexts? In Western psychedelic therapy, integration is commonly understood as the process that follows an experience, helping individuals interpret it and incorporate its insights into their lives. Drawing on what I have learned through long-term collaboration with Yawanawá and Huni Kuin elders and spiritual leaders, the article explores a very different starting point. In these Amazonian contexts, medicines such as uni and nixi pae are not understood merely as substances, but as ancestors, teachers, and conscious beings within a living field of relationships. Ritual is therefore not an isolated experience that ends and must later be integrated; it forms part of an ongoing relationship among humans, medicines, spirits, communities, territories, and ancestors. I suggest that integration may be necessary primarily because Western societies have become profoundly dis-integrated from these wider relational ecologies. The article asks what might change if, rather than continually trying to reassemble a fragmented self, we learned how to sustain communion with the many beings who make our lives possible.
