What Integration Really Looks Like

I used to think transformation would feel like lightning. Big, fast, unmistakable. Like one day I’d wake up and know: this is it. I’m different now. It’s done.

And sometimes it does happen like that. The breakthrough. The full-body knowing. The moment something lands in your cells so clearly, there’s no going back.

But what no one told me was how long the after can last.

I've had so many experiences of coming back from an event that cracked me open in ways I didn’t expect. Times when I could feel something inside me had shifted. Times I'd seen a pattern I’d carried for years—ancestral, heavy, not mine—and let it go.

Or so I thought.

Because when I got home, nothing felt resolved. I was tired. Quiet. Flat. I cried doing the dishes. I stared at my calendar like it was written in a foreign language. And I started to question everything. Was the work real? Did I actually shift something? Why did I feel worse?

That’s when I started to learn about integration. Not as a concept, but as a lived, uncomfortable, sacred reality.

Integration is the part no one glamorises. The messy bit where your system rewires itself in silence. Where your nervous system catches up with your soul. Where you start to live into what you just glimpsed.

It’s the long exhale after the contraction. The silence after the song.

It’s not that the breakthrough didn’t matter. It’s that now, your life has to expand around it. You have to carry the insight into your morning routine, your relationships, your old triggers. You have to embody the new frequency in ordinary moments.

I’ve learned to expect the fog. The fatigue. The disorientation. Not because something’s gone wrong—but because something’s landing.

So now, after deep work, I build in space. I cancel plans. I get gentle. I let myself cry over things that don’t make sense. I listen to the body. I let it speak.

And slowly, clarity returns. Not in the dramatic way I once craved. But in the grounded way that says: “This is real now. You’re different. Keep going.”

If you’re in the space between what was and what’s coming—hold on. You’re not lost. You’re integrating. And it’s holy work.