Integration Is Digestion. Best Done In Community Feasts.
Hello, kin,
Happy belated Imbolc! 🕯️🌝✨
I hope you each found ways to revel in the turning point between winter and spring, and let in the goddess Brigid's inspired energy. Are there new creations stirring in your heart and life? 🌷
I continue finding great joy and even mastery in the creation of my vocational life, my community life, and now... my love life, too! ❤️
About the latter matter, I had a distinct feeling of 🌬️"your prayers have been answered" recently, when reflecting/praying on the love relationship that seems to be so aptly and effortlessly arising in my life. 🕯️
May it be so!
And even if it does not turn out as I imagine or desire it to be...
There's always that to integrate.
What are you struggling to integrate these days?
Buddhism advises that there's two main sources of suffering:
- Wanted things not happening
- Unwanted things happening
Succinct, no?
And, I'd add: things happening that completely challenge or confront our existing, comfortable worldview...
Such events generate friction, dissonance, pain, struggle within the system—if not unsatisfactoriness.
And let's be real: Our maps are no longer mapping to the world. 🗺️🚫 ...Because the world order has been so radically altered in such a short time—and its reverberating effects, felt in big and small ways. 🌎🤯
Every time the map diverges from the territory... that's a kind of cognitive dissonance that it's up to us to handle. We can turn from it, make excuses for it, keep seeking the retreat of self-centered denial from it (if we have the privilege to do so)...
Or, we can turn towards the dissonance with courage, and compel it to integrate within our consciousnesses.
I define "integration" as a kind of cognitive digestion process, converting available information into apt meanings that advance the organism's ability to survive and navigate their world. By forcing our minds to hold conflictual truths in tandem (paradox), we can induce a transformational process in which greater insight is born from the frictions–and a more harmonic, indeed understanding worldview, results. 🌈 This is the harmony available on the other side of a storm! ⛈️
I have been just as dismayed and disgusted as anyone else by the developments happening in my nation of origin. However, I have not been existentially damaged by any of this. I don't just mean I have the privilege to avoid persecution under this authoritarian state (though that is true). I mean: because I have developed an apt pattern-level understanding of the phenomena taking place—I am not suffering. At least, not in that way.
As I've talked about elsewhere, a main current running through my work is apocalypse medicine 💀—the idea that world (or more accurately worldview) collapses contain great opportunities for reorganization and transformation.
To overcome ignorance is to begin reducing harm. And we have a LOT more calibration to be done to our stories of self and worldview before we become beings who are harmless, much less constructive, with our existences.
...If only mainstream culture weren't so death-averse! Maybe we would already be taught how to embrace these moments of apparent death and destruction to completely reorganize our stories of self and world into greater, more apt, and more true versions than ever before—and find even more empowering meaning to be made from things.
It is meaning that builds a bridge to a viable world.
I believe that in these highly troubled times especially, we could all benefit from community spaces for simply being witnessed and practicing active, self-guided sense-making around our changing stories of self & world.
And so I am pleased to share about a new (reinvented) offering, kicking off tomorrow(!) and running on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays through April: Integration Circles.
🌀 Integration Circles by Fractal Praxis 🤲
They're not only for psychedelic journeys anymore! They're also for this mind-bending journey through reality, today.
What this is:
- Online meetups on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month, starting at 4pm MST, February through April 2026.
- Spaces ("resonant fields") for processing and digesting transformational experiences, held in the witness of loving-kind community.
- RSVP required; limited to six or fewer people per session.
- Restricted to paying members of Cosmos Cooperative (the creative co-op platform I've recently joined!)
- Join Cosmos now for just $12 per month, and take advantage of as many integration circles as you want!
- Integration Circle attendance is FREE to Cosmos members. Donations accepted but not required; none turned away.
An integration circle is a space for processing and digesting transformational experiences, held in the witness of loving-kind community. These transformational inner experiences may be tied to the use of entheogens (psychedelics)—but not necessarily so. Major upheavals in one’s ordinary “map of the world” also qualify—birth, death, big change, losses of faith. Indeed, we are collectively living through some massive disruptions right now.
To make the most of these experiences, when our normal sense of self or our standard way of seeing the world are challenged—we must make meaning from them. To make new meaning is a process—and a vulnerable one. Through a mutually held container, integration circles provide protected space for whatever it is we are sense-making.
Fractal Praxis founder C. Savery (that's me!) will host these online meetups using lightweight facilitation and intuitive guidance to nurture a resonant field. She will also model meaning-making methods used in Fractal Praxis.
From the Fractal Praxis perspective, to gain life-changing insights from life experience, we must “digest and metabolize” the truth within our experiences. Intuition, self-reflection, and pattern analysis are the “enzymes” that help with this process. And it starts with full faith that we were built for intense meaning-making, and that paradigm shifts in consciousness can often be empowering for us. That even if it feels like a “self” is dying, a new more integrated Self is also being born.
Beloved community, I hope you'll take advantage of this offering!
You might think, "well, I don't have anything I really NEED to integrate in community."
...But, maybe you do.
Maybe there's a spirit-guided YOU that's wanting to come out, and find new ways to express. This could be a rehearsal space, for operating from greater truth.
Maybe there's a whole iceberg-like chunk of archaic self-identity that's ready to spectacularly calve off and be relinquished to the Earth for dissolution.
Maybe there's a freeze-state haze of inaction or discombobulation coloring your daily life lately... and that, if you encountered a space of rapt & accepting listening by others... you would begin to be able to voice what you, in isolation, are avoidant to admit.
Maybe there's a calling to be a part of a session, even if there's nothing in particular you intend to speak about, because you actually have a really helpful bit of guidance that's mysteriously crucial for someone else's struggle.
We need each other, and to weave the meaning we're making from things. 🕸️ We need to practice shedding egoic selves, and becoming more whole Selves together. We are in a grand process of BECOMING, period. It's not easy, but in these devoted, conscious containers, we can model that work to our selves and one another.
I have been truly blessed to have experimented in these sensitive/intuitive group meet-up spaces by convening the Embodier Members Circle of Cosmos (which I've since dissolved). Shout-out to my fellow witches and dear beloveds who participated in that first iteration of the Embodiers Circle—you know who you are!
Those meetups demonstrated that we could intuitively sense into, and creatively weave, our truths together—and that in loving witness, we could grow more courageous to turn even more faithfully toward our deepest truths.
I'm proud to be bringing this forward for these Integration Circles.
You may be wondering, Why am I requiring Cosmos Co-op membership to participate? Cosmos Co-op is a visionary platform co-op dedicated to bringing forth our life's work to influence the direction of society, through epic collaboration and conscious culture. And I'm happy for me/Fractal Praxis to be just one of several Creative Members developing Cosmos—and, to be holding a leadership role in the organization's latest evolutionary iteration. I've been lucky to shape (and be shaped by) Cosmos' radically co-creative, artist-centered cooperative model since 2016—nearly ten years ago! 🤯
There's going to be a lot of fun stuff you can do through becoming a Supporting Membership in Cosmos. Accessing my regular Integration Circles is just one example of that. For instance, soon I will have a private chat & forum channel dedicated to Fractal Praxis-focused discourses. There are also events (both online and regional, in Colorado), reading groups, writing groups, spiritual study groups, discussion courses, etc. offered by fellow luminaries in Cosmos—all accessible through a simple Supporting Membership, which you can cancel anytime.
Let's say you join just for the month of March, and attend one (or both) of these Fractal Praxis hosted Integration Circles that month. You're out $12 for an experience that's worth much more than that. So I say: give it a shot?
By using this link to join, you will also directly support ME—because this is an affiliate link that I make a little money off of! 🤑
If you know me, you know I'm all about the "win-wins." Cosmos is reflective of combining my life's work into a cooperative framework that multiplies and amplifies the WIN for all participants. 🏆 So, join Cosmos, and you support Fractal Praxis—a win-win indeed!
🔖 Gosh, thanks for reading this far, and for considering this offering! 😊
Do you have feedback about it? Want to RSVP for a specific date of the six upcoming Integration Circle sessions? Reply to this email and let me know! I truly love receiving feedback from you, and I really try to put it into play in my next iterations of this work.
I hope to see you at one of the upcoming Integration Circle meetups. We need you in these social fights of our generation—but how much better will the outcomes be when they're shaped by our more integrated, wise, attuned selves?
May you find tender space and loving witness—whether among peers, out in nature, or in prayer—for the new understandings and new Self stories being born through you at this time. 🙏
Love & solidarity,
C.