Earlier this year I spent a day running a workshop with a cohort going through the Anam Cara CPACT training, a twelve-month training program in psychedelic and contemplative therapies based at the Anam Cara Centre in Byron Bay (in 2026 / 2027). It's not something I run myself, but I get asked to contribute a breathwork day because the skills overlap so directly with the work I do here at Wild Heart and Melbourne Breathwork: helping people make sense of what happens in non-ordinary states of consciousness, and more importantly, what to do with it afterwards.

What struck me that day wasn't anything dramatic. It was how differently a group works together after months of shared experience in altered states. People weren't managing the experience or trying to figure out what it meant on the spot. They'd already built the language and the trust for that. They could just stay with what was happening.

That distinction matters a lot when it comes to psychedelic integration, because it points to something people often get wrong when they're looking for support after a psychedelic experience.

Integration isn't a single conversation

A lot of people come looking for integration support expecting something close to a debrief: describe what happened, get some reflections back, done. And there's a place for that. But the more meaningful work usually isn't about explaining the experience. It's about tracking what shifts in the weeks and months afterwards, and working out which of those shifts are worth building on and which ones are just noise.

That takes time, and it takes a therapist who's comfortable sitting with material that doesn't resolve into a tidy narrative straight away. Non-ordinary states surface things in a different order to normal talk therapy. Sometimes the most useful part of a session isn't discussing the psychedelic experience directly at all, it's the groundwork of nervous system regulation, trauma-informed pacing, and plain old therapeutic relationship that makes the integration land somewhere real.

Why training and lineage matter here

Psychedelic integration is a term that gets used loosely. There's no single qualification that guarantees a practitioner knows what they're doing, which makes it a genuinely hard thing to evaluate from the outside if you're the one looking for support.

What I'd suggest looking for instead:

• Direct experience with non-ordinary states, not just theoretical knowledge of them. Holotropic Breathwork, for instance, reliably produces altered states without any substances involved, which is part of why it's used as training ground for this kind of work.
• A trauma-informed clinical foundation. Altered states can bring up material fast. Without solid grounding in trauma-informed practice, that speed can do more harm than good.
• Ongoing professional development, not a single certificate from years ago. This is a fast-moving area, both clinically and in terms of the legal and regulatory landscape in Australia. Programs like CPACT exist because the field recognised that a weekend course isn't enough.
• Clarity about scope. A good integration therapist should be upfront about what they can and can't help with, including when to refer you elsewhere.

What this looks like at Wild Heart

I offer psychedelic integration sessions from Wild Heart Psychotherapy's Brunswick and Lorne locations, with the same trauma-informed, transpersonal approach that underpins the rest of my practice. If you've had a session with a psychedelic-assisted therapy provider, a facilitated ceremony, or a breathwork experience that brought something up you're still working through, integration support isn't about analysing the experience from the outside. It's about slowing down enough to let it actually change something.

If you want more detail on the Anam Cara CPACT training itself and what the twelve-month cohort model involves, I wrote about it over on Melbourne Breathwork.

If you're looking for support integrating your own experience, you can read more about psychedelic integration sessions at Wild Heart or get in touch to book a session in Brunswick.