Beyond the Medicine Circle: Integration as a Core Process in Transpersonal Psychology

This blog explores one of the three core strands of transpersonal psychology, emphasizing how integration is vital for personal growth and making the audience feel their role in advancing understanding.  

“Transpersonal psychology is concerned with the study of humanity’s highest potential, and with the recognition, understanding, and realization of unitive, spiritual, and transcendent states of consciousness” (Lajoie & Shapiro, 1992, P. 91).

In this field, self-expansiveness describes states where personal boundaries loosen, leading to feelings of unity or connection with larger aspects of existence (Hartelius, Rothe, & Roy, 2013, p.7). 

While classical psychology focuses on ego formation and stability, transpersonal psychology explores the developmental horizon beyond the ego - expanding identity into relational, ecological, and spiritual dimensions of being.

This link between self-expansiveness and integration underscores the ongoing process of re-integration, inspiring the audience to see growth as a continual journey beyond the ego.

In the 1960s, psychologist Abraham Maslow coined the term “peak experience” to describe moments of intense clarity, unity, and aliveness that reveal the truth of life (Maslow, 1964). These experiences can happen during spiritual practice and other ways such as entheogenic experiences.  

Stanislav Grof (1988) later conceptualized such phenomena as non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC), in which individuals encounter archetypal or cosmic layers of the psyche. For Grof, these states are not pathological but evolutionary, offering direct access to the deeper structures of consciousness.

Neuroscience offers another piece of the puzzle. During intense spiritual or emotional experiences, the brain’s default mode network, the system that helps create your sense of “self,” temporarily quiets down (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). That is why you can feel open and free of old patterns. But over time, that network switches back on. Your familiar sense of self returns, along with the habits, fears, and thought loops you thought were gone.

Psychologists also talk about the integration gap, the lag between a profound insight and the point when your life actually reflects it, which can pose challenges or risks for individuals attempting to incorporate peak experiences into daily life (Lukoff, 1985). You might know something in your heart, but it can take months or years before your choices, relationships, and daily habits catch up.

This echoes the transpersonal understanding that the true measure of development lies not in the temporary transcendence of the ego but in its reintegration within a larger, more compassionate field of awareness.

One task of transpersonal psychologists is to help people learn how to transmute and stabilize such “peak experiences, "fostering confidence in their ability to support lasting transformation. 

References

Carhart-Harris, R. L., Leech, R., Hellyer, P. J., Shanahan, M., Feilding, A., Tagliazucchi, E., Chialvo, D. R., & Nutt, D. (2014). The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 20. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020

Grof, S. (1988). The adventure of self-discovery: Dimensions of consciousness and new perspectives in psychotherapy and inner exploration. State University of New York Press.

Hartelius, G., Rothe, G., & Roy, P. J. (2013). A brand from the burning: Defining transpersonal psychology. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 45(2), 166–195.

Hoffman, E. (1996). The right to be human: A biography of Abraham Maslow. St. Martin’s Press.

Lajoie, D. H., & Shapiro, S. I. (1992). Definitions of transpersonal psychology: The first twenty-three years. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 24(1), 79–98.

Lukoff, D. (1985). The diagnosis of mystical experiences with psychotic features. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 17(2), 155–181.

Maslow, A. H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak experiences. Ohio State University Press.