Mushroom Journey Integration: Tarot, Truth & Embodied Wisdom (part two of two)

After my mushroom journey I was broken.

I felt humilated, ashamed, angry, helpless, alone. The lesson had been brutal and more than that unkind.

I'm already struggling with being alone, already wrestling with so much anxiety and fear for mine and my sons future, I put all my hope in this journey, that it would show me love, connection, peace, purpose. The brutality of just showing me what I already know in such a fiercely physical, confronting way? It just felt cruel; and I felt myself thrust out from whatever holy light I had been previously allowing myself to bask in to get myself through life.

And that was all I had....so now what?

Now there were some days to be faced where I felt raw, exposed, like a newborn kitten, weak, helpless. A crippling hangover with thumping headache. A need to sleep all day all night. No ability to face anything, all my resilience had fled. I felt over-emotional - my son left some of his dinner - I burst into tears. I wanted to just quit and go home. But there is no home, there's just this now.

I needed a Tarot spread to help me integrate this mess.

To try and connect back with the sacred, my sacred. I felt so cast out that I honestly worried my ability to read tarot had also been taken from me now, as punishment. If I'd lost my connection to spirit and the divine as a result of all this, then I was truly bereft and heartbroken.

Thankfully the cards spoke to me, kindly.

What is my next step in healing or integrating this experience?

🜛 A gentle, supportive suggestion from the cards for what’s needed now. Not to leap forward—just to continue walking.

Of course. What a simple and beautiful integration. Ker, goddess of harvest, comes into my life with unbounded generosity. With her totem deer she brings kindness and peace. She has come to bring me sustenance at a time of feeling empty. Her embrace and compassion will fill me up, She brings gifts of nurturing and caring. Care is the salve that will heal and mend, while nurturing is the honoring of life to bring it to its full potential.

This is such a tender and generous message after what I endured. It’s very simply saying: you are still held. You are still blessed. You are still loved.

What gift did I bring back from the underworld?

🜔 Even in ruin, what spark—an ember, a truth, a line of soul-thread came back with me.

This tells me I found the sacred, I had it all along - it lives in my body and in whichever place I stand and anchor into presence. This card offers me balance and stability, it offers me a sacred place on this earth where the realm of spirit and the realm of earth open to each other. This mirrors the cards from the gift position in the pre-journey spread - Temperance and The cave (sanctuary).

And The Crowning...wow... Initiation. Thresholds. Birth. Rebirth. A seat at the table. This is a card of crossing thresholds and walking through the gates of initiation, which requires great courage and faith. There are rolling contractions and it’s almost always not straightforward. As we transition from one thing to another we’re called to burst through the constraints of the seed and then the certainty of the bud, so that something new can bloom from within. This power is inner, but it’s also connected with the intelligence that exists within all Life. It’s the same energy that tells flowers when to bloom and it was present when we grew in our mother’s womb. I can trust in that. It will carry me through. I can surrender to what’s wanting to be born through me. Life is always trying to initiate us into even more of who we truly are.

What do I need to release from this journey?

🜖 Residual weight—expectations, shame, trauma energy, someone else’s stuff.

The swirl of my thoughts is what needs to go. It's all playing round and round in my mind creating shame and anxiety. Racing, spinning evaluative thoughts - was this all meaningless - why did I go with her - was this my fault? I commit to completing this integration and letting this go. Because this was an experience that lived fully in my body, I don't need to bring any of it up into the mind, the impact and learning is exactly where it needs to be.

And that's why it was so brutal - because learning lessons academically, in theory has no weight and no impact - it needs to be visceral to land and to fully imprint.

And I'm releasing the image of what it should have looked like. And what I think I should 'look like' doing this kind of work. I'm not a high priestess or a shaman, I make no claims on that, I don't need to try and create an image of myself around that. I can be powerful and I can also just be me, without incense, flowers and sage. I have my own rituals that are mine. And now I know who I really am, I can build from here.

What part of me endured or held strong?

🜍My inner anchor—the part that showed up for me, even in the chaos.

Fire and Water, elemental.

I found my inner fire. Ace of Fire was my ally card going in. And now I see why, I had to find my fire, dig deep into my spirit and I had to get myself up and moving. I found my life force in that chaos, I found motion not freeze. I found the part that is there for me like no one else can be. And she has a will that can shape the earth like a river, and fire that can forge.

While everything collapsed and dissolved my will and my integrity stood firm. Even in the disintegration I never abandoned myself.

Seeing this, feeling and witnessing this strength in me - it was a powerful lesson. I know that, like Inanna, from my pre-journey spread, I travelled to the underworld and returned with fire and lionheart.

What was revealed, even if it was painful?

🜄 This shows the truth that emerged through the discomfort—what I saw or felt that can’t be unseen.

These cards reveal how I lost my inner light, lost my way, maybe in ego, maybe in how I didn't communicate clearly or express my needs and boundaries. The Thorn is all about the importance of communicating this with others, how else can we feel safe, and others feel safe with us? The thorn protects the rose so that she can fully bloom.

This has to be the key lesson from my journey - how easy it was for me to totally lose my sovereignty and to willingly absolve myself of accountability for myself and responsibility for how this journey went. I didn't consider my own self if it went wrong, how to get home safely. This was the very painful truth - I did have a plan for myself and my own journey and I didn't advocate for that.

What distorted or disrupted that intention?

🜃 The unexpected energy, dynamic, or misalignment that pulled the experience off course.

I brought an overly romantic view of this journey, a mismatch with reality. This is the dreamer who wants to ride into ceremony with a noble heart—but ends up entangled in fantasy, codependence, or misplaced trust. And the expectation that ritual beauty = emotional safety.

This illusion had to fall away. And I had stuff to let go off before I can get to what I think I need.

What was I truly seeking?

🜁 Not what I planned for, but my soul's longing.

The opportunity to reconnect with the Earth's wisdom, yes, a journey inward to the dark and hidden places of my soul, absolutely, the opportunity to shed and heal the aspects of my life that I'd outgrown, 100%.

And then Love - to feel self-love, experience universal love, unconditional love. And to be sent a guide of true devotion, in perfect love and trust, so that I may let go of my human frailties and infractions, of wounding abandonment and betrayal. God yes - this was absolutely my soul's longing.

I was seeking purification. I was seeking the ancient fire, the earth-heated darkness that melts ego and calls the bones into truth. I came to sweat out the false self. I was seeking the kind of deep inner homecoming where the fox curls into my lap because my heart is finally safe again.

what my heart needs...

what my body needs...

what my soul needs...

My heart feels so much warmth and joy at being given the Mountain card.

"The mountain serves as a mirror for the spiritual initiate, offering her motionless face as enticement for the self to turn inward and meet the immovable self - that one constant reality, the "I am" "

"Curandera comes from a long line of medicine women - she is the archtypal healer who knows just the right medicine to move body and soul back into alignment. In Curanderismo, the thrust toward wholeness relies on integrating the mundance and the sacred, the broken and the unbreakable."

My body relaxes in the presence of Curandera.

" Ixchel says time is the thread and destiny the cloth. Like weaving, midwifing your dreams entails diving in to your center and drawing innate knowledge out. Ixchel comes to help me connect to a higher order and bring my vision to fruition"

My soul feels relief and knowing at the pattern that sits behind it all

You are still held. You are still blessed. You are still loved.

I feel this starting to seep into me now, after really being with this spread as part of my integration process.

A very kind and beautiful friend offered me ceremonial cacao to warm and open my heart, and a marijuana cookie to bring me calm and space to breathe. And she offered me cards from her own beautiful deck of the Wild and Sacred Feminine.

I feel blessed by this beautiful spread of kindness and warmth.

All the lessons and explanations are laid out beautifully here and I can now appreciate the journey and its gifts. They were not what I had intended to recieve, but they were of course exactly what I needed.

And now I'm through the aftermath, the weakness has passed, and I feel stronger than I did before, more resilient. As though my deep stress signal that I'd been living with was interupted, and I receieved a system recalibration. I have had an energetic and neurobiological reset. And I wonder if this reset was shown to me in the imagery of the energetic grids I saw being wiped and replaced - it felt like internal circuitry, like a motherboard.

And I wonder about the other things I was shown - the multiple lifetimes...When I see people now I feel closer to them, I have the odd sensation that I've lived or am living their life. It's deepened my relationship with humanity. And the younger version of my mother that I felt and the fault I felt at our relationship degrading. I thought at the time I was being told that it was my fault. Now I can see I was being shown the part of myself that still grieves for my mother and who does think its her own fault. A young and tender part that I never allow myself access to.

This journey stripped away every illusion I had about what healing should look like.

It let me know that I don’t need feathers, sage, or a title to be on a sacred path. I don’t need to be a high priestess to be powerful—I just need to be honest, sovereign, and fully present with what’s true.

I learned, painfully and viscerally, that strength isn’t about how graceful I appear, but about how deeply I can endure and keep going when there’s no one else to carry the weight. The lessons didn’t arrive like visions or revelations—they landed in my body, through sweat, overwhelm, and exhaustion - because that's the only way we really learn.

And in that rawness, I touched something essential: a young part of me that still aches for a mother who can’t return, who still thinks it’s her fault. She needs my attention now, not in the chaos of ceremony where I just couldn't, but slowly and gently, in the quiet days that follow now.

And beneath it all, now I feel it: I am held. I am loved.

This ordeal was a blessing—one I wouldn’t have asked for, but one that gave me more than I knew I needed.

If this resonates…

If you’ve been through a plant medicine journey—or any kind of intense inner ordeal—you might be left holding more questions than answers.

Maybe it didn’t go the way you hoped.
Maybe it cracked you open in ways you’re still making sense of.
Maybe it revealed something that your mind still hasn’t caught up with.

This is where tarot can be a gentle guide.

Together we can explore the deeper story of what happened—uncovering the lessons, the hidden gifts, and the quiet blessings that might still be waiting to be seen.

If you’re walking through the aftershocks of a big experience and want a compassionate, intuitive reflection space, I would be honoured to walk with you.