The Integration Chronicles - Dave Lawson

"The Language of Transformation: How to Reprogram Your Mind After Psychedelic Experiences"

Hi Again!

Welcome to The Integration Chronicles 🌌—your go-to source for stories, insights, and inspiration from the world of psychedelic facilitation and integration.

This month, we’re exploring the MIND, how wisdom takes work, how we can use language and logic to integrate transformative experiences, and how taking radical personal responsibility can literally change everything.

I’m excited to share this conversation with Dave Lawson, an executive coach with over 18 years of experience helping teams collaborate more effectively and leaders develop empathetic, aware management styles. What makes Dave’s work unique is how he bridges hard business operations with deep personal growth work, all informed by three decades of working with psychedelics as tools for self-awareness and transformation.

The Conversation

Olivia Eden: Looking back, what were some pivotal moments that led you to this type of facilitation work, and what was your life like before that?

Dave Lawson: To talk about the type of facilitation you’re working with in your network, we have to go all the way back to my high school days, where I first started to experiment with what I like to refer to as entheogenics—psychedelic and psychotropic medicines that really allowed me to change my perspective on where I was in life, where I wanted to go, and ultimately how I wanted to treat others along the way.

I’ve always been uniquely focused on my relationships with other people. I get a lot of energy and enjoyment out of my relationships, my friendships, even my working relationships. But in high school, I was this awkward teenage boy who was kind of a late bloomer, really scrawny, sort of athletic-ish in that I liked to skateboard and hike and ride my bike. I really struggled to get along in my social construct. I didn’t fit into the hierarchy in a neat, tidy way. I was challenged with some behavioral problems and had emotional needs that weren’t being met.

I knew I needed to make a change in my life, but I really didn’t know how to facilitate that, and I wasn’t getting the guidance I needed from the people around me—or so I thought. A friend of mine introduced me to LSD when I was about 15 years old, and that’s what I chose to do all through high school.

I’m not going to make a claim as to whether or not that was healthy. I don’t believe that children—and I mean anyone under the age of 18 to 20—should just openly experiment with drugs. That can be challenging and detrimental in a lot of ways. But it is what it is. That’s where I started, and I can say it’s had a very positive effect on me in that it helped open my eyes to exactly who I was and what I wanted out of life, even at an early age.

What I wanted was to create art and have meaningful relationships. That’s a little different than what a lot of kids in high school are going through—trying to figure out careers, whether to get married young, whether to have children or buy a house. For people who don’t have a roadmap or who have emotional or developmental disruption in their lives, there have to be different paths. I just started my journey with LSD.

In doing so, I found a great deal of satisfaction. I went from skateboarding and being generally a hooligan—let’s just call it what it is, I was directionless and difficult—to playing soccer. I moved to a new high school in Georgia and joined the soccer team. I became heavily involved in the art program. I was on the board of directors for the National Art Honor Society at our local high school chapter, and I was really proud of that. I actually ended up getting a scholarship for my involvement there, which was validating.

I went from difficult child to just being comfortable with who I am. I think that was the lesson I took from my entheogenic experience from an early age. And I really believe that’s the lesson a lot of people are taking from these experiences—knowing myself and being open and honest about who I am and how I show up.

When I went into college, I was able to double down because of my experiences. I found myself in groups of people who had explored quite a lot and even read literature on the meaning of these experiences. I started to learn more, not just about the experience of taking psychedelic drugs, but also a methodology through which we can sit with ourselves and be intentional about why we’ve engaged in this process.

One thing we learned really early on when engaging with these substances and spirits is that they certainly aren’t party drugs, or at least not in the traditional sense. They’re not the kinds of things you want to do on the way to the club. These are experiences that people hold on to, even if they just have one, for the rest of their lives. They completely impact and alter the way they think about themselves and others. That became the container within which me and my friends approached entheogenic medicine. Years later, I can tell you I remember very specific circumstances and very specific lessons from those years that have stayed with me throughout my life.

Olivia Eden: How have those insights fed into the work you do now? How do you continue to integrate those experiences?

Dave Lawson: I started out in college as a fine arts major, which was a perfectly valid path. But as I started to learn more about my own experience, I decided I really wanted to dive into brain and behavior—how human beings function. I learned that psychology is actually the study of behavior, not much more than that, even as we get down to the neuronal level. So I started to dive into the biochemical reactions within the brain as we engage with certain substances—and I didn’t limit it to entheogens or psychedelics. There are a lot of moving parts going on inside our bodies and brains.

One thing I came to realize through this entire process of discovery is that we’re all kind of constantly having a psychedelic experience. The fact that we are always at the mercy of our brains and minds to interpret the world around us means that we are actually living in a hallucinatory state. As you engage with and have more psychedelic experiences, you start to see bleed over. You start to see how you’ve always seen the world in different ways—you just tried to silo it or narrow it down to specific, definable characteristics. Once you blast the doors off that perception, you can start to engage with the world in a different way, in a more open way that really does allow you to see yourself and others in your true state. That’s kind of the root of healing—the root of growing connections and building bridges is knowing how you show up.

I love the word integration because we’re taking experiences that are esoteric and difficult to define and translating them into language our logical mind can understand. Many people translate their experiences into colors, shapes, or archetypes. For me, it’s language and logic—that’s how I encode and remember these lessons long-term.

One thing that’s been pivotal over the last 30 years: you don’t need the substances to have the experience. These medicines are facilitators, they bring awareness, but they’re not doing the work. The person still needs to reintegrate. If you have tools outside the psychedelic experience to help translate and remember these lessons, that’s where real transformation happens.

Olivia Eden: Can you give our audience some actionable tools on how to use logic and language to integrate these sometimes hard-to-understand esoteric experiences?

Are you a facilitator* looking to grow your audience, deepen your network, and amplify your transformative influence? TAP INtegration hosts monthly meetups to bring the community of practitioners together, to teach each other and grow together. Dave presented at our last one. Next one in Austin is a Holiday party. Come dance with us!

Dave Lawson: Language is a great place to start. Whether you’re writing in a journal, typing into a doc, or recording your voice—get the experience or challenge into a place where you can review it over time. That’s the key to programming the human mind. You hear something once, you encode it. Twice, the light bulb goes on. Repeatedly, it starts to affect behavior.

If you review your thoughts regularly, you have a better probability of actually changing behavior. But here’s the caveat: you can also receive harmful messages and programming from others. I’m talking about social media—emotionally charged messages that feel real and inspiring, then a sales pitch designed to separate you from your money.

Be intentional about the language and information you’re taking in, especially during any therapeutic or change process. When you open yourself up, you’re susceptible to someone else’s thoughts about how you should behave. Language is the model by which we reprogram and heal people. It’s also the model by which we’ve led people into wars. It works, it’s real, it can be good or challenging. Just be aware.

Olivia Eden: So you’re suggesting people minimize their screen time if they’re going through a transformative process?

Dave Lawson: 100%. It was said best to me after a breathwork class I went through—a very intense breathwork class. If you’ve ever done one of these heavy breathing breathwork experiences, the goal is not to reprogram or reshape your vision of your life. The goal is actually to shed a lot of challenging thoughts. It’s to get the wiggles out, to regulate the nervous system so that you can come to the table in a more relaxed and open space. As we were finishing up the breathwork class and doing some light processing, the man leading said,

“Listen, you’re wide open. We just blew the doors off this thing. You’re going to be open to almost anything and everything that comes your way. So avoid alcohol, avoid social media. Give yourself some time. Be intentional about what you start to put back in, because your body’s just going to soak it right up, and your mind is going to translate that into future behavior. So be very intentional about what you want to get out of this experience and how you go back into your life.”

The same applies to the integration work that everyone in this network engages with and even in the coaching I do.

Olivia Eden: Can you give us an exercise—one of your favorite integration tools?

Dave Lawson: There’s one I really love that has been used by therapists of all walks: a simple inventory. When we talk about taking inventory of our internal thoughts and feelings, a lot of times people feel like this is a closed bitch session in the diary of your mind, where you write down all your frustrations. That’s not what I’m about to discuss.

Taking inventory is very methodical—like a ledger of challenging circumstances. You can apply this to situations where you want to magnify positive interactions, growth, and wellbeing. But many times when people are challenged and coming into a coaching relationship, they’re trying to move away from behaviors and thought patterns that are causing them problems.

Let’s take judgment as an example. Judgment is wrought with all kinds of issues. A lot of times, people start in their journey with judgment from a place of resentment. Resentment, I believe, is the key to a lot of really deleterious behaviors. If you have resentments and that voice in your head that’s constantly playing through certain circumstances and interactions, you need to find a way to allow yourself to feel that, understand why it’s there, and then—in my opinion—reflect on your own personal contribution to that resentment.

Let’s say you feel judged at work, and somebody even did something to cause problems for you. It’s very easy to fall into resentment, to play those scripts over and over again and carry around disdain for that person. But the truth is—and this is just brass tacks—that person, whether you like it or not, wasn’t doing anything against you. They were doing something to fulfill a want or need they have internally. You may have been the target, but they were really trying to fulfill something within themselves. If you can take the intent out, at least in your own mind, it begins to open the door to healing.

Here’s how it works: You write down the resentment—”So and so said bad things about me in a room where I wasn’t present. I wasn’t able to defend myself, and it caused me problems or a loss of closeness with somebody they were talking to.” You talk about the specifics. Then you write down the areas of your life it affected. If it was at work, it could have affected your finances, your ability to make money in the future, your relationships. You get the lay of the land, figure out the real specific details around that resentment.

The final column is very simply talking about your contribution to the situation. This is actually the hardest part. This is where people get stuck. They have to pause and really think through it. Then they’re like, “Well, I wouldn’t have contributed to it if so and so hadn’t done this.” Now they have to write another resentment down on the inventory. The question is: do you want the inventory list to grow, or do you actually want to fill in the fourth column and be brutally honest with yourself about how you showed up to the relationship?

This is a really fundamental exercise for helping people let go of situations where they felt they were wronged. Taking personal ownership is huge.

I do want to give a caveat, though: a lot of people are walking around with a lot of trauma, and that trauma is not the result of anything they did. It’s really important we recognize there is another type of inventory that’s not related to knowing yourself or owning your part in any given situation. Sometimes people go through very, very hard things, and we need to recognize that. That’s a different process—it’s a deeper process—and I really believe that’s where you bring in facilitators and integration tools like psychedelics to help people process those things in a safe container that can really induce healing.

THE RESENTMENT INVENTORY (Quick Reference):
Column 1: Write the specific resentment
Column 2: Detail what happened and who was involved
Column 3: List which life areas it affected (finances, relationships, self-esteem)
Column 4: Identify YOUR contribution to the situation (hardest part!)
This exercise helps you move from victim mindset to radical responsibility—the key to breaking cycles and creating lasting change.

Olivia Eden: Do you have a special offer for our readers?

Dave Lawson: I use the Birkman assessment to get to the heart of what’s really going on—people’s needs, stress behaviors, and how to interact with more self-awareness. I’m offering your network a three-session coaching package: one intake session, a 45-minute self-guided assessment, an assessment review, and a follow-up on how to apply the tools. It’s typically $750, but I’m offering it at $600 for Integration Chronicles listeners. These tools are invaluable for shining light on personal challenges, whether you’re working solo or leading a team.

Dave Lawson is an executive coach with over 18 years of experience in sales, business operations, real estate, property management, and HR consulting. He specializes in empathetic leadership and team collaboration, integrating insights from 30 years of working with psychedelics into his coaching practice. To connect with Dave and claim your $150 discount on the three-session Berkman assessment package, contact him at david.lawson.atx@gmail.com.

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DISCLAIMER: This content is for educational purposes only. The discussion of psychedelic substances is presented in the context of integration and personal development. Always consult qualified professionals for therapeutic support. The use, possession, and distribution of many psychedelic substances are illegal in most jurisdictions.
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