Feeling the call to be of service? This episode is for you.

If you have done a few ayahuasca retreats, you know the shift. You entered the medicine path for your own healing, and somewhere along the way a seed starts growing: “I want to give back. I want to support others.” That impulse can be real, clean, and sacred. It can also get tangled in performance, spiritual identity, and the need to be liked.

In this episode we bring service down to earth.

Service is not a persona. It is the natural overflow of integration. It is where your gift and your grief meet. The places that broke you open often become the places you can hold others with uncommon precision, especially in the retreat and post-ceremony landscape where people come home with a lot of light and not enough structure to live it.

I use a simple metaphor to name what stops most people: the hermit crab crossing. You outgrow your old shell, you see the next one, and the only way there is to walk naked across open ground. Many people keep stepping in and out of the same shell for years. They volunteer once, post once, offer once, then retreat back into hiding. The call is not the problem. The crossing is.

We also get practical about boundaries and integrity in the service field.

If you lead with empathy before respect, you will get drained. If your service depends on approval, you will dilute your truth. If you confuse peak states from ceremony with readiness, you will overreach. True service is stable, relational, and grounded in daily life: how you speak, how you follow through, how you hold your energy, how you treat people, how you protect your nervous system.

This is especially relevant if you want to support others after ayahuasca retreats, hold integration space, assist in ceremony, or build a real practice. The foundation is not branding. It is embodiment.

• The “healing to service” threshold after ayahuasca retreats

• Gift + grief as the real source of service

• The hermit crab crossing: leaving the old shell and becoming visible

• Serving without needing to be liked, praised, or validated

• “Who before how”: stop obsessing over strategy and choose one person you want to serve

• Clean boundaries: respect first, compassion second

• How to reconnect with retreat community without hidden agenda

• Why integration is not complete until it reaches behavior and action

• Reach out to one retreat friend with zero agenda: “You came to mind. How are you doing lately?”

• Identify one boundary that protects your energy without closing your heart

• Notice where you are trying to “prove” your service, and remove that motive

• Commit to one small daily act that builds trust with yourself

If you want a deeper container for this work, here are three ways to step in:

The Integration Circle
A grounded space to process what happens after ceremony and translate insight into daily life, guided with emotional safety, confidentiality, and practical integration principles.

The Celebration Circle
A six month group container with 24 live calls, built for people whose gifts are coming back online and who need clean mirrors, real witnessing, and the skills to stand in what is true without shrinking.

Sacred Impact
A six month, 24 week container for leaders building offerings, a practice, or a platform in this space. Voice, vision, structure, integrity, and the lived embodiment required for your service to land.

Explore options and book a consult via davidvox.com.

Follow and connect
Instagram: @davidvox
Facebook: Ayahuasca Integration Alliance
YouTube: @Ayahuasca-Integration
Resources: ayahuascaintegration.org

What happens when you drink and touch real light, but you don’t integrate it? The vessel cracks. The current keeps coming, and what could have become wisdom turns into overload, inflation, chaos, or collapse.

Today I’m sharing one of the most important lessons on the medicine path: the light can be so strong that it becomes difficult to hold. Ayahuasca, breathwork, and deep spiritual practices can open you to an unfiltered current, a level of clarity and unity that dissolves separation. Then real life returns, and the system struggles to translate what it touched into something livable.

You’ve seen the pattern. People speak about visions and missions, but the world of action stays untouched. Monday arrives and the body is dysregulated. Time collapses. Money becomes messy. Relationships strain. Boundaries blur. Service becomes an idea instead of a lived offering. The gap between spiritual peak and daily life widens, and many people respond by chasing more light instead of strengthening the vessel.

In this episode, I bring the lens of Kabbalah to sacred integration through the concept of tikkun: repair and restoration. In the Kabbalah creation story, infinite light pours into vessels that shatter, scattering sparks. The work becomes gathering the sparks, rebuilding the vessels, and restoring unity where there has been fragmentation. I’m offering this as an integration framework, not as formal religious teaching.

The point is practical: integration is vessel-building. You learn to hold the light without leaking it. You bind insight into time, structure, and action. You translate revelation into responsibility. The world of action becomes the altar where the divine actually lands.

I also name the risks I see when people bypass this step: addiction to peak states, spiritual inflation, arrogance, over-giving, bread of shame dynamics, retraumatization through overload, and deeper fragmentation. If you facilitate, this becomes a responsibility conversation. Sometimes the most loving move is to pause medicine and build structure.

You’ll leave with a clear map of what to watch for, how to ground what you receive, and simple daily practices that strengthen the container so the light can dwell, not shatter you.

• Why powerful spiritual contact can become overwhelming without integration

• The Monday gap: peak-state visions vs embodied daily life

• Kabbalah as an integration lens: tikkun as repair, restoration, reintegration

• The “shattered vessels” metaphor and why chasing more light can be dangerous

• How overload shows up: anxiety, depression, dissociation, fragmentation, collapse

• Spiritual inflation and identity attachment to visions, roles, and “vibration”

• The world of action as the altar: time, money, body, relationships, boundaries, service

• Over-giving and “bread of shame”: when receiving without earning damages the vessel

• Building the vessel: structure, discipline, humility, follow-through, completion

• Facilitator responsibility: requiring integration and knowing when to pause medicine

• Simple daily practices: one promise kept, one action completed, one boundary held

If you feel called to go deeper into your own integration work, I offer three journeys:

The Integration Circle
A six-month container for people walking this path with sacred plant medicine. Real integration, real mirrors, grounded structure, and consistent follow-through.

The Celebration Circle
Six months of learning to inhabit your life instead of chasing it. A structured practice of receiving, self-respect, gratitude, and integration of your gifts.

Sacred Impact
A six-month journey for transformational leaders who carry vision and depth and need it brought into form. Platform, offerings, structure, integrity, pacing, and delivery.

Explore options and book a consult via davidvox.com.

Inner child integration is a practical return to inner power, self-trust, and coherence.

In this episode, I share a medicine dream from my fiancé during the COVID period. In the dream he is a child with white angel wings, free and light. Every time he lies to someone else or to himself, a feather falls out. Over time the wings become bare, and adulthood arrives without lift, without movement, without trust. Years later, I realized that dream was also a mirror for my own path. I know how easy it is to give away feather after feather, truth after truth, to keep love possible, to keep peace, to keep belonging, until the cost becomes your freedom.

From that story we go into integration work you can actually apply. Restoring inner power is built through micro-truth: the small choices where you abandon yourself and call it “being easy,” the small agreements you keep to avoid conflict, the small betrayals that slowly train your nervous system to distrust you. This episode tracks how those feathers disappear, how to notice it early, and how to stop the quiet self-plucking that leaves people feeling hollow, compliant, or exhausted.

You’ll be guided through The Feather Audit, a simple integrity practice you can run daily or weekly:

• Truth I lived: what I knew was true and embodied through action

• Truth I avoided: what I felt or knew, but did not say or do

• Truth I owe: what needs repair, a conversation, a new agreement, or a clean action

We also look at “characters” and personas: how they form in childhood, how they adapt to groups and authority, how they can appear spiritually sophisticated, and why they cannot receive real intimacy or real nourishment. Then I share a grounded framework I call The Four Ps for inner child integration: Passion, Purpose, Playfulness, Prosperity. Passion and playfulness fuel the child’s aliveness. Purpose and prosperity protect the child through structure, rhythm, and sustainability. Together they create a life that holds both freedom and stability.

Core question to carry into your week: Where are you losing your feathers right now, and who are you losing them for?

• Inner child integration as the restoration of inner power, coherence, and self-trust

• The “angel wings” dream: feathers lost through lies, wings lost through self-betrayal

• How people trade truth for belonging, peace, approval, love, and safety

• Micro-truth: the smallest yes/no choices that build or break integrity

• The Feather Audit (Truth I lived, Truth I avoided, Truth I owe)

• Repair as action: new agreement, clean follow-through, restored trust

• Personas and characters: why they form, what they protect, what they cost

• Why a character cannot receive real intimacy, real love, or real nourishment

• Inner power as lived truth, not truth performed or spoken

• The Four Ps framework: Passion, Purpose, Playfulness, Prosperity

• Child fuels the adult (passion, playfulness); adult protects the child (purpose, prosperity)

• A weekly practice: identify one feather, name it, and stop the leak early

Connect with David

If you want a deeper container for this work, here are three ways to step in:

The Integration Circle
A grounded space to process what happens after ceremony and translate insight into daily life, with emotional safety, confidentiality, and practical integration that holds up outside the room.

The Celebration Circle
A six-month group container with 24 live calls for people whose gifts are coming back online. Clean mirrors. Real witnessing. The skill of standing in what’s true without shrinking, performing, or abandoning yourself.

Sacred Impact
A six-month, 24-week container for transformational leaders building offerings, a practice, or a platform. Voice, vision, structure, and integrity, brought into form through lived embodiment and real-world action.

You can explore these journeys and book a consult via davidvox.com.

Instagram: @davidvox
Facebook: Ayahuasca Integration Alliance
YouTube: @Ayahuasca-Integration
Resources: ayahuascaintegration.org