Redefining Set & Setting: The Integration Elements 🇺🇸

In microdosing, Set & Setting is not about preparing for a specific moment in time like a ceremony or trip. Since microdosing is a permanent part of a microdoser's daily life, it means permanently taking care of a number of integration elements, with the final objective of achieving a successful microdosing process.

A successful microdosing process is the ultimate goal and why we're here. We'd love to agree on its definition in community.

For now, ours is: "When a microdoser considers they've achieved results they're comfortable with. Results could take the form of (1) learnings/insights that may or may not have the potential for change, or (2) changes (big or small)."

For users whose final goals are changes, we've agreed that actionable learnings/insights/good experiences by themselves are most of the time not enough without taking action. We can celebrate them as successes, but remembering they are the first steps.

This definition of success considers that the objective of the microdosing process is the betterment of oneself (eg. in health, self-development). This might apply differently for other objectives, such as recreational ones.

Our team has developed the Integration Elements Framework, identifying 50 integration elements that can surround a microdosing process, which can be useful to consider for microdosers and microdosing practitioners in their path towards a successful process.

 
 

Download the full paper here (PDF)

Also, we created a tool called the Integration Navigator, that Microhuasca's practitioners use to track Benefits (B) or Challenges (D) that come up every week (plus a baseline) in each of their users across the 50 integration elements.

 
 

This means a lot of data. Now, approximately every 2 months, Microhuasca receives new groups of microdosers and both the Integration Elements Framework and the Integration Navigator receive a new upgrade, fully shaped from data analysis from the previous groups and dozens of interviews and designing in community with our practitioners. In 10 months, the Integration Navigator has gone through 10 iterations and has data from over 15,000 tracking notes from 20 practitioners and over 100 microdosers.

We mostly refer to microdosing in this document, but this Set & Setting framework could be equally applicable, with adaptations, to macrodosing and other portals to access expanded states of consciousness. The Integration Elements framework is a branch of the Model of Learning and Action with Expanded States of Consciousness by the same team, which explores the Integration Elements of Result as a path towards the successful consciousness-expansion process within this context.

Alvaro Zarate