Exploring The Infinity Container with Dr. Victoria Sterkin
Since the appearance of psychedelic therapy, one main issue that surfaced in the majority of the population was the misconception that psychedelics almost acted as miraculous compounds that would heal society from mental illness. Such ideology is currently heavily portrayed in the media, most recently with the resurgence of psychedelic research by various content creators and businesses who may be only trying to sell you their kits.
By this, we don’t mean that if you take a route such as micro-dosing or macro-dosing, you won’t feel any effect that will make you feel less depressed or anxious. But it can be an unknown variable that depends on your trip and how you deconstruct it and implement it in your life. This unknown variable is often the reason why so many people go to recreational or psychedelic therapy just for the psychedelic trip and downplay post-therapy or integration, typically going back to square one and feeling the same symptoms months later and ending up thinking that the whole psychedelic therapy fuss could be nothing but a hoax.
This thought can be especially true if they have a ridiculous trip, like becoming a dolphin who evolves into a human mecha intending to invade Mars, now habited by New Yorkshire puppies.
As I said, even when providing the “right” set and setting, the mind and the generation of these trips or feelings may be randomized and often ridiculous in the sense that you won’t be using it in your day-to-day life or healing your anxiety, but you will have a hell of a story and moments of amusement, as we cannot fully control our subconscious. (This is also why psychedelic therapy often has more than one session to achieve and find the one trip that can be the catalyst to explore the mind of the patient and reach the root of what’s troubling them or causing them anxiety.)
Now, you may be thinking. How do I know if I’ll have that one trip to catalyze the exploration of the mind?
And let me tell you, these trips can be pesky little critters that roam around our minds for years until one day, out of nowhere, something clicks in our brain, and we get the queue that maybe the puppies living on Mars symbolize that perhaps you feel lonely and must acquire a puppy as emotional support. Or, in a more realistic scenario, that the trip you had of you being reborn and living a whole new life with the alternative life choices you could’ve had in the past, from relations, job offers, friends, hobbies, and all of the “What would’ve happened if…” scenarios you had in your mind the whole time.
When someone faces these experiences, it can be abrupt to come back to life where we may be discontent about certain situations roaming our personal or general lives.
For this reason, the post-intake/post-psychedelic experience is one of the best times to modulate and shape our lives to be who we want to become and how we want to integrate this trip into our day-to-day life. This process is called integration, and contrary to a psychedelic experience, it isn’t a randomized experience. In contrast, integration processes are well-thought-out and put together with various frameworks to provide the patient with the best outcome for their mental health.
To find out more about integration and its importance in psychedelic therapy, we spoke to Dr.Victoria Sterkin, founder of the integration platform, The Infinity Container.
You can read the following interview below:
What is your personal experience with psychedelics? And why did you choose the psychedelic field?
When I was 14 and was handed a joint by an older guy who I thought was super cool. Quickly I saw the synergy with the plant overpower the synergy with the guy! Cannabis became a best friend whom I relate with almost daily ever since. It woke up a part of me that felt locked in my mother’s passing when I was six. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that it allowed me to integrate with the grief, not turn it off. The depth of feeling finally felt matched by something in my body and became a bridge to find that same depth of feeling in connection with my environment, and in particular, music and writing. I then started dabbling with ecstasy in the late 90’s and going to raves in NYC. I’ll never forget what it felt like to touch my hair and feel music the first time the pressed pill kicked in at Twilo.
Through my college years, I dabbled a little with acid and mushrooms. But it wasn’t until Covid that I really started working with mushrooms and incorporating that work into my practice. I was inundated with clients and felt how burnt out people in mental health were feeling. An artist I knew from back in NY, (I moved out to Santa Cruz, CA 7 years ago) called and said, “Doc, we need you.” He and his partner were starting a microdosing company. I respectfully declined. I felt too overwhelmed with the work I was doing and kept asking the universe to illuminate a technology that could shift the burden so many were feeling. The mushrooms kept coming to me in my dreams in the form of the ocean. I finally woke up to the message that the mushrooms were that technology I was seeking and so many creative ideas came flooding in. So I helped create a microdosing company and built a practice for practitioners and communities to learn about microdosing and simultaneously was trained to hold ceremony space for journey work, while doing my own personal micro and macro work too. I left that company over a year ago after some real misalignments came to surface and the work has just continued to blossom.
When growing up, was working with psychedelics something you kept in mind?
That’s such an interesting question. The short answer is no. When I started taking ecstasy I learned about its relationship with psychotherapy. This made so much sense to me but at the time I didn’t know what or who I wanted to “be.” I just was. Learning that the government shut down this research closed me off to even thinking of the possibility at the time. I also didn’t aspire to be a therapist. When I was super little, I knew I wanted to become a doctor, but I thought I’d be a medical doctor. I just knew I wanted to help people grow and wake up.
I felt alone in my grief and felt most people had no idea what it meant to really be alive. I recognized from a young age that her death, the neglect my sister and I faced, and the abuse from my dad’s girlfriend changed me. I was attracted to people who thought differently, saw the world differently. I was also terrified of dying. I held a lot of fears in my body that I think transferred over from my mom. She was diagnosed with leukemia and died within three weeks at the age of 36. (Bufo helped me tremendously with that pattern I held.)
While in undergrad I started working with neurodivergent populations and understanding how so many different brains learn.. and that people experience the world through so many different templates. And then in my early 20’s I met my fairy godmama and mentor, Nana JoySee. She adopted me right after I finished grad school. She is so psychedelic but without the substances. She opened me up to different realms while I was doing vigorous behavior analytic peer-reviewed research. She shifted my pain point around not having. It is the combination of these experiences that led me to feeling aligned with using entheogens as a potent tool to achieve the learning I hold hope for.
What advice would you give to your younger self when it comes to psychedelics?
That fears are not a weakness but a recognition of the power that these chemical compounds, plants and fungi hold. The fear is a layer of the respect.
Since working with psychedelics, has your opinion about these compounds changed?
I wouldn’t say my opinion has changed but my awareness & understanding has grown. I’ve learned so much from my experience working with thousands of people now, and from reading the research and literature. Castaneda’s books alone have widened my knowledge tenfold. I’ve always felt that these substances were here to help us. I’d say my opinions on SSRI’s and traditional psychiatry have changed. I used to be very against these drugs and I’m now way more open to the ways that they help some people.
What ongoing research interests you the most in the psychedelic realm?
Ok so obvi I’m gonna say research on integration. And particularly integration in group settings. Most of the research we have is in clinical, 1:1 settings. I recently ran across a sociological study looking into psychedelic integration in group dynamics which feels like a good start. Last summer TIC did a pilot retreat with a group of practitioners and the anecdotal evidence was profound. What people receive in connection to others when our neurochemical armor is down, is truly evidence based magic, the magic of our socially designed nervous systems coming into life in their expanded states of intraconnection.
I am loving what groups like Hystelica are doing for women. Back when I was working with that microdosing company we did a citizen science study with Dr. Conor Murray at UCLA, & Dr. Mindy Pelz taking a group of 70 menopausal and post menopausal women through a microdosing protocol. So many women could be receiving so much more help and understanding of what’s happening in their bodies during times when women have the highest rates of suicide.
I love hearing the anecdotal stories and teachings that happen recreationally.
I also want us to learn more about the relationship between music, plant medicine & our bodies.
How can we, as a community, improve psychedelic research in the clinical field?
I felt this way when I was in academia and the same feeling applies here… We should be promoting cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary research modalities. As a grad student at Columbia University, I remember asking my brilliant advisor, Dr Doug Greer (a musician turned behaviorist), why don’t we conduct our research in collaboration with other disciplines? Why aren’t the neuroscientists offering their layer of knowledge to the data we’re collecting on learning? I found academia to be too fragmented & competitive. This is one of the reasons I left. It has since changed, a little.
When I was at the MAPS conference in 2023, there was such fragmentation between the indigenous contributions to psychedelic culture and the “scientists.” This delineation immediately takes away from the scientific rigor that indigenous populations carry. Indigenous people can also be scientists. Both science and historical cultural context can be seen as “schools” of processes that hold wisdom. My hope is that we respect each and begin to see more collaboration between communities to offer a fuller picture of the truth.
When we merge worlds the world expands. This is deeply important to me.
I want to congratulate you on your newly released project, The Infinity Container. How would you describe the project to newcomers to the psychedelic field?
Thank you so much for showing interest. The Infinity Container is an integration platform that goes beyond self help. It is a community space for therapeutic learning, particularly for the helpers. My hope is that with this space, the helpers feel held and supported and that the offerings we provide ripple out to what they provide to open more access into the plane of possibility. It is a space to condense in, & digest all that is happening so that our expansion doesn’t come from a manic pacing but that the whole process of learning is honored, even the slowing down needing to repeat lessons part of us… Even the inner child in us healers.
I wanted to create a space for the kinds of collaborations I spoke of earlier, where all different forms of practitioners can come together, process and learn… from the sound healers to the psychiatrists. I also wanted to create a space where we can learn from our elders as well as from the freshies, the newbies just starting a practice.
I want people who are offering support in the world right now to feel supported. I feel very strongly about this. We need people to pitch in and those people need inspiration, love, recognition, and spaces to learn in too. For me, I get most of my support from the artists. So I really wanted this space to be inclusive of the creators. Music and art are VERY important parts of the journey here on Earth. Our artists who pour their souls into the work that is such connective tissue for so many, deserve the same support and respect as the therapists, scientists and “healers.”
How did Infinity Container come to life? And what services do you provide?
After leaving the microdosing company, I missed the practitioner sessions I held every Friday, the community integration calls I held monthly, the school I birthed there and the creative playground it was to bring in different offerings that aligned with the teachings of the mushrooms. Since then I heard the mushrooms wanting people to do more of the learning and integrating and to not rely on them as much but to truly learn how to rely more on the network of an intraconnected Earth-body. People are needing community right now, big time. And our community sustainers need support.
I have always been very resonant with the work of Dan Siegel (MD & therapist who founded interpersonal neurobiology), Candace Pert (pharmacologist who died years ago after discovering the opioid receptor and the AIDS Tx, Peptide T), and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (who studies embryological development and developmental movement patterns)… all studied mind-body integration in very different ways. I love using psychedelics as a tool but I didn’t want to create something that was solely psychedelic focused. When the focus is too singular on psychedelics (and I do believe we need those spaces too) then we’re not doing the work of creating a world where psychedelics are more integrated and accepted as a normal part of our practices.
So I gathered a team to collaborate with and actualize the vision. Daniela Matos creative directed the vibe, my partner Edu Cerro on illustrations, Mariana Martin Capriles on all things video including editing, graphics and animation, Catie Hart coded the vision and magical spells into our website, and Erika Kaempfer helped with overall support and strategy. We wanted to create a digital space that feels intimate and inspiring like peeking into someone’s notebook.
Currently The Infinity Container has 2 tiers, a free membership where you can access our monthly integration call and a digital community portal space and a paid membership where the supporters can receive support & professional development. I don’t want this to be seen as another self help self integration space, but a space that holds the intention that the work we’re doing goes beyond the self. We can be here for ourselves, but we also have to be here learning for the Us, the We.
We offer a library of integration teachings and practices to use with yourself and your clients, a parenting & inner child healing program with my mentor called StoryTime with Nana JoySee, sound baths, weekly containers to drop into for creative process and practitioner support, weekly office hours for 1:1 mentorship with myself, a community of incredible humans and different spaces for inspiration, venting, referrals & resources. If you’re a member, ticketed events for non-members are free. I want the membership to feel super generous.
What frameworks or models do you use to guide clients through their integration process?
I first came to work with the process of integration through the lens of an integrated brain, outside of the realm of psychedelic integration. An integrated brain is working more collaboratively with itself, is most metabolically efficient and allows for more choice, possibility, flexibility and resiliency. We then can extend that into interpersonal neurobiology where we move from the integrated solo self to an omni-connected nervous system more integrated with the other (nervous) systems in the environment. Psychedelics are a tool that can shake up the wiring and create more flexibility, and collaborate with us to illuminate more possibility both within the solo self and the surrounding environmental intra-connected self. The integration on the back end of the journey is what allows illuminated possibility to shift into actuality, or allows a reconfiguration based on what was learned and observed by the body’s interaction with the psychedelic.
Embodiment practices, storytelling, creative exploration, working with the 4 elements, our ancestors, emotional awareness, biological functionality, behavioral analysis and most importantly community based approaches apply. The framework is dependent on the journey, on the developmental gap, and the direction they want to explore. We hold what is with what is possible and build from there, titrating in change a little at a time.
What do you wish for the future of The Infinity Container?
I wish for growth and support and participation. I wish for people to feel into the power of integration and wake up to the need for therapeutic learning that goes beyond 1:1 therapy that is so so important and… and… we need community. I’m a therapist so I live and breathe in the power of offering yourself space to grow in and I’ve also learned that most people actually need interaction that is semi-private. Safe and contained but with multiple perspectives offered to get out of their own stories.
I can see many creative events in our future. Collaborating with innovative beings, waking up & celebrating the people. I see many different containers within our portal. I began our public facing portal with our free community for anyone interested and in need and just expanded with a paid membership focused on artists & practitioners. It’s amazing for newly budding practitioners seeking to build their practices as well as people who have been working solo and are seeking the energetics that healthy networks provide.
Are you currently planning any events?
IRL Events- Yes! I’ve had this idea in my mind that continues to develop. My dear friend (mentioned above), Mariana Martin Capriles who also goes by MPeach… She’s an incredible, incredible Venezuelan born artist. Our collaboration will be an immersive experience that opens up the energetic body and then integrates us with the physical body, a sound scape and visual immersion that will turn into a celebratory dance party. I want the healers and the helpers to feel held and appreciated while having fun. I want the givers to have opportunity to receive… to proliferate the work of feeling more… and of being more. Too many people are feeling dulled and burnt out. We need their participation. And that participation DESERVES to be celebrated. We’re currently scouting venues.
We’ll also continue our series of IRL blue lotus sound baths here at the ranch this spring. And this summer we’ll most likely open up another practitioner retreat.
Is there a way people can support your project?
Yes, join us. Share your energy. If you are a helper and are looking for a space to integrate… we’ve got you. We’re currently calling in applicants for our membership of artists, storytellers, doctors, therapists, facilitators, parents, etc. If you’re looking to feel supported while supporting others, we welcome your energy of reciprocity. Our paid membership is currently a referral based program. If you don’t know anyone in the container then come to our free community call (hosted once a month). The free community is a great portal in, for both of us to get to know each other and feel into the “fit.”
What kind of person would benefit from integration processes?
An alive one 😉 Integration is the process of becoming. Whether you’re taking psychedelic substances to help open up the pathways to get out of your own way and as Robin Carhart Harris recently said in an interview, “relax your beliefs or assumptions…” or if you’re just living your life and going through the complexities of our days, we need to give ourselves tools, time, space and support to digest our experiences and become more of who we are. Integration isn’t just about psychedelic work although it’s one of the most important parts of psychedelic work. Integration is about learning and being alive. If you have a working nervous system and body, your nervous system is designed to learn and grow. If you’re not integrating, you’re most likely fragmented, stuck & suffering more than you need to be.
Why do some people struggle with integrating profound psychedelic experiences, and what support do they need?
I think most people struggle with integrating most things in their lives and without that practice it’s even harder to integrate the massive data set that comes from a psychedelic journey. Our environments are designed to fragment us and push us to keep going.
This is where community can come in really powerfully. When we have community support, compassion and empathy is held within the energetic framework of the environment. There’s space and support to stay with process. After a journey, most people go back to their day-to-day lives, even the very next day because they can’t afford the time off. Most communities that aren’t specific psychedelic communities don’t know how to help someone make sense of the teachings, so they do the work themselves or don’t do it at all.
Most people also need a container to integrate in. A journal or a canvas can function as the container but the journal won’t have the same kind of energetic feedback as humans, right? But it can serve as a space to organize all the info to make sense of it.
Integration is about seeing the pieces, valuing them, really feeling what each piece of the puzzle is all about. And then we can start weaving them together and create a new framework.
A lot of people will also find that the ways of existing presented in the journey are vastly different from what they experience their current lives to be. That big discrepancy needs loving comfort & support and something that can hold the full range of the pendulum. I often find my job with people is to feel where they are, feel where they seek to go, and hold both so they can feel held enough such that the map to get there is illuminated.
What advice would you give someone who feels “stuck” and unable to fully incorporate their psychedelic experience into their life?
First and foremost let’s give permission to be “stuck.” It’s often a powerful part of people’s process that allows for desire to learn and grow to emerge. Then I’d say, let’s find areas where we can play with flexibility. Stretch. Breathe. Start doing things a little differently than you used to. Find the areas of rigidity that are easiest to play with… use a little extra soap when you’re washing the dishes, kind of a thing. Let’s find where you can play with flexibility with ease and remind yourself about your capacity to be flexible and mobile.
Then we can look at what it is you want to incorporate and the various ways to experiment with how to get there. You went into a journey feeling freedom and an intraconnected body where we are all loving and one… and then ya come out into a shitstorm of reality. Where can we practice freedom? Freedom is exercising choice. Where can we exercise choice that aligns with our beliefs? Where can we safely feel connected?
We can get super psychological about the stuckness and really investigate it and no matter what comes from that investigation it comes down to remembering, we can create change and movement a little at a time. It all happens a little at a time…
How does the integration process help people make meaning out of intense or confusing psychedelic experiences?
The journey, the time communing with the medicine… it’s a step. A very powerful, potent step. This step helps to illuminate what we are ready for. This step illuminates the next steps. When we recognize that some puzzle pieces have been illuminated in this step, we realize that we have time and space to work with these pieces. In this integration process of becoming, we GET TO titrate in different aspects of the journey. We get to weave things together. The potency of a journey can overwhelm the nervous system without time on the backend to weave it all together. The nervous system needs time and space to learn and grow into the new. The integration process reminds the body that it’s ok to first be in overwhelm before we organize all of the pieces. WE GET TO organize the pieces. We get to practice making sense of something. We get to stay in process with ourselves. Most things are overwhelming when we don’t have support, time or space to digest them. Most things are confusing when we don’t have time, space or energy to seek clarity.
I remember after a journey I started a project clearing an old chicken coop. Weeding the soil, clearing out the rusted fencing, dismantling something that was broken and unusable. This project became my integration space. Clearing and ripping and creating more space and FEELING the process of something becoming. My body went through the process and in that time / space container I and the space became something new.
Why is it important to revisit a psychedelic experience through integration rather than moving on to the next experience or journey?
A metaphor I might use to answer this question is bulimia. We get powerful tastes of a meal but then our bodies aren’t given time to receive the nutrients of the meal and release what our bodies discern as the waste. With bulimia we aren’t giving our bodies a chance to do the digesting. If we just keep piling on more journeys and never digest the previous… we’re merely offering ourselves a taste of something while conditioning only getting to have a taste and actually reinforcing distrust in yourself to do the becoming. We also want to give our brains the full experience to go into the critical period of a neuroplastic state and repatterning / reorganizing. If we’re not giving ourselves reorganizing time and just staying with consuming & creating plasticity… that’s a recipe for fragility, and confusion. We’ll never land or truly expand. Learning needs time.
In your experience, what are some typical insights or themes people gain from psychedelics, and how do you support them in integrating these into daily life?
- Love. Love surrounds everything. Love is everywhere. Even surrounding the most intense darkest pains. The integration is playing with the echo of this knowing in the walk-a-day. Find the love. Find the beauty. Be it. We don’t need to take medicines to be with that layer of consciousness. The medicine can serve to awaken that which is always there. It’s a remembering and a returning to. It’s a returning to sensations from being in utero. No matter how fucked up your relationship is with your mother there’s a time and place when we were held by the love magic of Earth’s womb… otherwise ya wouldn’t have made it to birth.
- You are we. Group journey work is fascinating for this one. The sense that we’re all derivatives of each other and inextricably bound together… fear & separateness goes away. We don’t have to deal with walk-a-day conditions in the journey so when we go back into those conditions, the integration is about discernment and holding the “bothness” of it all- that we exist in the unconditional boundary-less infinite loving quantum and the conditional newtonian walk-a-day plane. We can set conditions while holding and being love.
- People realizing their capacity to move with and relate to sensation including discomfort… That the discomfort becomes a teacher or a signal rather than something to get rid of. The integration is listening in differently. Slowing down to find choice and not just quickly reacting. Getting curious about the sensation. Knowing there’s wisdom there too.
Do you believe ‘bad trips’ can be prevented? If so, what are your tips to avoid a bad experience? Or do you think bad trips can be beneficial?
I would define a bad trip as an unsafe one. Unsafe meaning, the facilitator isn’t safe. They take advantage of power. They don’t know you enough. They don’t create a safe container and they insert themselves into it too deeply.
The set and setting research is important to remember. Set an intention and create a setting to help support that intention and then we let the setting hold the intention for us so that we can let go into the infinite with a safe container, curiously and with openness. Bad trips can also happen if we don’t give ourselves a safe space to land. We do a lot of set and setting work to prep but there needs to be care on the back end of the journey as well. We should be asking ourselves and our clients if they have space to land in? Does it give room to breathe into the desired changes?
The discomfort that may come from a journey that some may call a bad trip, that’s some juicy content your body is calling you into and feels safe enough to approach in relationship with the medicine.
How do you approach your personal self-care and emotional integration as a therapist working with such profound, sometimes intense, human experiences?
This is one of the reasons why I created the Infinity Container. I want a space for practitioners to integrate their experiences too. I often write about the experiences I have with people. They become teachings. I live in the mountains and I get a lot of quiet, introspective time. I move my body. I walk with the trees. I sit with my cat and coregulate with his big lil body. I go into my sauna and sweat. I play my drum and my flute. I bathe in water. I bathe in sound. I bathe in the forest. I have conversations with Nana JoySee, my mentor fairy godmama. I paint. I cook. I lay on the ground while my partner Edu plays his guitar through an amplifier and let the vibrations wash through me. I create lessons and creative ways to amplify the wisdom that gets illuminated. I’m also mindful of how many medicine ceremonies I hold. I typically don’t do more than one per month.
What advice would you give to someone who’s maybe a bit iffy about trying psychedelic integration?
I’d say let’s take a moment and remember what it felt like as a child. Does a memory come up, of a time when you were playing and realized something about yourself… Where you got to practice something and it was fun. When you give yourself space to explore something… Was it building something with blocks and seeing it come into existence? Was it playing an instrument and finally learning a song? Was it playing “store” and figuring out a system? Let’s reignite the memory, to reignite the truth that you are already primed with integration practices. Integration is your birthright. School often fucks up our relationship with learning. Integration is an opportunity to recondition that.
One of the many points presented by the psychedelic community against psychedelic therapy is the cost of these therapies, claiming that they can probably get, for example, a dosage of psilocybin for $20 instead of paying hundreds or thousands for psychedelic therapy sessions, often leading to people believing that the healing of psychedelic therapy lies in the psychedelic intake. How important are the following processes? Do you think someone can achieve the same results in a recreational experience?
I think some people need the container and some people at certain points in their development, don’t. I don’t think recreational experiences offer the same kinds of outcomes but that doesn’t discredit the recreational outcomes. If you’re opening the door to a traumatic experience, it is profoundly helpful to have an experienced practitioner there to hold that space and help you make sense of it… and as someone said to me earlier this morning, what he got out of a journey was something he couldn’t achieve in 15 years of therapy. I also believe it was the 15 years of therapy that helped prepare him for what unfolded… but that’s an answer to a different question. So the cost effectiveness is dependent on how we look at the economics beyond this very moment in time. It is also very important to me that people have healing that is affordable. This is another reason why I created The Infinity Container. Everyone can access a once a month potent session for free. And as for our paid membership, one month is less than the cost of one therapy session and offers multiple modalities to integrate with (library of content, virtual group containers, office hours for 1:1).
How do you perceive the future of psychedelic therapy?
My hope is that it is more integrated as a tool we can access if we need it. That our communities are more supportive of these practices. That people become more educated about the power of these practices and medicines. That many different cultures have a history of working with these modalities in various ways and we get to feel choice in honoring how we drop into our practices. That there is more freedom to drop in and there’s more community built around accepting a myriad of therapeutic practices. My hope is that it’s not so fragmented.
Lastly, where can people find your work and contact you about Psychedelic integration?
Folks can visit my websites, www.victoriasterkin.com and www.theinfinitycontainer.com – TIC’s website is something I’m really proud of. There’s lil easter eggs hidden in there and more on the way, so play around. Join TIC’s community portal on mighty networks. If you want to dip your toe in, come to a community call. If you feel aligned to participate beyond the free community call – apply for a membership, or email we’ll figure it out together.
We don’t need to do this alone.
The world needs your participation… let’s amplify the plane of possibility and move into actuality, little by little… little by little.
