After each session.

1. The first hour or two

Right after we close the session, your body and your nervous system are still catching up to each other. The trance state has a tail — a residual quiet, a slight emotional porousness, sometimes mild fatigue or a faint headache. None of this is a problem; it's the work settling in.

In the first hour or two:

• Drink water. The work is dehydrating in ways that aren't obvious during.
• Eat something simple. Real food, not snacks. Protein and warmth tend to land best.
• Don't drive for the first twenty or thirty minutes after a remote session — let yourself reorient before you operate anything. After an in-person session, take the same buffer before you walk to the car.
• Don't open the laptop. Don't take the call. Don't reply to the messages.
• Sit with whatever showed up. Even if it's confusing. Especially if it's confusing.

2. The rest of that day

For the rest of the day after a session, plan for softness. Cancel the meeting that can wait. Skip the dinner that needs decisions. Move slowly through ordinary tasks — laundry, a walk, simple meals — and let the session keep running underneath.

What to avoid:

• Alcohol, marijuana, anything that alters the state again. Give the work clear room.
• Hard conversations. Anything difficult will hit harder than usual.
• Heavy media — news, intense shows, infinite scrolling. Your nervous system is more open than usual; protect it.
• Big decisions. The clarity that arrives in a session needs a few days to settle before you act on it.

What helps:

• Time outside, especially in daylight.
• Movement without thought — a walk, light stretching, gentle yoga.
• Music without lyrics, or silence.
• An earlier night than usual.
• Active grounding if something feels too big — cold water on the wrists or face, naming what you see and hear in the room, feet flat on the floor, a familiar voice on the phone. The work doesn't need to be fought; the body just needs help remembering it's here.

3. The next few days

For the three or four days after a session, you're in what I think of as the integration window. The actual work of the session keeps moving without you having to do anything — small shifts in perception, sentences that surface in your own head that weren't there before, old reactions that don't fire the way they used to, fragments of the trance work that come back partially or fully days later. Some of this lives in thinking, but a lot of it lives in the body — old postures softening, a held tension you didn't know was there finally letting go, breath getting easier without you trying.

That window is the most active stretch. If older or heavier material surfaced during the session, the quieter integration can keep moving for weeks after — sometimes longer. Both are normal; the timeline doesn't tell you whether the work is taking.

You don't need to track this carefully. You're not solving a puzzle, and you're not collecting data. The point is to notice when something shifts and to let it shift without interrogating it. What surfaces from underneath is fragile in its first days; questioning it too hard can collapse it before it has time to take.

If you want a posture for the integration window: more witnessing, less analyzing. Watch what comes up. Let it pass. Some of it will return more durably in the days after that.

4. Sleep and dreams

Sleep matters more than usual in the integration window. What's underneath keeps processing through dreams — sometimes vivid, sometimes strange, sometimes nightmare-shaped, sometimes wholly forgotten by morning but present in mood. Sometimes a dream in the first week feels like the session continuing — picking up a thread that didn't finish in the room. Those are worth noting too.

If a dream feels relevant to the session, jot a sentence or two when you wake up. You don't need to interpret it. The note is enough; the dream itself was the work.

If sleep gets disrupted for more than two or three nights — falling asleep but waking at 3am, vivid dreams that exhaust you, insomnia that's not normal for you — let me know. Pacing adjustments to the next session can help.

5. What's normal to feel

In the days after a session, the following are common and not signs that something has gone wrong:

• Emotional porousness — tearing up at things that wouldn't usually move you, being more affected by news or music or other people's moods
• Mild fatigue, especially the day after
• A headache or pressure behind the eyes for a few hours
• Intermittent waves of emotion — sadness, lightness, irritation, joy — coming and going without obvious cause
• For many clients, a more inward quality of attention, less reactive to the usual triggers
• Dreams that feel important without feeling decipherable

Rare, but worth flagging to me rather than waiting:

• A panic attack that doesn't ease within twenty or thirty minutes of grounding, or that returns repeatedly
• Flashbacks or intrusive images from the session — or from earlier in your life — that keep firing involuntarily after the first day
• A sustained sense of feeling unreal, far away, or detached from your body that doesn't pass within an hour or keeps returning
• Significant disruption to sleep beyond two or three nights
• A sense that you can't get your footing back — not the soft porousness of integration, but the feeling that something has come loose and isn't settling
• Feeling unsafe in your own body, intrusive thoughts increasing, or an urge to harm yourself or someone else
• Strong urges to use alcohol, cannabis, or other substances to dampen what's coming up

If any of those happen, text or email me. I'd rather hear about it sooner than later. For a mental-health crisis, the path is in /policies §10.

6. The recording

Within seven days, I'll send you the recording of the session. What you do with it is your call — there is no required listening practice, and no client has ever been worse off for not listening. That said: the recording isn't a souvenir. Listening back days after, in your own body, more quietly than the room allowed — that's often where something that didn't land in the session finally lands.

If you want a structure:

• The first listen. Once you've had a few days of integration, sit with the recording somewhere quiet. Not in the car. Not while doing dishes. Headphones if possible. Eyes closed, body settled, the way you sat in the session itself — not taking notes.
• After that. Listen when something nudges you toward it — a theme from the session showing up again in life, a pattern you want to revisit, a question that came up after. The recording is a tool for repeated work, not a thing to consume once.

I'll often send a short written follow-up within a day or two of the session — what I noticed, what I'd hold for the next session. Sometimes it takes longer; the system around these notes is something I'm still refining. When the note arrives, it's for you to read once and set aside; it's not a homework assignment.

If listening back to a session ever re-activates something you'd rather let settle, skip it. Not listening is a legitimate choice, not avoidance.

7. Between sessions

Most of integration is the kind you do alone. But there are moments to reach out, and moments to wait.

Wait if:

• You're in the normal porous, somewhat-fatigued, emotionally-moving state of the first few days
• Something is unclear but you're still inside it
• You have a question that can keep until our next session

Reach out if:

• The porous state extends past a week and isn't shifting on its own
• Something destabilizing happens — panic, dissociation, a memory that feels too heavy
• A practical question about the recording, the schedule, or what's coming next
• You realize there was something significant you wanted to say in session and didn't

Email is best for anything that doesn't need an immediate answer: hello@alexnegrete.com. I respond within one to two business days. Text is fine for time-sensitive things: (512) 960-3089. For a mental-health crisis, please don't wait on me — call or text 988 or go to your nearest emergency room. /policies §10 has the full framing. If you reach 988 and want me to know it happened, text me afterward and I'll adjust how we work going forward.

8. Before the next session

As the next session approaches — usually two to four weeks after this one, depending on the program — start preparing the same way again: sleep, water, intention, a soft evening before. /before has the full version. The arc repeats; the work compounds.

The sessions aren't a series of independent events. They're a sequence — each one carrying what the last one started, each one setting up what the next one can reach. Integration is what makes that sequence real instead of episodic.