Most disease — mental, physical, societal, environmental — can be attributed, at least in part, to too many fragmented parts unable to access a sense of wholeness. This is the gap the Solar-Lunar Framework was built to close. Systems break down when they aren't supported by the whole. When we look at this through the lens of mental health specifically, we see rigid, maladaptive patterns — painful to live with, and difficult to find the flexibility to shift and update.
This isn't just my own read on it. Dr. Daniel Siegel, the psychiatrist behind interpersonal neurobiology, puts it plainly: when integration is blocked, chaos and/or rigidity arise — and in his view, every psychiatric syndrome he's studied can be understood through that same lens. Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris's entropic brain hypothesis names something closely related from the neuroscience side: conditions like depression, OCD, and addiction reflect low-entropy, rigid brain states — measurable ruts — and psychedelics appear to work, in part, by loosening exactly those rigid patterns.
Psyche, meaning soul, and delic, meaning to reveal, together describe what these rigid patterns give way to: a way for the mind to unhook — and even from the ego, which often clings to a more fixed "this is just who I am" identity.
If we're going to use psychedelics — creating an entropic brain state, shaking people free from the ruts and maladaptive patterns — we better know how to put them back together in a way that allows room for the update. We hear a lot of people in the psychedelic industry naming how important the therapeutic aspect is, how important integration is. But beyond "journal," "go to therapy," "make art," and "spend time in nature" (all very important behaviors to live by), I hadn't yet seen specific guidance around how to really prepare a bodymind for profound, life-altering events, and create the organization to move with the experience beyond the psychedelic journey — the death day, the life-altering event itself.
What Is the Solar-Lunar Framework?
The Solar-Lunar Framework is a map for transformative experience, built at the intersection of behavioral science, somatic practice, interpersonal neurobiology, and contemplative traditions. It organizes the work of preparing for and integrating change into two spirals: the Solar Spiral and the Lunar Spiral.
It isn't a curriculum you complete once. It's a practice you return to — a spiral you travel again and again, each time from somewhere new.
The Solar Spiral: 7 Preparation Capacities
These aren't topics — they're capacities. Moves. Ways of metabolizing experience.
The Solar Spiral holds the capacities that help you arrive ready: grounded, receptive, and resourced before an experience begins. They work with what the body already knows how to do — awareness that gets lost easily in the headiness of everyday life. Preparing isn't only about understanding the narrative you're bringing with you; it's feeling how that narrative may have pulled you away from this spiral in the first place. Returning to it lets you meet change with fuller participation and felt sense, rather than concept alone.
Together, these seven capacities create and condition a safe brain state, creating readiness to explore and update into who you are becoming.
Ground — We begin here because we are earthlings. To ground is to make contact with the shared reality of life, in relationship to whatever is holding the body in gravity, in space, in time.
Receive — Like egg meeting sperm, receiving opens the beginning of relationship — the third energy that forms a sense of who we are.
Flow — Moving with the spiral of life. We receive the ground, then begin to move.
Connect — There is more than one. We exist in relationship. Connection is relational appreciation — gratitude, the reinforcement of being with.
Pulsate — Expand and condense. Cellular breathing. The dance of the universe. To pulsate is to recognize the rhythm of flow, the tides moving in and out, the oscillation that makes flow sustainable.
Evaporate — To access another realm, another octave of existence, we have to know how to move from the walk-a-day into the quantum — particle and wave, able to shift into the energetic field alongside the Newtonian one.
Play — The six capacities before this one build a state safe enough for creativity and spontaneity to unfold. To play is to have found that safety — laughter, pleasure, and the novelty that comes from moving with life instead of against it.
Seven capacities, seven days of the week. Each can be practiced daily in the weeks leading up to a journey, as a way of returning the body to ground before it meets the medicine — but the spiral isn't only for preparation. Life itself can feel disorienting, ungrounded, psychedelic in its own right — and these same seven capacities are a way back home whenever you need one.
The Lunar Spiral: 13 Integration Capacities
This is the year of integration. Integration isn't a single event — it's work that gets to breathe; we get to take our time becoming. For those working with psychedelics specifically, there's a critical period that opens once the medicine has done its work: a window of flexibility well earned. The Lunar Spiral is how that window gets used — participating with the integration process, updating the nervous system's prediction model, rather than letting old patterns reprogram themselves back in under a new name.
In indigenous cultures, much of this integration is already built into the structure of daily life. Most of us don't have that structure handed to us — so we build it. The Lunar Spiral is that container.
Thirteen capacities move through three broad movements:
Orienting — establishes the stability and ground rules of integration itself: movement, boundary, relational sensing, sorting signal from noise, so that we can rest into and update.
Shift — Moving from one state to another. Shift holds both transit (slow, gradual change) and switch (abrupt change). We will always have a first response; Shift asks us to find a second one. It's the difference between fragmentation — a choice-less state — and integration, which lets us see choice and move with flexibility.
Contain — Containers give boundary, and boundary is the prerequisite for discernment. To contain is to know where I end and you begin, while still holding the container of we alongside the containers of you and I. Containers give us space to find ourselves and update into.
Attune — I feel, and I allow myself to be felt. Attune is sensing, resonance, frequency-matching — the basis of healthy relationship, because it's the environment meeting us instead of taxing, consuming, or erasing us. It's us meeting the environment, instead of mindlessly projecting and taking up space.
Discern — Sorting signal from noise, without moralizing. Discernment is the prerequisite for shedding, anchoring, weaving — we have to be able to identify and distinguish between, sort and understand the parts that make up the whole, before we can truly feel more wholeness.
Anchor — To anchor is to stabilize inside what's true — the way a blastula wanders before it decides where to implant, or even the way we choose where to sit at the beach. It's a regulation capacity: stabilizing enough to be functional in the environment we've landed in.
Metabolizing — the digesting work: settling into what's true, releasing what no longer serves, igniting what's alive, refining down to essence, calibrating pace and dose of change.
Shed — To shed is to release the false picture — not discarding it back into the room to be stepped on again and again, but composting it. Letting it land somewhere safe, so it doesn't have to keep returning.
Kindle — We each know ignition — the moment sperm and egg met, felt and contained. Kindle relights that aliveness: motivation and direction that can be held and grown, not scattered out of control.
Distill — Distill extracts the essence from what the fire reveals — clarifying, finding the core truths and meanings that rise out of a larger experience.
Titrate — Titrate doses the essence sustainably, testing it against lived reality in amounts small enough for the body to adjust, without being overwhelmed by how much is too much, or not enough.
Reintegrating — moves outward again: bringing what's been metabolized back into relationship, orchestrating it, creating from it, and making it last.
Weave — Weaving through time integrates what's been distilled back into present life, relationship, and system — picking up what matters and carrying it forward. It's the deliberate act of continuity in a discontinuous world.
Conduct — The capacity to feel the rhythms and energies already at work, and move with them, recognizing you're part of something larger than your own cycle alone. Conducting works with timing, layers, composition — the capacity to shape the symphony of your life.
Generate — Where everything that came before culminates in growing the new — creation held in relationship with other and environment.
Sustain — Sustain closes the spiral and turns to face the next one. It asks what allows this to keep going — not just for you, but for what you're in relationship with. Continuity without force. Discipline without punishment. Structure without rigidity. Devotion without martyrdom. Momentum without burnout. Sustain is how something stops being an experience and becomes who you are.
Thirteen capacities, mirroring the thirteen lunar cycles of a year. The spiral is built to move through one capacity per month — real time with each, rather than rushing the metabolizing work a capacity asks for.
Each capacity is practiced one at a time, month by month, inside a community moving through the spiral together.
Why Two Spirals
Preparation and integration ask different things of the nervous system. The Solar Spiral is about arriving — building the internal resourcing to meet what's coming. We turn toward the sun when we recognize that we're ready to grow. The Lunar Spiral is about digesting — turning what already happened into something that actually changes you, rather than something that just happened to you. Lunar time is all about digestion, and allowing the aspects to emerge that often get lost or stay hidden by the fast pace of the sun.
Most approaches to transformative work focus heavily on one side or the other: intense preparation with little support afterward, or integration talk with no groundwork laid beforehand. The Solar-Lunar Framework treats both as equally necessary, and neither as optional.
How the Framework Is Used
Inside The Infinity Container, the framework isn't something you read about once and set aside. Every session, theme, and program is organized within it. Each month moves through one capacity — the community holds the structure, so the individual doesn't have to hold it alone.
The framework is also the spine of an upcoming book, which will teach it in full as a public resource. The Infinity Container itself isn't a gate in front of that knowledge — it's the place to actually practice it, get support while you do, and for practitioners, to eventually become certified in teaching it to others.
Where to Start
If a specific capacity already caught your eye — Anchor, Weave, Conduct — start there. If you're earlier in the process, Ground is the natural first stop. Either way, find your membership here to practice it inside a container built for exactly this.