Setting Intentions for a Psychedelic Experience

Your why is at the center of everything, it’s your fuel, your goal, and your purpose all wrapped into one, while your what and how radiate off of your why.

Compassionate inquiry, coined by Dr. Gabor Maté, means investigating your psyche from a scientific perspective, one without judgement, and it’s one way to hone in on your why.

Many of us focus on the what and how first, but by honing in on your why, you can gain a lot more understanding into what you hope to accomplish, as well as ensure you have an actionable process that adheres to your purpose.

Why Set Intentions?

“I believe that your why or your purpose is really the foundation of the structure upon which all of your internal work is built upon. If you build a house on a fractured or unlevel foundation, then it doesn’t matter how plumb you put up your wall. It’s going to follow the misalignment of your foundation.”

Setting intentions is a way to set yourself up for success, as a basis for the container you set for your healing journey. 

It helps you identify relevant content. Some folks will end up with a laundry list of content they hope to or want to work on, but there is such a thing as too much content. 

With psychedelics being non-specific amplifiers, they can make everything seem important. Your intention is a way to filter through what is relevant to your motivation, purpose and healing journey in that moment. 

Setting an intention can also not only improve your preparation process, but clarify your integration process as well. 

Our final reasoning for setting intentions is that, like a facilitator, they can act as an “anchor” to your emotional home during your experience. Throughout your ceremony, there may be instances where you feel stuck, scattered, or outright scared. 

In these moments, referring to our intention is a gentle reminder that there’s a meaningful purpose to this temporary experience. An intention can ground us and provide direction in the moment.

Common Pitfalls When Setting Intentions

1. Too Many Intentions

Remember that laundry list we were discussing earlier? If you’re finding yourself with more than 2-3 intentions, or even more like 15-20, take a step back to assess what’s pertinent.

For example, your relationship with your partner is rocky, you haven’t talked to your sister since she got married and you fear this distance will see no end. On top of that, your 30-year-old brother who is perfectly capable of getting a job and financially supporting himself, is living in your basement. 

You’re depressed, feeling stuck, going to work to support your family, but feeling less like yourself and more robotic by the day. Your depression makes you feel worthless and you fear that your lack of physical and mental appeal is only further straining your marriage, so you compensate by doing everything you can to keep him around, even if it’s at the expense of your needs. 

Your first thought for creating your intentions might be ‘to fix your marriage’ or ‘to once again be the person my partner married’. You also might intend ‘to understand why my sister won’t talk to me’ or maybe even to accept it, and ‘to get the guts to kick my brother out’ or ‘to find joy in my work’. 

These all may be desires that we have for our future, but there are more fruitful ways to frame our intentions so that they can be more fluid and concise while eliciting more seismic change. At the base of each of these problems there may be some common themes. 

Perhaps issues with communication, an unhealthy fear of change, or codependency that stems from a fear of being alone. Only you can recognize the underlying factors that resonate with you and permeate across the fabric of most of your problems. The intention to address those common themes in your life may be the best way to make the most out of your psychedelic journey. 

2. I want, I want, I want

Oftentimes, that’s what intention setting can sound like: “I want to heal my depression. I want to get rid of my anxiety. I want to feel better about myself. I want to feel fulfilled. I want to be a healthier person.”

Now, these are fabulous goals, but they focus solely on receiving the benefit. If we can change the terminology surrounding our intentions, we can move away from limiting our aspirations away from, “I want.”

Imagine you’re on a first date, and you’re curious about their goals or intentions surrounding dating. What if they put all the focus on the benefit they’re receiving? “I want kids, I want my partner to be financially well off, I want, I want.” 

In doing so, one may actually be limiting their purpose and intentions by limiting the framework in which they think about them. We like to tell folks to try to use different terminology than, “I want,” which is very common to do. 

3. High Expectations or Complex Intentions

If you’re familiar with psychedelics, you’re probably familiar with the phrase, “I experienced 10 years of therapy in a single mushroom trip,” which can certainly be true for some, but it also sets extremely high expectations for the rest of us.

Take a more “bite-sized” approach, psychedelics aren’t the fix, they’re a tool in your toolbox as you navigate your healing journey. Like a symbiotic relationship, it requires you to show up and do your work while the mushroom does its work. 

It also helps to keep your intentions short and sweet, something easily remembered when you’re in the middle of a mind-altering experience. If your intentions have too many layers, they can be difficult to recall in the moment when you may need that anchor the most. 

4. Ignoring the Process

It’s the journey, not the destination, an adage many of us have heard, but it rings true even in psychedelic healing. Some of us only want to see results, not realizing that results arise from being fully immersed in the process itself. Immersion in the process, including integration, is also what helps solidify results into lasting ones. 

So many times we see clients who feel immediate therapeutic benefit after a psychedelic experience and then feel no need to participate in integration afterwards, and so many times we see them come back to us wondering why they’re feeling that they’ve lost that therapeutic benefit.

5. Missing an Emotional Component

If you don’t feel your intention in your heart, then you may want to engage in a bit more compassionate inquiry.

For many people, intention setting acts as a mental exercise, with the emotional landscapes surrounding your intention being as important as the intention itself, because whether you realize it or not, your emotions shape your behavior (Lerner & Keltner, 2001)

After periods of prolonged emotional numbness, it can be difficult to assess what’s at the core of our dissatisfaction because it’s been a while since we’ve exercised the muscle of deep self reflection. 

Journal or think about the following prompts that resonate with you. Afterward, you might find a clearer objective for your psychedelic experience.

To evoke an emotional response that can drive your intention setting, you can journal or think about the following prompts that resonate with you. Afterwards, you may find a clearer objective for your psychedelic experience. 

• Do you generally forgive yourself when you’ve made a mistake? If not, how does this impact you? Do you generally forgive others when they’ve hurt you or made a mistake? If not, why? If so, how quickly? How does your level of openness to forgiving impact you and your relationships? 

• When you’re in love, are you able to keep a healthy routine? If not, why? If so, do your motivations for keeping a healthy routine change?

• Can you be fully authentic and vulnerable with at least one other person in your life? If not, what are some causes of this resistance? Can you be fully authentic and vulnerable with yourself when you’re alone? If not, why? Do you often find yourself looking for distractions?

• Is there an emotion or emotions that you tend to avoid? If so, is there any memory that stands out to you where you or someone you know displayed that emotion and it had a severe impact on your life or the lives of others?

• Would you describe yourself as an independent person? How does your independence reflect onto the way you value yourself and your relationships? Has anyone ever commented on your independence? If so, in what context?

• How do you cope with conflict? Do your coping mechanisms consistently elicit regret, shame, or further conflict?

• Do your family members or peers have at least a rough idea of what your day-to-day routine looks like? Are they aware of the current events and emotional circumstances in your life? If not, why?

• When something bothers you, how long does it take for you to address it? If you usually address it immediately, what would you gain from taking some more time to reflect? If you address it after a long time, where do you feel your resistance to act comes from and how does it affect you?

• Do you feel misunderstood? If so, what misconceptions do people have of you? Do multiple people have the same misconceptions? What might be prompting their beliefs? Can you bring yourself to briefly assimilate their misconceptions? Why or why not?

Intention Setting: Best Practices

1. Honing in on an Intention

In order to narrow it down to 1-3 core intentions, you may benefit from going through a sort of distillation process of a larger list of your intentions. 

The first step is taking a personal inventory, you can start by examining the emotions that you live in most often and in what places or around what people you feel those emotions the most.

If those emotions feel heavy in a certain environment, alone or around certain people, ask yourself what about those situations makes you the most uncomfortable.

Keep in mind that the problems we have with other people are direct reflections of the problems we experience within ourselves. You can ask yourself: Do your problems come from an external factor or from your unwillingness to respond to that external factor in a self-supportive way?

For example, when you’re with your partner, you might feel like you’re on top of the world, but when you have to leave for work, you feel unmotivated and as though your partner only gives you the right amount of attention when you’re together.

Your partner may very well be emotionally distant when you’re apart, or your job may not provide you with sufficient mental stimulation. However, we should try to pry a little bit deeper. Perhaps you could explore the possibility that you have an anxious attachment to your partner which triggers feelings of insecurity and abandonment when you’re away from each other.

To address this realization, your intention could be to find more security within yourself and to experience how it would feel to redirect some of the love and attention that you give to others, unto yourself.

So let’s say you write a list of 50 things you want to do to be a better human, and what you think psychedelics can help you with. 

You can then categorize those intentions into different aspects of your life, paying close attention to the themes and patterns that emerge as you go through this process. You’d see very quickly how a list of 50 intentions can turn into a list of 4-5 overall themes. 

From there, you can further distill by determining which ones are the most impactful, can you distill it into a mantra or a five word statement that you can then repeat and practice in preparation and your psychedelic experience? Which ones would you bring into a psychedelic experience?

Can you take it one step further and distill it down to one word that thematically encompasses the energy and purpose behind that intention?

2. Embodying Your Intentions Before a Psychedelic Experience

Once you’ve distilled down your intention, the preparation phase is the perfect time to interact with it and embody it. The more time you take to practice and get comfortable with your intention in your everyday life, the more it will show up for you during your psychedelic experience. 

Embodying your intentions beforehand may look like meditating with them, journaling about them, or just sitting with the idea so that it hangs on the surface of your being, becoming more accessible in altered states of consciousness. 

Even if you’re unable to consciously recall your intention in an altered state of consciousness, it has a better chance of working in the background. That said, don’t be too concerned with the actual content of your experience lining up with your intentions as you experience it, that’s what integration is for. 

Resist going into analysis or judgement mode if something arises in your psychedelic experience that seems unrelated to your intention, because assigning it a label automatically limits its potential, save the analysis for integration and remember to surrender to the experience.

Recommended Reading: Preparing for a Psychedelic Experience in Daily Life (Even Before You’re Ready)

3. Let Your Intentions be Fluid

Just as evolving is inherent to the human condition, both mentally and physically, the same holds true for our intentions. 

For example, maybe your intention is to show up to work better or be more successful, but after a psychedelic experience you realize that although you want to be more successful in your career, you don’t actually find it fulfilling or it doesn’t feel like your true purpose in life. 

Then your intentions can shift, and you can actually end up using your career as an outlet for finding purpose.

“If I say that intentions are behind your goals and your outcomes, what I see in the psychedelic experience is that your root causes are the driver of your symptoms, like depression and anxiety. And oftentimes there’s not a very clear linkage to that, so if you’re going through something in the psychedelic experience and you’re like, ‘this doesn’t make sense,’ just know that you will have an opportunity to make meaning and to drive that towards your purpose and intentions in the integration process.”

4. Establish Markers of Success

Funnily enough, we can borrow some pretty helpful tips from corporate America to utilize in our personal healing journey, specifically when talking about “Key Performance Indicators (KPI),” a topic that whole books are dedicated to exploring for business success.

Key performance indicators are, “measures that organizations use to reveal how successful they were in accomplishing long-lasting goals” with defined and standardized processes being of the utmost importance to ensure success (Velimirović et al., 2011). 

By turning the focus off of corporate financial goals and onto our own personal goals, we can use this framework to establish markers of our own success in meeting our goals. 

Even the best of us can suffer from self-doubt, so it’s important to have markers of success other than your own belief that you’re making progress.

Your emotional landscape can actually be one of the best markers of whether or not you’re moving towards your goals or purpose, because once you finally reach your goal—  what’s it going to feel like?

Is it more abundance? Is it more fulfillment? Is it more peace, for example? How do you know when you actually reach your goal? Setting these emotional targets is one tangible way because feelings are felt and aren’t just opinions or beliefs swirling in our brain.

Poignant Questions From Our Community

Through our intention setting events, we’ve learned a lot about the process of setting intentions, and questions that may arise during that time.

Many have asked if their intention is too focused or too vague, and honestly, there’s a sweet spot right in the middle. 

“If you come in with very rigid intentions, then you’re setting a high bar of expectation. And if you come in with little to no intentions, then you’re not building the guardrails or the structure of your potential benefit in a psychedelic experience.”

You want to have clarity, but you want to keep an open mind to be able to introduce new things that weren’t in your awareness or on your radar. 

Expectations aren’t necessarily bad, but they won’t be helpful if you are setting expectations around what your experience should feel like, what content should arise, or how much progress you should make.

You may be wondering, isn’t the desire to “get better” a valid enough intention? The answer is yes and no. Many of us have gone through a lot of trials and tribulations, and we’ve reached the last straw. But what happens when you actually do “get better”? What does that actually look like in your everyday life?

How do you show up for yourself? How are you showing up differently for your family or your loved ones or your career or your purpose or your hobbies or your goals?

“Getting better” is definitely a milestone in the healing process, but looking beyond that can add a layer of tangibility to your healing journey that carries you further than you ever could have hoped.