How and Why to Set Intentions

Setting intentions for psychedelic therapy is an essential practice, deeply rooted in both traditional and modern  approaches. It serves as a guiding force, shaping the psychedelic experience toward a specific purpose, and prepares your mind to explore that purpose. There are six specific benefits that come from defining an intention.

Creating a Purposeful Journey

Psychedelic researcher and author, Dr. James Fadiman, underlines the importance of setting an intention when he said: "Setting intentions is like drawing a map of where you wish to go — it becomes a powerful psychological tool to navigate the psychedelic experience."

Safety and Structure

Renowned mycologist and advocate for medicinal use of psychedelics, Paul Stamets, emphasizes that "Intention setting in psychedelic therapy is not just a ritual; it's a safety measure." By establishing clear intentions, you can create a mental framework that offers stability and direction during the often unpredictable and profound psychedelic experience. Without an intention set, the images and emotions you experience during the session may lack the context that is necessary for interpreting your experience.

Facilitating Deep Personal Insights

Dr. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in the field of psychedelic therapy, suggests that intentions can "act as a beacon, drawing out the subconscious material most relevant to one's healing." Grof's insight points to the capacity of intentions to unlock deeply buried emotions or memories, facilitating significant personal insights and therapeutic breakthroughs.

Enhancing Therapeutic Outcomes

Author Michael Pollan notes in the best selling book “How to Change Your Mind”: "The mind during a psychedelic state is impressionable; intentions can shape the experience profoundly and improve therapeutic outcomes." This perspective is backed by clinical studies, where structured psychedelic sessions with clear intentions often lead to more positive and lasting changes.

Promoting Self-Agency and Empowerment

Contemporary therapist and author, Rachel Harris, PhD, believes that setting intentions empowers individuals, making them active participants in their healing process. She argues, "Intention setting fosters a sense of agency and involvement, crucial for the deep, transformative work of psychedelic therapy."

Aligning the Psychedelic Experience with Personal Goals

Terence McKenna, a well-known ethnobotanist and advocate for the responsible use of psychedelic substances, pointed out, "Without intention, the psychedelic experience can be a mere curiosity. With intention, it aligns with our deepest aspirations and values."

Guidelines to Setting Your Intention

To help guide you in developing an intention for your session, Tracy created the following questionnaire. She suggests writing and rewriting it a few times over so that the precise intention becomes solidified through the editing process. It’s okay and common for the process of refining the intention to take place over days or weeks during the ramp-up preparation for the session.

Intention Questionnaire

To aid you in developing your own intention, Tracy created an outline that you can use during the writing and editing process.

(1) Begin by writing down the full list of potentional intentions in terms of working on your well-being and self-knowledge. Try to frame these as intentions moving towards a state of being versus away from something you don’t like. For example, instead of writing “Stop people pleasing” instead write “Prioritize my needs when making decisions.” Other examples include:

• Increase emotional resilience
• Improve my relationship with a parent/partner/family member
• Become more present at work/with family
• Find the magic in the unknown
• Trust my emotional self and intuition
• Take better care of myself and my needs

(2) Once you have the full list of potential intentions written down, divide them into short-term (within next 6 months) and long term (a year or more from now). You can group them such as in the table below. Now pick the top 3 short-term and long-term that feel the most important to you, and place them at the top of each category in order of importance.

To develop your intentions, here are a few addition questions to ask yourself:

• What would the world look like when your top short-term intentions have come true? What about your long-term?
• How do you feel when you contemplate each of these?
• What behaviors are you engaging in that you would like to change or understand better?

Get vivid and descriptive because this part should be a little fun and a little scary at the same time.

(3) Finally, pick one word for each short-term intention. Then, string these together to create a mantra for your journeys. For example, if you wrote “Become more present with family,” you can simply reduce this to “Presence.” Now rank on a scale of 1 - 10 how you feel you are living up to your short-term intentions today. 1 means not at all and 10 means extremely fulfilled.

Intention 1 word: __________ Score: ____

Intention 2 word: __________ Score: ____

Intention 3 word: __________ Score: ____