Setting an intention before any transformation work (not just with psychedelics) will direct your process and help you make sense of it with more ease and clarity. However, having an intention that’s too vague can be counterproductive and often masks hidden expectations. It’s like walking into a doctor’s office saying “fix me,” and when the doctor asks what’s wrong, responding “I don’t know, shouldn’t you know?”
There’s an art to setting intentions that requires three elements: Full commitment to the work, clarity about what you’re seeking (even if just directionally), and complete surrender to the process and its outcomes.
In this article, we’ll explore what an intention is, how intentions differ from expectations, how to set an effective intention, and how to use your intention to integrate and create meaningful change.
What is an Intention?
An intention for transformation work is a conscious statement of what you wish to uncover, explore, invite, or focus on during your growth and transformation. Think of it like an empty picture frame through which you view your experiences. If your intention is to explore your world through a lens of love, that frame helps you see how everything—even seemingly unrelated things—connects to that intention.
When you set an intention in transformation and healing work, you’re choosing a specific lens through which to view your experience. This brings focus and clarity both during the experience and afterward during integration. This clarity from your intention is especially valuable in psychedelic work, where experiences can be abstract and difficult to translate into everyday language. Your intention acts as a framework, helping you draw meaningful connections and extract actionable insights from your experience to then integrate into your daily life.
Your intention works with your brain’s natural filtering system (the Reticular Activating System), which heightens your awareness of specific things you focus on. During transformative work, when you look for possibilities or examine what’s holding you back, your brain naturally begins filtering experiences through this lens, helping you see things more clearly.
The key aspect of intentions is that they remain open-ended, without specific outcomes attached. Rather than expecting particular answers or experiences, you stay open to the process as it unfolds. While you can’t predict how things will go, your intention keeps you aligned with your “why” while remaining receptive to whatever emerges in relation to it.
Intentions vs Expectations
Let’s explore the important distinction between intentions and expectations.
Expectations are mental ideals we create about how things should be. They stem from our ego and reflect the image we hold of ourselves. When reality doesn’t match these expectations—which is often—we suffer from the disconnect between what we want and what is. Since expectations are rooted in control, they can push us to force outcomes that aren’t right for us. They’re rigid and resist life’s natural flow.
Intentions, on the other hand, arise from wisdom and a deep understanding of our true nature. They emerge from careful listening to our highest self and inner guidance connecting us to our intuition. Unlike expectations, intentions embrace life’s flow—they acknowledge that while we may have a vision, the path to achieving it might look different than we imagined. This flexibility demonstrates trust in the universe to provide what we truly need.
Understanding these differences reveals why intentions create more space for genuine transformation. They provide a guiding star for your healing journey without demanding a specific route to get there.
Why is Setting an Intention Important?
If you haven’t figured it out by now, setting an intention is more than just a formal process—it’s about the perspective it brings to your transformative work. When you set and trust an intention, you give yourself permission to fully engage with the experience, becoming an active participant in what you desire rather than casting unrealistic expectations out and passively hoping for specific outcomes.
In psychedelic medicine work, your intention creates a bridge between you and the medicine, inviting collaboration. This allows for you to take an active role in the process rather than placing all your power into the hands of the medicine. This can also be a little witchy, but by aligning with a connection on a deep energetic level, you allow your inner intelligence guide you towards what’s most important for you to focus on in this specific journey.
If you ever feel lost during your transformative process, your intention serves as an anchor—a reminder of why you’re doing this work and what matters most to you.
Without intentions, the work can feel random and unclear. Whether before, during, or after a healing experience, your intention provides a framework to make sense of it all, helping you find deeper meaning and connect with your purpose.
How to Set an Intention
Connect with your most authentic self
The first step to setting an intention is to get quiet and connect deeply with yourself. If you don’t have a formal meditation practice or struggle with deep self-connection, find an activity where you feel most authentically yourself. Use this state to guide your process, connecting with your truest self and what you genuinely want and need.
Self-Inquiry
Either through meditation or journaling, ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s something that I want to be more aware of?
- What’s something that’s holding me back that I want to explore with more curiosity?
- What am I feeling physically in my body that I’m curious about?
- What’s present in my life right now that I want to explore/understand more?
- “Show me…” “Allow me…” “What’s causing me to…” are great to lean into, if you’re not sure where to go
Guide Your Intention
When you’re complete with your reflection, write down what came up in one single sentence that invites openness and begins to guide your intention. Making it simple is the name of the game, you want to be able to connect with this intention during and after your experience, which means you’ll want to memorize it and hold it close to you.
Use these to start:
- “Show me…”
- “Allow me….”
- “Give me the space to explore…”
- “Help me see…”
Sit With and Refine Your Intention
This may seem redundant, but you want to make sure that you deeply connect with your intention. If there’s some word or part of it that doesn’t feel right, use the practice of sitting with it to refine it and get it just right. It’s not about perfection, but about your connection to it.
Revisit Your Intention Daily Before and After Your Experience
Part of the magic that an intention provides is not just your connection to it, but your belief that by intentionally doing transformative work you’re setting yourself up to receive the information that will help you continue to draw the map of where you’re headed. The more you keep connecting with your intention, the more potent it’s going to be both during the experience and once it’s over.
Bonus: Pay Attention to What’s Happening Before Your Journey
Before you ever do any transformational work, especially with psychedelics, and you’re connected to an intention, the universe will start to show you signs and allow you to hold your frame up to see the world through. Trust that whatever messages or synchronicities are coming up are meant to find you and aid you in your process. With the clearest intention, you may immediately start to see the signs that are right in front of you, now that you have a clear lens of what to look for.
How to Use Your Intention to Integrate Your Experience
This process of integration is where you create real change aligned with your experience and is arguably the most important aspect when it comes to making change.
Since your intention continues to play the role of the frame through which you view your experience well after the experience is over, then it’s also going to serve as the map to help you get to where you’re going faster and with more clarity. The point of having an intention isn’t to just check a box, but to create a framework through which you view and bring your insights into your daily life with.
You want to go back through the experience you had with your intention as your frame of reference and pay careful attention to what happened, how it happened, how you felt, and why it feels important. When you view your experience through the lens of your intention, it can help you make meaning of it with more focus, especially the parts that feel random and confusing.
After your transformative experience, you’ll want to continue connecting with your intention through meditation and reflective practices.
Ask yourself:
- How is my intention continuing to show up?
- How is this connected to my intention?
- If my intention is _____ then how can I act in service of it?
- What was this trying to show me in relation to my intention?
Trust that experiences which seem unrelated are still meaningful to your journey. You might think getting from point A to point B requires just one step up the ladder, but reality often demands climbing ten steps—and you’re simply being shown the first one. This is the beauty of setting intentions: their flexibility allows you to accept this longer path rather than resisting it and wishing for an immediate solution.
Connecting to your intention regularly keeps it top of mind and continues to prime your brain to see your world through this lens. This is why having such a closely connected intention is so important, you’re going to be using it for a while until you feel like you’ve achieved what your intention sought out to find.
Conclusion
Setting an intention before any transformation work—whether with psychedelics, meditation, or other healing modalities—creates a clear, flexible framework to guide your process. Intentions act as anchors that keep you aligned with your “why” and help you make meaning of your experiences with greater focus and clarity. But the magic lies in the balance: an effective intention requires clarity, full commitment to the work, and complete surrender to the process as it unfolds.
By embracing this art of intention-setting, you not only invite transformation but actively collaborate with it, trusting that each step—no matter how unexpected—moves you closer to deeper understanding and lasting change.
Was This Post Helpful? Are You Thinking of Working With Psychedelics Now?
If yes but you’re not sure what would be best for you, or you’re totally ready to get started, go ahead and book a free call with me. I’ll help you understand the best path for you so you can truly get the most out of it!
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