Psychedelics don’t just open your lens up to see things differently, feel more deeply, and journey into the metaphysical, they also hold unique neuroplastic benefits that allow your brain more ease to rewire neural pathways (aka to stop doing the same things you’ve always done because you’ve always done them).

Most of what’s being highlighted in the news is the clinical application success that psychedelics are helping people who are suffering from mental health disorder achieve. Yet there’s a lot of non-clinical applications of psychedelics that are transformative for anyone who may not be suffering with extreme anxiety, depression, or PTSD, rather someone who just wants to live a life more aligned with who they are.

Maybe you’re sick of your own shit and you’re ready to take a stand, yet you don’t feel equipped or aware of what you need to do to make a change happen.

Maybe you want to uproot parts of you that you know have been keeping you stuck but talk therapy, venting to friends, and taking up a new hobby every year has only gotten you so far.

Maybe you want to create better, deeper, and more meaningful relationships with others, or even with yourself.

Or maybe you want to discover who you really are when you strip away all the things that make up your current identity—like your career, social circles, and things you do on the weekend.)

Wherever you may be on your path, psychedelics are a powerful tool to catalyzing and sustaining the change you seek, such as overcoming your limiting beliefs and stepping into a life that feels more aligned to who you are and the dreams you have for yourself.

And when you combine new perspectives, enhanced awareness, and the desire and commitment to change with the neuroplastic effects of psychedelics. Well, that’s where the transformative magic is.

If you’re psychedelic-curious, let’s take a look at how you can structure your experience to overcome your limiting beliefs

Set an Intention for More Clarity

The difference between using psychedelics recreationally, clinically, and for personal development is the intention that you set for the experience.

An intention is more than just a cute phrase that you take into the journey with you, it has the power to shape the entirety of your experience, how you interpret it, and how you integrate it into your life after. Which is why sitting with and setting an intention is an important step of the process that I would urge you to take seriously.

Let’s be clear on what an intention is by discussing what it isn’t:

• It’s not a guarantee or an expectation
• It’s not a mantra or a positive affirmation
• It shouldn’t come from your ego
• It shouldn’t feel like you’re trying to control the experience

Rather, your intention should be:

• Based on wisdom and inner-trust as well as trust in something greater
• Flexible and in accordance to the flow of life
• Found through inner listening to your highest self

An intention when set well can help you show up and attune yourself to the experience. It’s an open invitation to the collaboration of the process, understanding that the medicine has an agenda but you also have sovereign choice as well. In higher dose experiences, intentions can also be grounding and recentering if you ever feel out of control or unable to understand what’s going on. Think of the intention as the guard rails to get back on track to the ‘goal.

Most importantly, an intention provides the framework for the entire experience. From preparation to integration, it gives you a lens to look at the experience through to make sense of it and make it more tangible and actionable to act on once the journey is over.

This comes back to a really important point of this work, why are you doing it? What’s the goal? The purpose? The point?

You wouldn’t walk into the doctor’s office and ask them, ‘Can you tell me what’s going on with me?’ (notice how I didn’t say ‘what’s wrong with me?’)

No. You’d walk in and say, ‘My arm hurts, can you help?’

It’s the same thing with psychedelic experiences. You give the medicine a general direction, and it can help you uncover and unfold the rest, so long as you have an intention in mind of what you’re hoping to discover or change.

I suggest any time you’re journeying with higher doses to sit with your intention for multiple days, bring it into meditations, and keep it at the top of your mind as you prepare yourself for the experience. When doing a microdosing protocol, I want my clients to have a general intention for the entirety of the container. Day to day that may slightly change, but it shouldn’t veer too far off from the overall ‘goal’ we set.

In regards to overcoming limiting beliefs, you may recognize some of the stages that are hallmark of this experience:

• You don’t even know what your limiting beliefs are but you feel blocked
• You know what they are but you feel you can’t step forward
• The way you’re trying to step forward doesn’t feel like it’s working and you’re giving up

Depending on what stage you’re in, you’ll want to set your intention accordingly.

Whenever I’m creating an intention for myself or helping clients, I try to keep it specific and also open. I want you to be able to use your intention to look back on your journey in a way that feels like you can make sense of it.

For example, saying, ‘Show me my limiting beliefs’ may actually be too vague rather than saying, ‘Show me what holds me back and prevents me from enjoying the work I’m doing.’ The more specific you can get, the more you can ‘loosely’ guide the experience and view it from that lens.

There’s always the chance your experience can go way out of the bounds of your set intention, but trust the medicine is guiding you to where you want to go regardless, which might mean doing some other deep work before getting to the point you desire.

The point of setting an intention is to trust yourself, the medicine, and the powers that be. If you embody trust in the process, you’ll continue to move forward no matter what. Resistance is the enemy of change, and though it’s not like you can prevent that from happening, being aware of it can make all the difference.

Pay Attention The Moment You Say, ‘Yes’

When preparing for a psychedelic experience, remember that the medicine begins working the moment you embody and say, ‘yes’ to it. Meaning the days and weeks leading up to the experience can be just as potent as the experience itself. I suggest keeping a note in your journal or on your phone of what’s coming up and what you’re noticing.

Oftentimes for me, these moments are crucial to the experience itself. I often have a lot of questions, or am stripping away a lot of the unnecessary information leading up to the experience that could take up too much space in my journey if I’m not paying attention ahead of time.

This is why I HIGHLY suggest working with an integration coach to prepare and integrate the journey. They can help guide you throughout this process, give you tools and skills to get you in the right mindset and help make the experience itself more clear and transformative for you—and less confusing.

And let me let you in on why I think this is important. In one of my first high-dose journeys, I blindly walked in. I prepared for maybe 12 hours beforehand and felt extremely confident that I could handle the experience.

That journey couldn’t have been more confusing for me. I literally walked away with no idea what happened or what to do next, and a complete sense of disconnection from myself and the world around me.

This was a journey that I look back on so often because had I prepared well and had the support I needed throughout, I could have saved myself MONTHS of pure confusion.

Funny enough, when I actually started working with an integration coach almost a year and a half later, I was finally able to make some sense of the experience, though not nearly as much as if I would have when it happened.

Looking back I can see a lot of synchronicities that were leading up before the journey itself, such as the insane weather I experienced the night before that caused water to leak into my Airbnb, which I assume was trying to show me that this was going to be intense and shake my entire foundation. But because I wasn’t attuned to what was happening, the signs weren’t able to help in the experience. And looking back, I don’t even remember what my intention was, which feels like a total miss for me.

So don’t be like me, because that was a really hard year. (;

Choose a Medicine and a Protocol That Supports What You’re Seeking

Not all medicines elicit the same experience, and the dose and setting matters greatly.

Depending on what you’re looking for, consider your options:

• Do you want to do a high dose or a microdose? Or somewhere in the middle?
• Do you want a medicine that puts you in your body or takes you out of it? Or both?
• Do you want to do this 1:1 or in a group setting? How big of a group?
• Do you want to do this in the native land of the medicine or in a modern experience?
• Who do you want to facilitate your experience?

All of these questions can help guide you toward the medicine that might be best for you. Since there are dozens upon dozens of ways you partake in psychedelics, I’ll dive into the ones I think are best for unblocking limiting beliefs

Microdosing Psilocybin

If you’re looking to take it slow and form a relationship with medicine in a very subtle yet still powerful way, I suggest microdosing psilocybin.

What I love so much about a microdosing protocol is the tangibility of its application in everyday life. You’ll be able to open yourself up to new perspectives while doing the tasks you do everyday so you can see where you may be stuck, holding yourself back, or acting in a way that either feels really aligned or not at all.

Because of its application to daily life, it has the benefit of being more direct and less abstract. Microdosing mushrooms can open up your emotional channels, allowing you to peer into the whole system of your emotions in relationship to your actions.

When you realize how much your emotions play a role in the actions you’re taking, you’ll start to see the patterns, be able to notice and bring awareness to these emotions, and then use other tools to help you regulate, reflect, and redirect onto a new path.

I put this first because I truly think it’s one of the most effective ways to overcome limiting beliefs, and it’s also an experience that’s digestible and meant to be consistent and habit forming over the course of a 3 month protocol.

If this sounds interesting, take a deeper look at what microdosing and emotional coaching could look like.

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits of microdosing:

• Integrates into daily life so you can see day to day what you’re doing that holds you back and keeps you stuck
• Easy to digest the information of the experience rather than receiving a lot of information at one time
• Can help you explore your emotions around your limiting beliefs in a more tangible way, seeing how your emotions have resulted in narratives that are holding you back and keeping you stuck
• Extended neuroplasticity allows you to implement the changes in the long term with higher likelihood of creating new neural pathways to adopt new beliefs and habits
• If you’re anxious (like I was), it can allow you the opportunity to assess your anxiety from the root rather than wishing it would go away.

High-Dose Psilocybin Journey

A high-dose mushroom ceremony may provide a great opening of opportunity to get to see inside and overcome limiting beliefs. When doing higher doses of psilocybin—2-4 grams—you’re giving your brain an opportunity to shut off its DMN (Default Mode Network) and activate the brain in a novel and profound way.

For many this may elicit a mystical experience, outside of the realm of normal reality. I would consider this getting in contact with the metaphysical, seeing the world operate at a greater scale than you’re typically used to. This is where people often explain the ‘oneness’ of life.

This can hold immense weight when investigating what holds you back, by seeing beyond what you would typically see, having visions, intense feelings, hearing messages, or simply experiencing something for the first time that you may not be able to describe in words.

Everyone experiences psilocybin a bit differently, but the more important piece of this is the intention you bring into the journey has the power to shape your experience and potentially show you what often can’t be understood. (Yes we already talked about this but it really is that important)

Similar to how psilocybin interacts with your emotions when microdosing, it also interacts with you emotions in higher dose journeys, just know that it can be much more intense for the purpose of showing you what needs to be seen to be healed. This may be difficult, but know that it’s part of the process to release the things that no longer serve you, or to see/experience something again so you can process it in a new light for the purpose of evolving beyond it.

If a high-dose psilocybin journey sounds like something you’d want to explore and you have never experienced the medicine in this way, I would highly suggest working with a facilitator or a guide. Or if group ceremony sounds interesting to you, do some research and find a ceremony that feels aligned.

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits of a high-dose psilocybin journey:

• Can both put you in your body and takes you out of it to explore the metaphysical—opening up a new perspective and sense of understanding.
• May show you exact memories or moments where you took on the beliefs you have—giving you an opportunity to give the beliefs back and take away a more aligned belief about yourself.
• May also show you abstractly what’s happening from a different perspective that may make more sense to you when you come back to full consciousness.
• The medicine’s wisdom wants you to participate in your journey, giving you an opportunity to explore more deeply what you’re looking for with the guidance of the mushrooms at your side. Think of your experience as collaborative, giving you a chance to have the medicine show you how you can heal and expand into what your soul is seeking.

Hippie Flip (Psilocybin + MDMA Combined)

I’d be remiss to say that hippie flipping isn’t a favorite medicine combination of mine, mostly for the beautiful benefits that it can have for someone who is deeply resistant to challenge. For me, this combination was so impactful because I had built a narrative up that nothing would ever help me and that I’d feel stuck in my limiting beliefs for the rest of my life.

The therapeutic benefits of hippie flipping are astounding. Because MDMA is a heart opener and elicits feelings of love, and psilocybin has the tendency to show you the difficult so you can move beyond it, combining the two allows for a softening and a unique invitation to explore.

For this reason, if you do have resistance, this can be a big lift during your experience, making you more likely to explore something you perhaps wouldn’t without the aid of MDMA.

There’s also a unique somatic effect that happens with this polydrug combo —the somatic and sensory driven component of MDMA combined with the emotional release and exploration induced by psilocybin. Releasing into the medicine can allow you to unblock stuck energy in a way that you can connect in your brain in a new and healing way.

I find that this combo helps me tap into the energy of stuckness in a way that allows me to explore it, understand it deeper, and then release it so it no longer lives in my body rent free.

Everyone interprets this differently, but I found this specific combination to be one of the most healing aspects of my own work.

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits of a hippie flip:

• The euphoric and feel-good effects of MDMA can soften the hard hits that psilocybin can often produce, making difficult information feel more accessible and elicit more compassion toward trauma, grief, and other difficult to face emotions.
• MDMA can help infuse painful memories with more compassion and a new perspective, which can help you feel more embodied in how you feel toward something.
• This combination has a unique opportunity to drive more intense compassion for oneself and others, which can be largely beneficial when trying to overcome limiting beliefs.
• The somatic effects of MDMA combined with the emotional effects of psilocybin can be an invitation to explore and release in a way that can be immensely healing.

Medium Dose Ketamine

If you’re someone who deeply struggles with anxiety or extreme stress that you have a difficult time regulating, medium dose ketamine is a really good option. Not only is ketamine the only legal ‘psychedelic’ (it’s actually a dissociative with psychedelic properties) on the market, but it also works as an anti-anxiety medicine while giving you a more mystical and other worldly experience to examine yourself from a completely different lens.

Since ketamine is a dissociative, it works to detach you from how you typically see yourself, making you the observer of your thoughts and feelings instead of the typical driver.

When you can look at yourself from this new and different perspective you can actually start to detach yourself from your typical emotions and feelings. I would say out of all the medicines I’ve mentioned, this one has the most clear use case because it’s less abstract and more direct.

What’s even more interesting about ketamine is it’s impact on your brain chemistry. Out of all the psychedelic medicines, ketamine has the most profound effects on neuroplasticity because it impacts so many of the brain’s receptors. This gives you supercharged neuroplasticity, and the ability to sustain the new thoughts and perspectives well beyond the experience yourself with careful integration and intentionality.

Not to mention, a medium dose, typically at-home protocol has compounding effects over time. The experiences themself only last about 60-minutes, making it more integratable into daily life as well as more digestible over time. Less of a firehose of things to work on and look at and more bite-sized pieces that you can begin integrating in between sessions.

I highly suggest if taking this approach that you work with an integration coach because of the nature of the experience being at-home and because the integration is where you will achieve the most change.

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits of medium dose ketamine:

• Helps ease anxiety and see yourself outside of yourself as the observer rather than the experiencer.
• For someone who is just beginning their journey to understand themselves, it’s a great place to start since it’s a softer more gentle approach into deep introspective work .
• Ketamine at medium doses still allows for some level of normal consciousness, therefore you can likely recall the entirety of your experience when it’s over, getting the most out of it that you can.
• The brain receptors that ketamine interacts with induces a dramatic spike in neuroplasticity, allowing the brain to adapt and evolve to sustain new insights and perspectives.
• Doing multiple sessions can have compounding effects and help you quickly and efficiently move through something that you may otherwise not have been able to access.
• Ketamine calms the system while showing you experiences that may be difficult to see, making you more likely to be open to what it’s showing you without shutting down.

Integrate and Embody New Beliefs Into Your Life

Without integration, psychedelic experiences are equivalent to riding a roller coaster and saying, ‘That was wild!’ And then moving onto the next thing at the park. Integration is what creates the change, by using the experience as a jump off point to get to realizations and discoveries you may not have gotten to as quickly by using the experience to direct your actions.

If you don’t integrate, or practice what you’ve learned from your experience in your conscious life, then you will continue to feel the way you feel and act the way you act.

For example, one of the journeys that drastically changed my life showed me that my sensitivity to the world was my biggest superpower. I got to experience that embodied feeling and belief within me of what it would be like if I owned this part of me, rather than reject it.

I could have come away from that experience thinking, ‘Wow that felt really good, I wish I felt like that!’

Instead I came away from that experience finding ways that I could implement that belief into my day-to-day life. This meant discussing my emotions more freely, dancing more often to express my sensitivity, and no longer speaking of being sensitive in a way that felt negative.

Though it sounds so simple, these minor shifts as part of my integration have drastically changed how I feel about myself in my life, and had I not done them, that journey experience would have become something that felt like a distant memory, and another reason to dislike and distrust myself on some level.

When you commit to integrate what you uncover in your psychedelic experience, you commit to change and to being an active participant in your healing. You give yourself an opportunity to rewire your neural pathways to support a new way of being, and because psychedelics make your brain more receptive to the change, these habits and thought patterns have more of a chance of sticking.

What I love so much about integration is just how practical and simple it can be. Each journey I walk away from, I’m not trying to change my whole way of being, just a few things that I know are going to slightly shift the direction of the ship I’m sailing on. This is one of my favorite analogies, because even a few degrees of a change in direction can entirely change your destination.

When it comes to integrating to move past your limiting beliefs, you’ll likely be working to change your thoughts and beliefs to support how you want to feel instead. You may see or feel something in a journey that felt embodied and true in that moment, but when you come back to regular consciousness, you can no longer feel it. Look at this as an opening! The dissonance between how you felt in that moment and how you feel now is where you’ll focus your integration. The whole point is to close that gap.

This may mean you’ll adopt a more consistent meditation practice, you may shift an aspect of your community to be surrounded by more people doing what you want to believe is possible for you, or you may start engaging in more reflection via journaling or other creative processes.

If you’re serious about moving beyond your limiting beliefs, this process pairs well with an integration coach who can guide you, hold you accountable, and who can trust and believe in you through the entire process.

Growth isn’t linear and it may not feel like anything is changing, which can either steer you away from what you want, or motivate you to push forward. This is where a coach is extremely valuable, even the simple reminder to get back up when you feel defeated can help you actualize the change you seek.

Your Limiting Beliefs Require You to Step In

Above all else, when it comes to using psychedelics to move past limiting beliefs, there’s a choice point.

You can either use these medicines as you would any other medicine, in a passive way. Or, you can actively choose to participate in your journey to evolution by intentionally journeying and consistently integrating what you’ve uncovered. If the experience is cream filling of the Oreo, you want to make sure the cookie holds it all together.

Choosing to change takes courage, and using psychedelics as an ally in this process shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you do take this path, please know it’s not a simple solution or an easy in, it requires your active participation and drive to realize the change you seek.

And from my own work and the work I’ve done with clients, believe me when I say it’s entirely possible to change the way you feel about yourself in a new and radical way!

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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! And for more psychedelic and emotion tips like this, subscribe to my weekly newsletter, *Read my journal* to get them delivered straight to your inbox, along with the gory deets about how I navigate this world as a highly sensitive girlie who uses psychedelics. 🎉🙆🏽‍♀️