planting seeds
Preparation Programme for Earth Medicine
Here, Veronica speaks of the relevance of setting an intention for each ceremony.
Setting an Intention
Setting an intention for a psilocybin ceremony is important as it helps guide your experience and creates a purposeful framework for your journey. It serves as an anchor or a guiding star that can help you navigate the often profound and sometimes challenging aspects of the psychedelic experience.
Intention-setting allows you to focus your mind and energy on a specific theme or question, which can influence your mindset, emotions, and perceptions during the ceremony. It helps you clarify what you hope to gain or explore, and provides a clear direction for your journey.
It can also become a rigid thing that you may need to let go of if your experience takes you somewhere else. For example, you might have the intention ‘How can I let go of my grief?’ and find that the ceremony is simply peaceful and joyful, with no definite answers. You might then fret and spend hours in your mind, demanding answers. Perhaps the answer was simply to remind you of your own inner peace, joy and presence, as well as the grief that is always there. We want to create intentions that dig beneath the surface and then allow enough openness to receive the guidance through the many ways it may come.
Journaling
Journaling is a powerful practice for self-reflection and personal growth, particularly when used in conjunction with entheogens, as it can enhance the integration of new insights and experiences, as well as help you go into ceremony with a clear intention.
By putting your inner experiences into words, you can gain insights into your patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving, and identify areas for personal growth and development. This allows you to explore your inner landscape and gain clarity about your emotions, thoughts and perceptions, which makes it an insightful practice leading up to your psychedelic experience.
By writing down your intentions and goals for the experience, you can clarify your intentions and align your focus and energy towards them. Journaling can help you articulate what you hope to gain from the experience, and by revisiting your intentions later, you can assess how well they were met and gain insights into your progress.
With nuance though, there is a fine line between directing your experience towards your intention and trying to control something where you may need to let go of a need to control. We’ll talk about this more in person, but it is worth noting that it is important to be both clear with your intention(s) and to be able to let your intentions go if needed.
Journaling can aid in the integration of new insights and experiences that arise during a psychedelic-assisted ceremony. Psychedelic experiences can be profound and may reveal insights or perspectives that are not readily accessible in everyday consciousness. By journaling about these experiences, you can process and integrate the insights into your daily life. Writing down your thoughts and reflections can help solidify the lessons learned and facilitate their integration into your beliefs, values, and behaviours. With this said, starting a journaling practice ahead of the ceremonies (if you do not have one already) will help you process the whole experience, as these weeks leading up are already unfolding insights that can be worth exploring.
Many people report insights and rising clarity to already unfold in the weeks ahead of Earth Medicine, simply because their attention is going to their intentions and the deeper reflection begins.
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What are your intentions for Earth Medicine? What do you hope to gain or explore during this experience? Write down your intentions and reflect on why they are important to you.
What are your expectations for the ceremony? What thoughts or emotions are you bringing into the experience? Reflect on any hopes, fears or concerns you may have, and consider how they might influence your experience.
Reflect on your current state of mind, emotions and body. What are you feeling and experiencing in the present moment? What thoughts or beliefs are currently influencing your perception of reality? Take a deep dive into your inner landscape and try to explore without judgment.
Explore your sense of self, identity, and values. What do you believe about yourself and the world around you? Consider how these aspects of yourself might influence your experience during the ceremony.
Reflect on how you plan to integrate the insights and experiences from the ceremony into your daily life. What practices or changes do you want to incorporate into your routine? Don’t worry if you draw a blank - our integration programme will help with this.
Reflect on the things in your life that you are grateful for. What are the blessings, opportunities and positive aspects that you appreciate in your life?
Reflect on how you can take care of yourself before and after the ceremony. What self-care practices can you incorporate into your routine to support your physical, mental and emotional well-being? For example, will you need some alone time before ceremony? Or perhaps you know you’re better being around people and not overthinking things? Take a moment to feel into your needs.
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What brings you joy and wonder in life?
What do you fear most about the future?
What excites you most about the future?
What would you tell your best friend if they were going through the same challenges you are right now?
What are some points of anger, shame or guilt that you're holding onto?
What things do you need to make more time for?
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Inspired by The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, we love the practice called ‘Morning Pages’ where you write a stream of consciousness across 3 pages first thing in the morning. The idea is that you let whatever comes out to come out, even if it doesn’t make sense. Don’t self-correct or read back over anything. It’s the practice of opening up the channel, so to speak, and getting the clutter out of the way.
Ritual + Totems
It can be a poignant practice to ritualise your intention before our time together, in a way that creates further symbol and clarity for the psyche. For example, you could synthesise your intention into a piece of artwork, or find an object in nature that feels representative of the end goal (which you could bring to the retreat and leave on the ceremony altar), or even create a small alter at home with a few objects that move you through your hopes symbolically. Movement is also a powerful way to physicalise your intention. You might find a song that speaks to it and move your body to the music in a way that feels connected to your intention. Be creative and remember that there are no right or wrongs in the realms of self-realised rituals for healing and growth.
Francis Weller speaks the the art of creating ritual in such a beautiful way in his book ‘The Wild Edge of Sorrow’. He wrote,“Simply said, ritual is any gesture done with emotion and intention by an individual or a group that attempts to connect the individual or the community with transpersonal energies for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is the pitch through which the personal and collective voices of our longing and creativity are extended to the unseen dimensions of life, beyond our conscious minds and into the realms of nature and spirit.”
“Ritual is a form of direct knowing, something indigenous to the psyche. It has evolved with us, taking knowing into the bone, into our very marrow. I call ritual an embodied process.”
— Francis Weller
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After journalling through the themes above, make a spider diagram and explore possible ritual concepts to embody or symbolise this further into your psyche.
Find a place to enact your ritual. We like to make rituals in nature, but privacy is pretty important (to avoid feeling self conscious), so find what works for you.
Invite in playfulness, yet also a focussed commitment to the task at hand.
preparation programme navigation
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Welcome Page
Explore our initial guidance and resources and watch Andrew’s talk on the importance of ceremony.
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Growing Awareness
Create micro practices to increase your awareness and evolve your capacity for presence and observation, which will lay some important foundations for the psychedelic journey ahead.
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Clearing the Way
Minimise external influences so that you can be more in touch with yourself, your intention and your connection with life, enabling you to meet the entire experience with more presence and capacity for growth.