Psychedelics, when used thoughtfully, can help induce life-changing experiences. In a 2006 Johns Hopkins study of psilocybin (the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms), over half of the participants rated the experience as “among the five most personally meaningful” of their lives… 14 months later!

For the past half-century, expert psychedelic clinicians and researchers have employed methods that commonly produce profound therapeutic benefits. But what are these methods, and how can you incorporate them into your Mindbloom journey?

The first step is setting your intentions.

Why it’s important to set intentions

Intention setting has always been an essential component of psychedelic therapy, employed by early psychedelic therapists in the mid-20th century and in today’s groundbreaking psychedelic research centers at prestigious academic institutions such as Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London.

You may have heard the terms “set” and “setting” used in relation to a psychedelic experience. The psychedelic experience is rooted in the user’s character, expectations, and intentions, which are referred to as “set” (mindset, abbreviated). The social and physical surroundings in which the event takes place are referred to as “setting”.

Establishing intentions prior to a psychedelic experience can help cultivate the right “set” by priming your mind with your objectives, or what you hope to gain or learn from the experience. When combined with the right setting, this dramatically increases the likelihood of having a positive, therapeutically valuable experience.

How to set your intentions

What are the right intentions? Just about anything! An intention can be something serious, such as understanding the root of your depression or anxiety or learning how to deal with a loss. But it can also be something lighter, such as how to find more joy in your daily routine.

A great first step for setting your intentions is to think about what brought you to Mindbloom and what you’re hoping to change in your life. Your intentions work best when they are personal, specific, and focused.

Here are some questions you might ask yourself as you get started:

• Where am I stuck in life?
• What’s holding me back? 
• How does my behavior compare to my goals, values, and self-beliefs? 
• What would I like to change about my life?

Pro tip: don’t just think through these questions… close your eyes and try to feel them!

Next, write down your intentions. Writing them down is crucial for solidifying these goals in your mind. Prepare 1-2 intentions per session (never more than three).

Common themes include:

• Improving awareness of strengths, weaknesses, blindspots, roadblocks, etc.
• Exploring creative problems and inspirations
• Healing from past traumas
• Improving relationships
• Overcoming bad habits
• Cultivating gratitude

Here are some examples below. You can think of these statements, requests, or questions as the beginning of a dialogue you are initiating with a special part of your subconscious mind – your Inner Healing Intelligence.

• What are the causes of my depression or anxiety?
• Show me how I can be a better partner to my significant other
• Help me understand what’s holding me back at work
• I will be more patient and empathetic
• How can I overcome my bad habit?

Need some expert guidance? Before your first session, you’ll also have the opportunity to discuss and reinforce your intentions with your Mindbloom clinician.

Putting your intentions into practice

At Mindbloom, we advise clients to set intentions – not an agenda. This means going into each session with thoughtful objectives, while being open to wherever the medicine and your subconscious decide to take you (remember to trust, let go, be open). Use each session as an opportunity to collect (but not direct) your experiences. You may be surprised by the profound insights you discover!

After your session, reflect (and journal!) on how the insights and observations that arose during your experience related to your intentions. Discuss these discoveries with a friend, family member, or therapist and see how this contributes to a new perspective.

In subsequent experiences, your intentions may completely change or you might find yourself going deeper into your original intentions. Intentions can (and often will) build on each other – let them!

As you approach your first Mindbloom visit, you may be asking yourself:

• “What will happen during my first Mindbloom session?”
• “After I take the medicine, what do I do?”
• “What should I think about?”
• “Will I be talking with my clinician during my treatment?”

In this article, we’ll cover exactly what to expect heading into your first treatment and how the “TLO” mantra will help you navigate the experience.

What you should know going into your first treatment

In our article, we talked about setting intentions before treatment. Even with your thoughtful focus on intentions, psychedelics can still unlock unexpected subconscious material. That’s why we ask our clients to set intentions, not an agenda, and cultivate a positive and open mindset heading into treatment. Here are some more important points to keep in mind for your first experience:

You’re entering uncharted territory

You’ll work with your clinician to find an appropriate therapeutic dose during your first couple of sessions. Even with a conservative initial dose, the medicine (ketamine) causes changes in your physical and mental perception and allows you to explore sometimes hidden parts of your consciousness. Read our article, “How will I feel during treatment,” if you want to learn more.

You’re here to learn

You’re doing this to learn and gain insights into your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Approach the experience with an attitude of curiosity and exploration. We advise clients to use their session to collect experiences that you can reflect upon and start to decode while journaling for integration after your session, and in the days and weeks that follow.

If you encounter anything during your exploration that causes fear, sadness, anger or any other uncomfortable emotion, remember that anything that is coming up in your mind is there not to harm you, but to enlighten you. Treat these ‘guardians of the threshold’ with openness and curiosity – they’re not monsters, they’re teachers. Have compassion for the fact that they have carried the burden of these difficult emotions for so long, and thank them for bringing them into the light of your awareness for healing and integration.

You’re safe

Your Mindbloom Guide and a professional clinician are there to support you throughout your journey. Before and after your initial session, your Guide and clinician will ensure your medication dosage is right, and help you work with your set intentions. During treatment, you’ll be comfortable in your own at-home setting, with an eye mask and hand-selected meditations and music for your journey. Your Peer Treatment Monitor (PTM) —a loved one or close friend— is with you during your sessions to check in on your safety and comfort.

How to navigate your experience

Even if you’re familiar with psychedelics, you may feel uneasy or excited for your first Mindbloom session. Don’t worry – your Guide will help you prepare both your intentions and expectations during your initial video consultation and at the start of your Mindbloom session.

In your preparation call before taking the medicine, your Guide will help you prime your mind for the experience. Immediately after, you’ll use journaling to help develop and solidify your insights and new perspectives and then debrief your session with your Guide and clinician. This helps to ensure your safety, provides support with integration, and helps make a suitable plan for treatment moving forward. Your guide is also available for unlimited text support throughout the journey.

Your Mindbloom psychedelic therapy sessions are designed to facilitate inner exploration, where you’ll dive into your own mind. The goal isn’t to focus on anything specific, but to embrace what comes up.

Your Guide and clinician work very closely as a team to support you every step of the way. In addition to unlimited text support, you will have 1:1 support with your Guide, meeting virtually both before and after your first and second treatment session. This includes a deep dive integration session following the second treatment. You’ll receive a Wrap-up call at the end of your journey, which is a space to reflect on and integrate The Basics Program with your Guide.

Throughout your journey, we encourage you to practice a classic psychedelic mantra that will help guide you: trust, let go, be open.

TLO – Trust, Let Go, Be Open

“Trust, Let go, be Open” or TLO, is a mantra that is widely used in psychedelic therapy. From pioneers such as Stan Grof and Betty Eisner to today’s sessions at Johns Hopkins and NYU, the TLO mantra helps voyagers get the most out of their experiences.

Trust

Trust that you’ve been prepared by expert Clinicians to dive deep into the issues that are holding you back from living your best life, without compromising your physical or psychological well-being. Trust that the medicine will serve its purpose.

Trust your own Inner Healing Intelligence, and trust that you have the skills and natural abilities to achieve profound insights and healing from this experience.

Let go

Letting go is crucial to psychedelic therapy. Let go of expectations about what should or shouldn’t happen to your mind or body. Let go of concerns and judgments, as well as the inevitable urge to control the experience. Whatever happens, happens – let it unfold. Your mind will give you what you need.

If the experience is challenging, confront whatever frightens you. Betty Eisner, a psychedelic therapy pioneer, explains:

Then there was the most important information for a therapeutic session, the suggestion that the subject should allow IT (whatever) to happen… “Move toward the problem!” In other words, one should go into the fire, toward the dragon, into the vortex, toward the void, toward that which is frightening. In a psychedelic session (as in life?), it is confronting the seemingly life-threatening situation that allows the problem to be solved and/or transcended… Life – or the deep unconscious – knows better than we do.

Be open

Be open and curious about whatever comes along in your journey. Your experience may be centered on your intentions – or it may not, and that’s okay. You may experience epiphanies or breakthroughs during your first experience, but don’t be disappointed if they don’t come right away. Benefits will compound over each session.

Be open to the events that are unfolding, whether profound or confusing, pleasant or challenging–there will be plenty of time to process and make sense of things later, if they don’t make sense right away. Stay open to the fundamental truth that everything happening is completely and utterly OK.

How will I feel during my treatment? This might be one of the first questions that springs to mind if you’re new to psychedelic therapy.

The short answer is that ketamine produces a sense of dissociation from one’s ordinary reality. But of course, it’s a lot more complex than that.

That’s why in this post, we’ll (try our best to) explain what you’ll experience during your treatment, and also, what happens during your first visit to Mindbloom.

Introduction to psychedelic ketamine experiences

Ketamine is the only clinician-prescribed psychedelic medicine currently available to mental health professionals. Ketamine is fast-acting and has shown impressive clinical efficacy across many conditions. This is likely because ketamine increases neuroplasticity (the ability to create new neural connections) and suppresses the default mode network (DMN), which is often the culprit of negative and ruminating thought patterns. Learn more in The Neuroscience of Ketamine.

Ketamine creates a unique experience due to its biological, experiential, and psychological impacts. Ketamine is dissociative, which means it alters your perception of reality. In other words, it can open you up to seeing yourself, and the world, in a whole new light, thereby opening up new possibilities for change.

The spectrum of ketamine experiences range from very mild to complete dissociation (typically only targeted in anesthesia), and Mindbloom’s clients most frequently achieve moderate levels of dissociation described as “trance” or “transformational” states, described below. While every journey is different, there are common mental and physical effects, which we’ll now explore in greater detail.

How Mindbloom clients typically feel during treatment

Our clinicians at Mindbloom collaborate with clients to find the right dose. The right dose is important because it will help the client achieve a therapeutic state that best meets their psychotherapeutic needs. For the initial session, the dosing is typically light to moderate.

The initial session

Mindbloom clients typically enter a trance state during their initial session. When in a trance state, people often report positive feelings such as reduced mind chatter, relaxation, euphoria, love, and empathy.

Explaining the trance state further, Dore et al. say that, “Depending upon dose, ketamine promotes a time-out from ordinary, usual mind, relief from negativity, and an openness to the expansiveness of mind with access to self in the larger sense.”

Depending on a client’s psychotherapeutic needs, clinicians might target a transformational state for clients. This is a deeper psychedelic state that is accessed with higher sublingual dosing or intramuscular (IM) injections. The transformational state is characterized by the reduction of body and sensory awareness of an ego. Clients can also have experiences that help to liberate their conceptions of themselves and the world from rigid societal norms, and sometimes these experiences are described as highly spiritual. Using IM dosing, a full out-of-body experience can be reached.

The 2014 paper, “Do the dissociative side effects of ketamine mediate its antidepressant effects?” suggests that the level of dissociation that takes place during treatment is actually correlated with more robust antidepressant effects.

Although each person’s experience is different, it’s often comforting and insightful to read about others’ experiences, including those of Mindbloom clients and this writeup by Dilan Dane.

How long does it last?

Each person’s ketamine experience will be different. You’ll start to feel the effects of the dose within 10-15 minutes, and the peak experience will last approximately 30-45 minutes. Most clients return to their ordinary level of awareness within 1-2 hours following administration and can resume normal activities. However, we suggest you clear your day to reflect and take advantage of your fertile brain state!

In some cases, mild side effects may linger until you’ve had a full night’s rest, so our clients agree not to operate a vehicle or heavy equipment until the next day.

Side effects and safety tips

Anyone taking a mind and body altering drug should always take extra care to remain safe. Side effects of ketamine can include confusion, disorientation, dissociation, loss of coordination, agitation, nausea, and elevation in heart rate and blood pressure. We require our clients to take these side effects very seriously, since disorientation and lack of balance can lead to accidents if Mindbloom guidance is not carefully followed during every session.

At Mindbloom, we’ve put some extra measures in place to ensure the safety and comfort of our clients. We carefully monitor the safety of our clients during virtual treatments, and can also prescribe anti-nausea medication as needed for future sessions. We also require that all our clients have a peer monitor close at hand whenever they do a remote treatment at home.

Will I feel the same way each time?

Ketamine is slightly different for everyone and experiences may vary from session to session based on your mindset and setting. The preparation for the treatment and the work you do between treatments, such as intention setting and journaling, will influence your experiences and help you achieve greater therapeutic benefits.

Your subjective experience, such as how dissociated you feel, might not always be an indicator of therapeutic results. That’s because even a mild experience could significantly impact your mood, feelings, and perspective in days to come.

In psychedelic therapy, journaling enables people to unpack and make sense of the often dense psychological and emotional material that arises during psychedelic experiences.

Let’s take a look at the science behind journaling, how it works, why it’s important, and how it’s used in psychedelic therapy.

The science behind journaling

Journaling is an ancient tradition. It can be traced all the way back to 10th century Japan. The modern diary, however, dates back to 15th century Italy. Back then, diaries were used for accounting. But with time, the focus shifted from recording public life to reflecting on private matters.

Over time, journaling became a tool used by some of humankind’s greatest thinkers to reflect on the world and deepen their insights. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, filled 5,000 pages of journals with ideas and observations. Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin and Maya Angelou (among countess others) famously kept journals as well.

But why has this practice of journaling survived among great thinkers and leaders for centuries? Simply put, journaling helps you prioritize and clarify thinking. Let’s dive a bit deeper.

How and why journaling works

Studies have shown that writing can help people better cope with stressful events, relieve anxiety, and even boost immune cell activity. But what exactly happens in our brains when we write?

Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and journaling expert, explains, “While your left brain is occupied, your right brain is free to do what it does best, i.e. create, intuit and feel. In this way, writing removes mental blocks and allows us to use more of our brainpower to better understand ourselves and the world around us.”

Because of that, the practice of writing can enhance the brain’s intake, processing, retention, and retrieval of information. It promotes the brain’s attentive focus and gives the brain time for reflection.

But that’s not all. The benefits of journaling are plentiful.

The benefits of journaling

Writing removes mental blocks and helps you use more of your brainpower to better understand yourself, others, and the world around you. If undertaken thoughtfully, it can be a source of conceptual development and a stimulus for the brain’s highest cognition.

When you’re writing strictly for yourself, it can clarify your own thoughts and feelings and help you recognize patterns in your life. In the course of this self-reflection, journaling can help you unlock deeper thoughts and understandings from your inner self. It can also facilitate critical thought and the expression of feelings about problems you’ve encountered during your life.

Psychologist and expressive writing expert, Dr. James Pennebaker, argues that journaling can actually strengthen immunity, decrease blood pressure, reduce stress and depression, and improve sleeping habits.

People sometimes ask: Is journaling any different from keeping a diary? Yes, it is. Because unlike traditional diary writing, where daily events are recorded from an exterior point of view, journaling focuses on internal experiences, reactions and perceptions.

Integration journaling and how it’s used in psychedelic therapy

We’ve taken a look at the science behind journaling, how and why it works. But what exactly is integration journaling? And how do we use it in the context of psychedelic therapy?

Integration journaling is a way to understand and process the wealth of information revealed by psychedelics. By keeping up a consistent journaling routine, you can start to make sense of your experiences in the context of your daily life.

Taking the time to reflect on and explore the thoughts and feelings you encounter during a psychedelic experience is the only way to fully integrate your insights into the way you’re living your life. Otherwise, those revelations tend to slip away amidst daily distractions.

Journaling in psychedelic therapy is used to:

• Calm and clear your mind
• Write about your struggles and your successes
• Enhance your self-awareness and elucidate your triggers
• Explore your experiences as you undergo treatment
• Track your progress as your treatment proceeds

How we use journaling at Mindbloom

At Mindbloom, we use journaling as a tool for two specific purposes – reflection journaling and integration journaling.

Reflection Journaling

Immediately after their experience, we ask clients to journal on everything that came up during the session. For example:

• What are you feeling and thinking at the very moment you’re writing?
• What was your experience like?
• Did you feel something you haven’t felt before?
• Did you experience something you haven’t experienced before?

Spending 20 minutes writing about your experience immediately after your session helps create longer-lasting benefits and provides a point of reference for future reflection.

Integration journaling

During the week after the experience, we ask our clients to keep a journal in order to leverage your new neuroplastic state. Make it a habit to journal 20 minutes every day, preferably in the morning.

3 closing pointers

Dr. James Pennebaker, an expert in the field of expressive writing, recommends the following for the best results:

1. Forget about grammar and spelling–the more you focus on just letting it flow, the better
2. Be honest and authentic (write like no one else is going to read it!)–the less you censor yourself, the better
3. Write by hand for better memory recall–the more material you remember and bring into your daily life, the better!

Remember that you’re in control. There’s no right or wrong here. The only rule is to write daily. Be consistent to make the most of it.