Setting an Intention That Holds Under Pressure
Updated: Oct 14
Every retreat tells you to set an intention. Almost none of them tell you what makes one work, so people arrive with something that sounds beautiful and dissolves the moment the medicine comes up.
An intention is not a wish and it is not a question. It is the thing you hold on to when you no longer know who you are. It needs to survive that, and most do not.
Why the shopping list fails
The most common intention I hear is really a list. I want to understand my relationship with my father, and heal my anxiety, and know whether to leave my job, and reconnect with my creativity.
Four intentions is no intention. But the deeper problem is the posture. A list treats the ceremony as a consultation in which you set the agenda, and the medicine does not take requests. People who arrive with a list generally spend the first hours discovering it is not being answered, and experience that as failure rather than as the beginning.
The related failure is the intention aimed at a specific outcome. Show me that I should leave him. That is not an intention, it is a verdict you want confirmed, and you have pre-committed to reading whatever happens as agreement.
Why the question fails too
Why am I like this? What is my purpose? What happened to me when I was seven?
Questions are better than lists, but they still put you in the wrong position — analysing, waiting for an answer, staying in your head at exactly the moment your head stops being useful.
And when nothing arrives in words, people conclude nothing happened. Meanwhile they have spent three hours weeping without knowing why, which was the answer.
What works instead
Intentions that hold tend to share three qualities: they are open, they are single, and they are about your posture rather than the outcome.
Something closer to:
Show me what I need to see.
I am willing to feel what I have been avoiding.
Help me stop running.
I want to meet my grief.
Teach me how to be with myself.
Notice these are not vague. "Show me what I need to see" is a specific and quite demanding commitment — it is agreeing in advance to look at whatever comes, including the thing you would rather it were not. That is what makes it hold. It cannot be disappointed.
The themes that consistently work are the large, simple ones: healing, truth, connection, freedom, love, forgiveness, surrender. They sound generic on the page. In a ceremony at two in the morning, they are the only things simple enough to hold on to.
The medicine will show you what you most need, not what you think you want. An intention that assumes otherwise breaks on contact.
How to find yours
Do this in the week before, not in the car on the way.
1. Write down why you are going. All of it, unedited, no attempt at wisdom. Two pages.
2. Find the sentence underneath. Read it back and look for the thing appearing repeatedly in different disguises. Someone writes about their job, their marriage and their fitness, and underneath all three is the same sentence: I don't think I'm allowed to want things. That is the material.
3. Ask what you hope does not come up. This is the most useful question in the exercise and the most uncomfortable. Almost everyone has an answer — a person, an event, a feeling. It is usually the centre of the work.
4. Compress it to one line you can hold when frightened. Short enough to say on one breath. If you cannot remember it while disoriented, it is not your intention.
What to do with it in the room
Speak it silently before you drink. Then, largely, let it go.
Repeating your intention as a mantra all night is a way of staying in control, and control is the thing being asked for. Set it down like a compass bearing and then stop looking at the compass.
You return to it in one situation only: when you are frightened and lost. That is what it is for. Not to direct the experience — to remind you why you consented to it.
When the ceremony ignores your intention
It frequently will, and this is worth expecting.
You arrive wanting to work on your career and spend the night with your grandmother, who died eleven years ago. You come for anxiety and get four hours of your own childhood. The temptation is to conclude you got the wrong night.
In my experience this is almost always the medicine going underneath the presenting problem to the thing generating it. The career question was real; the unmourned grandmother was why you could not think about it clearly.
So the last piece of advice is the one that makes the intention work: hold it, and be prepared to be overruled. The willingness to be overruled is the intention.
We work through this on the preparation call before every first retreat — it is usually the most useful hour of the whole process.
By Ritshi Zenati, founder of Holistika Center.
Ritshi Zenati, Speaker & Life Coach
Founder at Holistika Center.
Holistika Center holds plant medicine retreats across Barcelona, Málaga, Mallorca, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Colombia and Mexico.
Also, different programs like Microdosing, Life and Spiritual Guidance, etc.
Visit Holistika Center to explore upcoming programs.
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