Intention as Prayer

Finding a deeper way to relate with intention

Intention is one of those words that has been used so often it has stopped meaning what it once meant. We say it before journeys, before meetings, before meditations and these are all good practices. However, I wonder, do we treat it as a script we hand to the experience — a set of instructions a journey receives? What if we set down that assumption for a moment? Intention is not a script. It is not an instruction. It is not a goal. It is a relationship, and how you stand inside that relationship determines whether anything responds at all.

The first move is to release intention from the territory of the goal. I want to launch the website. I want to release the album in October. I want the promotion. The treaty world is the world of objects and exchanges — you push, it moves, you collect. Goals work there. The medicine does not live there. Plant intelligence, psilocybin, ketamine, the long quiet field of an MDMA session — these meet you somewhere else. And so the same word that does its work in the treaty world fails the moment you try to carry it across.

Intention works differently because what you are intending toward is alive. It is intelligent. It is relational. There is no hotline. You do not pick up the phone and place an order with the mystery. You stand in front of an intelligence that is not yours, that does not run on your timetable, and that responds when it responds — and when it does, it co-creates with something deeper than the words you have prepared.

Holding an intention with attention

The word inside intention is attention. Attention is the center of consciousness. Whatever you put your attention on, energy moves toward. This is the simple shape of awareness — what you bring to attention, you place at the center of your consciousness. One thought, two thoughts, a dozen thoughts, an ocean of attention pulled in the direction of a single desire. That is what intention is, before it is anything else — desire. Now we’re getting to a layer deeper, and what’s underneath intention.

You hold the desire in awareness. You meet it. You let energy move toward it. And then — and this is where most of us lose the thread — you let it go.

Anthony Hopkins spent a day walking the bookshops of Charing Cross Road looking for a copy of The Girl from Petrovka. He had just been cast in the film and wanted to read the novel before shooting began. There was not a copy to be had in London. The story says he gave up. He went down into the Leicester Square underground to wait for his train home, and there on the bench beside him was a discarded book, and the book was The Girl from Petrovka. He hadn’t given up. He just let go. And he was still very much holding the intention of finding that book. This is an important distinction and requires discernment. Giving up and letting go can be discerned by how they feel in your body. One increases energy and the other deflates, and the body can feel the aliveness. Most of us aren’t familiar with this kind of listening — the simplest version of it, before anything else: is this increasing or decreasing my aliveness.

Two years later, on set in Vienna, Hopkins met the author, George Feifer, who mentioned in passing that he no longer had a copy of his own novel. He had lent his only annotated one, full of marginal notes in red ink, to a friend, and the friend had lost it somewhere in London. Hopkins handed him the book from the bench. It was the same copy. He had wanted any copy. What life returned to him was the one with the author’s hand still in it. His intention was met by a greater intelligence that gave him what he needed. This quality of intention when it manifests is called serendipity and it feels more magical than getting what you want, when you want it.

The way to hold an intention is the way you would hold a handful of cloud. The hand is open. The cloud is there, hovering, present, almost touching the palm. The space in between isn’t to be ignored — it’s the felt sense of the intention. The fingers do not close. It cups. The cloud is not gripped. It’s felt. The moment you grip it, two things happen at once: the cloud disintegrates, and your hand is no longer open to receive what is possible. Ultimately, we’re engaging with a type of control, one that isn’t dominant and relates more as a co-creator.

This is the discernment. There is a thin edge between holding the intention and clutching the outcome. The intention is the desire being held. The attachment is the demand that the desire return in exactly the shape imagined. One of these is a prayer. The other is a contract you are trying to enforce on something that does not sign contracts.

The disappointment that follows an encounter where “nothing happened the way I wanted” is almost never about the medicine. The disappointment was authored in the moment the intention closed into a demand. Demand is what happens when you’re no longer co-creating with the intelligence of life.

Specificity without rigidity

A distinction matters here. Be specific. Do not be rigid. The two feel close from the outside, and they are not the same thing at all. Specificity is the act of naming what you are bringing into the encounter — I want to look at the grief I have not been able to face, rather than I want to feel better. The specificity is a form of respect. It is saying to the intelligence on the other side: I have done the work of knowing what I am asking after.

Rigidity is the demand that the specificity be honored in exactly the shape it was named. Specificity opens the door. Rigidity wedges a foot in that door and refuses to let any other door appear. The research points in this direction. A 2018 prospective study from Imperial College, tracking over six hundred people, found that clear intentions were associated with mystical-type experiences during the session, and that intentions oriented toward connection, spirituality, and personal growth predicted greater well-being two and four weeks later. The intentions that worked were not the most aggressive. They were the most truthful. They captured desire.

Beneath the intention, the desire

There is one more layer underneath everything we’ve been pointing at. The intention is sitting on top of something. What it is sitting on is desire.

The goal is to release the album. Underneath the goal is the desire to share the music. Underneath that is the desire to give the creative impulse a body in the world. Underneath that is the desire to be seen, to be known, to belong, to express. The further down you go, the closer you get to what is actually moving you. And the closer you get to what is moving you, the more accurately the intention can be set — because intention only works when it touches the truth of the desire.

Andreas Weber, the German biologist and philosopher, writes about desire as the engine of aliveness — that being alive is itself an erotic process, a constant reaching toward connection. But connection to what — to divinity, to the mystery, to oneness, to something greater than oneself. Desire is not the problem religion made it out to be. Desire is the body’s way of pointing at what it is here for. The medicine does not respond to the surface request. The medicine responds to what the request is in service of. And so the work of intention setting is, in the end, the work of finding the desire the intention is carrying.

Care is required here. Not every desire is wisdom. Some desires are trauma trying to complete itself. Some desires are an old avoidance dressed in better language. The work is not to obey the desire. The work is to be in relationship with it — to feel where it comes from, to ask what it is asking for, to bring it into the prayer without letting it author the outcome.

Intention as prayer

There is an older word for what we are calling intention. The older word is prayer — from mid-14c. as “devout petition to God or a god or other object of worship”. It is the same gesture — only the psychedelic “renaissance” of the last decade gave it a softer name to make it palatable to people who had inherited a difficult relationship with the religious context. In doing so, we may have removed the sacred along with it.

A prayer is a desire that you lift up. You hold it. You speak into it. You release it. Then you wait — with patience, or deeper than patience: with faith. The thing prayed for sometimes arrives, but it arrives so quietly, so unlike the picture you had of it, that the recognition is delayed. You realize weeks later: oh, that was the thing. I just did not know what it would look like.

The indigenous practice with tobacco captures this gesture most precisely. You hold the tobacco. You speak into it. The desire enters the leaf. The tobacco is offered to the fire, alchemy occurs, and the smoke rises, and the prayer leaves your hand and is carried somewhere you cannot follow it to. Your hand is empty after. That is the point. To let go.

A prayer is intention with the sacred returned. And so when we ask how to set an intention that works, the question we are actually asking is: how do I bring my desire into right relationship with the sacred, with what is larger than me. The traditions that have been doing this work for a few thousand years kept the word prayer on hand for exactly this. The newer word has been doing the older work all along.

Prayer is a ritual. Ritual is a technology. It sits in layers. The outer ring is habitual — the morning coffee, the walk after dinner, the rhythms we live inside without noticing. One ring deeper is prayer — the moment ritual becomes relational, when you begin speaking to something on the other side of the silence. Deeper still is mythic ritual, the reenactment of stories that reach into the unconscious. The innermost ring is initiatory: the rite of passage that does not let you leave as the same person who entered.

Intention setting before a journey is a prayer ritual. It is the second ring in. It requires faith — not religious faith, but the simpler kind, the kind that says: I am about to participate in something I do not control and I am choosing to bring the sacred, the mystery and life’s intelligence into this initiatory ritual with trust and surrender. This is relational and co-creating. This is true whether the journey is in Peru with a maestro, or alone at home with a ketamine kit, the door closed, no one watching.

So the layering goes: intention is the form, prayer is the carrying, desire is what is being carried. Seen and unseen, visible and invisible, the three are doing one piece of work.

Arriving

An intention that works is an intention that has remembered it is a prayer. Specific in its naming. Soft in its grip. Anchored in the truth of the desire underneath it. Offered into an intelligence larger than the one offering it. The medicine meets it there. It meets it nowhere else.

You hold the cloud. You speak into the cloud. You open the hand.

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This is the work the preparation phase of the numinous program is built around — finding the desire underneath the intention, holding it with the right kind of softness, bringing the sacred into the journey before the journey begins.

If someone you know is preparing for a journey — or has just come back from one and is trying to make sense of what they brought home — send this to them.

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Sources

Haijen, E. C. H. M., Kaelen, M., Roseman, L., Timmermann, C., Kettner, H., Russ, S., Nutt, D., Daws, R. E., Hampshire, A. D. G., Lorenz, R., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2018). Predicting Responses to Psychedelics: A Prospective Study. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 9, 897. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2018.00897

Weber, A. (2017). Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (R. Bradley, Trans.). Chelsea Green Publishing. (Original work published 2014)

Breau, J. (2024). With Best Intention: Psychedelic Intention-Setting Rituals as Rites of Sacralization. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School. https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2024/12/best-intention-psychedelic-intention-setting-rituals-rites-sacralization