Staying Grounded During a Psychedelic Journey Using Mantras
Psychedelic experiences can be beautiful and life-giving. They can also be challenging. Grounding techniques, like repeating a mantra for your journey can make all the difference.
Before your journey, you might engage in a process called preparation, where you ready the body, mind, soul, psyche, spirit, etc.
Preparation usually involves the practice of grounding tools or exercises as ways to stay calm if and when the psychedelic experience becomes especially difficult.
One common grounding exercise is to have a mantra: a phrase of words we repeat to ourselves.
The use of a mantra can help you stay grounded in the present moment throughout your psychedelic journey.
The Importance of Staying Grounded During a Psychedelic Journey
Using a mantra or another grounding exercise, like deep breathing, can be extremely helpful during a psychedelic experience
A mantra is just a simple set of words you repeat to yourself, but it can serve you greatly as you stay centered and return to your intentions. This can be especially useful if things become overwhelming, intense or confusing.
What’s more, the use of a mantra is even more effective when your psychedelic guide or facilitator can offer it to you as words of affirmation during your journey.
Plant medicines are usually quite safe, once one accounts for contraindicated mental health, physical health, and pharmaceuticals.
Working with a guide or facilitator who can help you explore and use a mantra during moments of challenge adds an extra layer of psychological safety during times of complexity.
What Is A Mantra
In some ways, mantras play an important role in our lives everyday, whether we recognize it or not.
A mantra is a word, phrase, or sound either uttered audibly or thought of silently that informs one’s mindset. Typically, mantras serve as tools for grounding in the present and cultivating mindfulness.
In a classic sense, several ceremonial, ritualistic, and religious practices, such as those within Buddhism and Hinduism, use mantras. The use of a phrase in these settings might promote presence or focus on a concept or entity, often in connection with a mentor or group.
A mantra can also be secular and individual. For example, you might repeat a reassuring phrase to yourself before an artistic performance or an athletic event. As unsuspecting as this may seem, these utterances or thoughts can be truly effective at helping us, and mantras work in similar ways.
Here are some of the main benefits of using a mantra:
Increased focus and clarity
Greater sense of the present
Increased mindfulness
Heightened awareness
Stronger sense of gratitude
These and other effects make mantras extremely useful in psychedelic settings, when the brain and body benefit from staying present and in a state of awareness.
The Importance Of A Mantra During A Psychedelic Experience
Mantras are often used during a psychedelic experience to guide the journeyer to a place of presence and grounding. Even as one adequately prepares and works with their facilitator prior to a journey, there is no way to accurately predict how the psychedelic experience will unfold.
An altered state of consciousness can on occasion bring about some unexpected confusion or discomfort. Since it’s an “altered state”, these feelings are probably not something we are used to experiencing in our daily lives.
Despite the changes one might experience, they can often work through elements of difficulty through the support of a facilitator and their own internal resources.
Mantras are great tools that serve as an anchor to the world. This can be tremendously helpful in staying grounded and allow the experience to fully take shape without allowing fears, discontent, or complexity to dominate.
Mantras can do several things for the psychedelic journeyer; here are two of the main ones:
Alleviate Anxiety and Paranoia
As one might expect, a journeyer who experiences a lost sense of space, time, or the self, might experience the onset of anxiety and paranoia.
Mantras can be used to cope with these unwelcome negative byproducts.
The goal is not to “sober up” and fight the dissolved ego or warped sense of time, but rather to help the journeyer remain calm as they lean into novel perception and experience.
Recenter Towards Intentions
Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers that elicit dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of senses and cognitions.
Sometimes there is so much going on internally, that one attempts to cope with the onslaught and gets “caught” sticking to one element of the experience. This fixation can be unsettling.
By recentering yourself with a mantra, you can bring yourself back to the present and simply observe your experience as you explore your intentions.
Tips For Choosing a Mantra
Selecting a mantra or two for one’s journey is best done during the Preparation period, ideally a couple of weeks before the ceremony with the medicine. By reflecting upon the mantra in the time before the experience, a journeyer can more fully integrate their phrase or sound into their consciousness.
Before one starts reviewing common mantras (which we provide in the next section), we encourage clients to take inventory of their intentions, needs, and predispositions. Doing so usually helps people land on a mantra that is truly aligned with their goals. Check out these Psychedelic Integration Journaling Prompt for inspiration for reflection.
Here are some key tips to keep in mind before choosing a mantra:
Balance affirmations and intentions.
As outlined in the previous section, mantras can both help alleviate worries and bring us back to our intentions. See if you can find a simple phrase that could do both. You can also adopt two mantras, but more than two mantras can over complicate something that’s designed to be simple.
Keep it simple.
A mantra’s simplicity and utility are often correlated; in other words, the more simple the mantra, the more effective it is. Try to keep your phrase to just a few words. There are no bonus points for something extravagant or esoteric (in fact, there’s not even a grade!).
Follow your intuition.
As you explore some options for mantras, pay attention to what you intuitively feel. Usually, clients who stick to the mantra they felt most immediately drawn to find that mantra to be extremely helpful.
Top Mantras for a Therapeutic Psychedelic Experience
We encourage clients to explore a few options when selecting a mantra. Below are a few of the most popular mantras we see clients using.
One helpful tip is to say the mantra out loud, pause for a few seconds, and see if that particular saying feels important to you.
Here are two mantras that help with grounding:
Trust. Let go. Be Open. (often abbreviated “TLO”)
I love myself. I care about myself, no matter what.
Here are two mantras that can reassure safety:
I am safe and I am at home in this moment.
I’m safe. I’m calm. Everything is at peace with me.
Here are two mantras that focus on the breath:
I can breathe into this moment. I can feel a sense of ease.
Feeling the awe of this moment, I know I can breathe, I’m safe, and I’m present.
As you might sense, some of these are better for certain situations. You might take one or two into a psychedelic journey as your points of calibration.
See if one calls to you and consider journaling, praying, or meditating with it in mind.
Implementing Your Mantra During a Psychedelic Journey
When it comes time for your psychedelic journey, you should have your mantra picked out. You can write it down on paper or if you know it and feel comfortable doing so, share it with your guide who can recite it for you during the experience.
You can spend a brief moment early in your journey reflecting upon your mantra, particularly if it aligns with your intention. Otherwise, you might just progress into the journey, staying open, and witnessing what unfolds for you.
It can be tempting to try to steer or guide an experience in one direction or another, but this can be a pitfall that leads to challenges. Instead, we recommend allowing the experience to flow naturally. Attempts to control usually disappoint, while efforts to accept and embrace typically lead to beautiful moments.
If things get challenging, call to mind your mantra, read it, or say it aloud. Remember, you have your facilitator with you and they can serve as a calm calibration point for you too.
Mantras for Psychedelic Journeyers
Choosing a mantra for your journey need not be done alone. You can work with your facilitator to explore a guiding mantra and make a decision on one that feels right for you.
Preparation before a journey is a time to both align with your intentions and practice mindfulness. Spending some time reflecting upon your mantra during this phase can help you internalize the power of those words and call them to mind more easily during a journey.
After your psychedelic experience, you might loosely call in your mantra to see if it resonates with you. You might explore some questions like:
Did my mantra come up during the journey?
If so, what did that look like?
If it did not, how does it present itself to me now?
It’s common for someone to feel a connection to a new phrase or mantra that stemmed from an experience. Welcoming in new thoughts and insights after a journey can be extremely beneficial in one’s integration process.
Support In Preparation and Guided Psychedelic Journeys
At Pivot Psychedelics, we’ve guided hundreds of people navigate the preparation process before a psychedelic journey. We understand that preparing the mind, body, soul, psyche, etc can be daunting and we’re here to help.
You can book a complimentary Discover Call with us to learn about psychedelics, discuss your preparation process, or even inquire about having one of our guides for your psychedelic journey.
