I Went to a Ketamine Retreat

(a month ago)

I’ve struggled to describe my experience, but it looked a lot like this. photo credit: jake weirick, unsplash

This newsletter turned 1 yesterday. I’m grateful to all of you for holding down this corner so I can continue to forget and remember that play is a thing. And that I like writing. Per usual, the lack of post in the past couple months is a reflection of my mental health. Was a reflection. For weeks in November, I plugged away on a draft about my relationship to alcohol. Begrudgingly. In December, countless new drafts about other things. Today I just need to know I can finish a thing.

When I told people I was going to a ketamine therapy retreat mid-December, the response was almost universal. “I can’t wait to hear about your experience!” For anyone still waiting, here we are.

I learned about Transcendelic Retreats from a simple internet search in the early fall. I signed up on my birthday, because I was saying yes to things at the time and because the slashed retreat price of $1,200 was set to expire that day. The company is brand new—the first retreat was held in October—and they were trying to get people in the door.

Let’s get the money stuff out of the way. Many people in my life cannot/could not pay $1,200. It’s also 1/10th of what these kinds of retreats often cost, doesn’t begin to cover the expense of lodging, food, medicine, paying staff and insurance or whatever. When I signed up, I recognized it was probably a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the price tag. Now retreats are listed between $3,200 and $4,400 for a shared room, and it’s still a very reasonable price. I don’t have a solve for this. Humans deserve to be nurtured and healed, and once again our values are fucked if it’s only available to those who can pay. The Transcendelic team is doing everything right—they’re approachable and warm, have found beautiful spaces and truly kind humans, they’re dedicated to diversity, and vow to cover the total cost of the retreat for one participant per session. This is not about them, it’s a system thing. We’re failing each other if we dismiss the right to retreat from daily life as an elitist luxury.

(On a related note, I just binged the podcast Classy with Jonathan Menjivar. Highly recommend.)

So what was it like? 10 participants from across four decades and multiple timezones. People I may have never met otherwise. A staff that included a Psychiatric Nurse, a Pulmonary Physician, various therapists (including massage), a Bon Buddhist monk, peer supporters and an incredible yoga instructor.

I know many are wondering about the ketamine itself. I promise I’ll get to that, but I don’t want to blow past the quality of the whole experience which was, in a word, nurturing. Take the ketamine away and it was a beautiful experience of being sweetly cared for by others—an often rare experience for adults. It was so not hippie bullshit. It was also not clinical or alienating. I want to say “casual,” but I’m afraid of sounding like it wasn’t legitimate. It was totally legit. Put the ketamine back in, and the sense of nurture only grew.

I have a friend who doesn’t like using the word darkness to identify the fucked-up corners, for a couple reasons. 1. the historically colonial implications of white/light = good/pure and black/dark = bad/impure. 2. the parts that show up dark, as in absent of light, are not their most disturbing corners.

I love this reframe. Horrific and disturbing things can happen in gorgeous, light-filled homes, and darkness can be a comforting blanket. For or all my love of sunlight, my staircase to self definitely leads underground.

Yet my experience with ketamine included a very basic theme of dark corners and literal black holes, all instilling some level of initial fear, all representing something potentially sinister. So for this I’m going to keep using the word “darkness,” because it was the literal absence of light. But even though I was looking into weird places, I felt . . . cozy. Love was duh. Like snuggling with lambs or something.

I was there to look at stuff I didn't want to, so when I’d come to a black hole (and then another and another) I’d take a breath and lean into it. At some point, I started searching for the corners, bent down to look into the pits, let myself surrender and free fall. Every time I did, what had been a mysterious nothing became something. Sometimes I was back soaring in the stars, sometimes I was in a new jungle zone, or a different subterranean lair. Sometimes it was just vaguely pretty. But never did I look into a scary place and find something worse.

I was frustrated. Am I looking for something that just isn’t there? Am I tricking myself into thinking I’m surrendering but I’m actually terrified and secretly redirecting myself to prettier things? Or does “darkness” just start coming apart at the seams when we look right at it?

Though I’d never experienced ketamine before, I’ve taken psilocybin dozens of times and have had almost exclusively great experiences. There was that time when I was probably 22 and my boyfriend’s face started looking tattooed with demonic designs, but I asked him to turn toward the firelight and that was that. There was Burning Man months after my mom died when I ate mushrooms and wandered miles out to the perimeter fence and still felt the wohmp-wohmp of electronic music in my ears and just wanted to be alone. But I’ve never really experienced anything I could call “bad.” Over time, my use of psilocybin has become increasingly more therapeutic—I prefer listening to headphones and being alone—and I usually get valuable insights about humanity as a whole and one or two people I know specifically. I never feel alone in there.

Also, surrender comes easily to me. As a depressive person, letting a river take me into the unknown sounds pretty great. It’s a relief when it looks like the world may crumble. The unknown is stimulating, and I’m always excited that we might be about to do away with the monotonous parts of daily life that are my personal hell. Surrender means I don’t have to muster the energy to go forth on my own. Also, leaving life behind isn’t my worst fear. An unlived life is.

it looked like this . . .

. . .but felt more like this

Ketamine is technically a “dissociative anesthetic hallucinogen,” used early as an anesthetic for soldiers in the Vietnam War. I’ve always thought of the word disassociation as a checking out or numbing, like alcohol addiction as a way to escape pains of life (which we culturally tend to view with negative judgement, because we’re cruel). And ketamine does make us depart from the attachments of daily life, view them from a distance. But it’s not like the blurring and “hiding” I experience with alcohol. It’s an ability to see things from a removed place, a place of little to no reaction. A mindfulness. I’m still metabolizing the idea of disassociation as a more positive thing than we often give it credit for. More space between things.

I ran into a friend at the library soon after returning home and shared a little with her, told her I have a hard time imagining it wouldn’t be great for anyone. She told me the harrowing story of a friend in the ER from a self-administered near-overdose of ketamine.

It’s an important reminder. I tend to resist most negativity about controlled substances and hallucinogenics, etc. mostly because I assume the roots are always entwined in Nixon’s deeply shitty and racist “War on Drugs.” But it’s important to pause and acknowledge that almost all drugs, medicines, substances can run a spectrum from deeply useful to highly destructive. There is ongoing debate about the line between removing barriers for those who suffer from severe mental health issues vs. enabling addictive behaviors. I don’t have the answers, but like with everything, believe it comes down to intention and support. Ketamine-assisted therapy is a distinctly different thing from taking ketamine as a party drug. Having a pre-determined dose injected by a medical professional while laid out in a cozy “nest” I made myself felt pretty damn therapeutic. It was definitely real self care. I absolutely recommend.

It feels futile to try to describe all the specific insights and images I got. Mostly, words are impossible, and also everyone has a different experience. But one clear theme was this: I have a story that I’m generally pretty nice to myself, but I’m not. I consistently let the external “shoulds” of society take up residence in my head and get trapped in a loop of being mad at myself for being the way I am. This is not kind. It’s not play. It’s definitely not fun.

At the retreat I was introduced to the Platinum Rule, the idea of making sure you know how the people around you want to be treated, instead of treating them as you’d like to be treated, per the classic Golden Rule. I love this focus on the reality that different people want different things. I have additional gripes about the Golden Rule. It assumes people think they deserve to be treated with respect, which reveals ignorance about the messy landscape of self-esteem. It also skips over concerns about the way we treat ourselves and goes straight to others, reinforcing the notion that focusing inward is inherently selfish. But when we’re well, are not battling ourselves, aren’t we automatically nicer to others, more generous, more forgiving?

Lisa just told me today is the first new moon of 2024. I’m currently on the road, solo, have access to the realms of intentiony future-looking. So I’m making a new rule. Be as kind and forgiving to yourself as you are the people you love most.

Optional Assignment:

Make up a Golden-esque Rule that’s all yours. Less resolution/goal-oriented, more tonal and continuous. Write it on paper. Plant the paper somewhere you’re not constantly looking, like inside the freezer or in the linen closet. You can also write the Golden Rule or the Platinum one or mine. This is about personal resonance, not originality.