I Am the River and the Raft
THE STORY OF MY KETAMINE CEREMONY
Hawaii lured my therapist from Nashville. When she told me our therapeutic relationship was about to transition to an LDR, it accelerated my decision about whether to pursue a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) ceremony: September or bust. She recommends it for most of her clients, but I specifically stood to benefit from the prospective treatment of my depression, self-hatred, and the numerous severances within my being that once drove me to alcohol addiction. The cost and scheduling had driven my indecisiveness, but when she informed me her only available date for the three-hour session was September 14, I welcomed the serendipity: that’s my birthday.
Having noticed a pattern in which I placed pressure on myself to make my birthday uber special, predictably setting me up for disappointment, I decided four years ago to establish three arbitrary birthday traditions. That way, I’ll know what the day will entail and can lower my expectations. First, I eat high-quality bagels for every meal and snack (meaning from a non-chain, bagel-specific vendor, versus the grocery store or whatever). Second, I watch my favorite movie, Captain Fantastic starring Viggo Mortensen (I don’t really believe in having a single favorite, but you choose one for the sake of having an answer to the icebreaker question). Third, I weep. In this sense, this year’s birthday was traditional.
We dedicated the therapy session prior to dosing to prep work and intention-setting. Because I lacked a specific reason for doing this in the first place, I stumbled toward something vague: a generic sense of reconnecting to myself, to befriending the parts of myself with which I’m uncomfortable. This may have informed my anxiety leading up to the big day: I didn’t know what to expect, and was nervous I might uncover a traumatic memory I didn’t even know was there, as I’d heard from others can happen. In the days leading up, when asked how I was feeling, I replied that I’m “nervy,” a playful way to describe mild terror.
You’re supposed to fast the morning of the dosing, including coffee and water, so I arrived thirsty and sluggish. My therapist’s office is a spacious room in the second story of an office building, so to make it feel therapy-cozy, she partitions the room with furniture, leaving the rest for yoga or whatever. When I arrived, this was the first time I breached the barrier to the other side of the sofa. I picked a mat (the cork kind because Kiki doesn’t mess around) and took a seat. A box of tissues peered at me as if it foresaw my birthday tradition.
Kiki reminded me of my intention, and almost immediately, my mind conjured a vision. Before me stood a mirror - the setting of many disturbing movie scenes - inviting me to reach out to it. As I did, my hand entered the glass-turned-plasma (like the scene from the Matrix), and as I extended my arm, the same hand reached back towards me, finding its perch on my opposite shoulder. I could feel my hand on my nape, the comforting touch of a trusted person who’s seen a little more than you (remember this was pre-drugs). The symbolism is on the nose: an invitation to reach toward myself rather than away, recalling how I used to reach for a glass of liquor from my woundedness, imbibing its dissatisfying salve.
What’s next is yucky: having deposited the ketamine lozenge in a wooden bowl, and following a grounding meditation, I placed the medicine under my tongue where it remained for twenty minutes… without swallowing. Good thing I was dehydrated lest my mouth engorge with saliva more than it did. After twenty minutes of dissolution and more meditation, Kiki permitted me to swallow and lie back. She tucked me in with a blanket and pillow, covering my eyes with a mask, and initiated a carefully curated soundtrack. With assurance she was there if I needed her, including the availability of a hand to hold if requested, I descended into myself.
As I lay back, I realized we had never talked about what sensations might greet me, only the effects available to me afterwards. I was frightened. The back of my eyelids, whatever color that is, began to mutate into two-dimensional, shifting textures. I felt the sensation of my body swaying, though I’m unsure if I was actually moving, as if floating down a swift winding river on a vessel with no oar, submissive to the current. I remember the self-doubt, like I was doing this wrong, muttering to myself “am I okay?” It felt like being sucked into darkness, like the time my life was threatened in a Pacific undertow as a child. Eventually - and all I know was that the whole experience took less than two hours - all that existed was color and texture, which itself merged with the ambient sounds of Spotify. It isn’t that I was disembodied, it’s that the idea of a body wasn’t a consideration.
In the waking world, my inner critics are vicious, numerous, loud, persistent, and influential. And they often disagree. One tells me I’m fat and unattractive, then another tells me I’m fatphobic and shames me for believing fat is unattractive, still another retorts that I am beautiful, but is put in his place when another points out it doesn’t matter what my body looks like, who hears from critic #5 that I’m vain for being so flattered that one time someone said I look like Jude Law, who is then cautioned against shaming myself and enabling this inner discord. It is a constant cacophony of self-doubt and self-affirmation at war, in a pacifist's brain, to boot. Being so familiar with these voices, I recognized them in my psychedelic state, telling me I can’t even get high sufficiently. They began to assume personhood as judges in a courtroom, again with the unmysterious symbolism, but I perceived that each was just me. I greeted them like childhood bullies I used to fear but now see as equals in our adulthood.
My attention returned to the river; the sloshing intensified. I saw myself on the raft, but an awareness emerged that I was also the vessel and the water beneath. Around the riverbend like Pocahontas’, the rapids kidnapped me to new fearful destinations, but those places, too, were just more of me. I was careening down a watercourse of myself. I am the river and the raft.
Alcohol is emotional lubricant. I was a sentimental drunk, but sober Michael seldom cries. The inhibitions gin used to diminish now stand strong in its absence. I was worried, therefore, that my birthday cry wouldn’t come this year, like a disapproving Santa. But with the psychedelic current gathering pace, I saw something in the distance. Hard to say what it looked like per se, but I recognized it as my birthday cry. It drew nearer and nearer, and as it reached me, I felt permission to weep. And I sure did. I wept harder than I can ever remember doing.
It was probably my snot that woke me. I came to recognize that I was crying, and at first I dwelled on how strange crying really is. How peculiar that our bodies make such an unsettling sound to signal some specific emotions, and how few other emotions merit their own noise in the same way. I heard muffled voices through the floor, the offices of a cleaning supply company, and, embarrassed that they must’ve heard my wailing, I remembered where I was. It occurred to me that Kiki must be near, so I asked for a tissue - she was right next to me, having been seated across the room when I went under. After just a few moments of gathering my wits and drying my face, I felt close to lucid. The tears had ejected me from the high.
We spent the remainder of the three-hour block eating treats, sitting in silence between my labored sentences, and processing what I just experienced. Kiki confirmed that I had said out loud “am I okay?” but added that it was more than that: I had repeated variations like “can I just be okay?”, “is this okay?” and “I just want to be okay.” As I continued to reorient myself, I recognized a sensation familiar from my upbringing in a charismatic church. Lying prostrate in a ceremonial environment with ambient music and an openness to supernatural-like interventions was what we used to call “soaking” in the Holy Spirit (iykyk). I’m often embarrassed by such memories, but in my tender state, I received the comparison with affection. My partner picked me up shortly thereafter, and a few hours later, I was playing birthday disc golf as a nearly regular version of myself.
The following day, Kiki and I met virtually for “integration.” She reminded me of the yearning represented by my vocalization about being okay and asked “what if you didn’t have to work so hard to be good?” My heart bobbed up to my throat as I visualized little Michael just searching for affirmation and safety like anyone else, except this Michael was represented by an amalgam of my two daughters. I struggle to offer myself the kind of compassion my rational brain knows I deserve, but my empathy and love for my children is bottomless. In moments when I need to extend grace to myself, I first direct it toward my children, then sub in my own inner child, because he’s still in me behind layers of older iterations.
Kiki reminded me that ketamine was simply a catalyst for me to access parts of myself and different ways of thinking that are actually accessible to me all the time. Writing this summation a couple of months after the dosing session, I notice that the effects that linger aren’t that mystical, not so “trippy” as when my body was still responding to the actual drugs. But I think I have successfully integrated two principal takeaways, in addition to the value of integration itself.
First the compassion for my inner child and my persistent critics. Those voices are no quieter since my birthday trip, but I notice them for what they are and greet them with love, in the same way I responded to my infant children when they would hit me in frustration. Their innocence precludes retaliation.
Secondly, my mind often wanders back to the river, which bore no form when I was simply “emotional matter experiencing matter,” as Kiki put it. But my imagination has since filled in details, situating me on a makeshift raft, the kind Bear Grylls might assemble in the jungles of Costa Rica or whatever. My legs dragging through the water as I float, I care little to steer and simply succumb to the current and the destination I may never reach. But I no longer fret about the uncertainty and powerlessness of it all. Rather, I carry with me a healthy sense of the world’s meaninglessness, not the kind that leads to despair, but the awareness that my life is just a particle in an endless void. I don’t have to worry about how small I am because I am also the universe itself. That which is me is the same “that” which is you and everything around us. How comforting to know we’re all navigating the same water of what is.
In recent reflection about the sensation of being pulled under like a riptide, something told me that must be what death feels like. I uttered that aloud to a friend who’s a death doula and also supports people through psychedelic experiences. She replied “oh yeah, death is very psychedelic.” I smile at the idea that I experienced death and rebirth of sorts, this being the central theme of the religious tradition of my upbringing. Even as a post-Christian spiritual seeker, I welcome the allusion to the resurrection story. May I embrace this resuscitation with compassion and grace.
