A Comprehensive Guide to Navigating Your Ketamine Session
I get a lot of questions and requests for guidance about how to approach a ketamine session—especially within the experience itself. While ketamine is becoming ever-more accessible, experienced guidance and support for navigating ketamine experiences are still hard to find. Having guided hundreds of individuals through thousands of ketamine sessions, I have developed specific approaches to help skillfully engage your journey. By setting intentions, surrendering to the experience, working with memories and dissociation, exploring internal dialogue, and engaging in corrective experiences, you can support greater healing and transformation in your ketamine-assisted therapy. Additionally, I discuss how to handle situations where it seems like “nothing is happening.”
Get Settled: Connect with your Heart and Intention
Whether your medicine session is at home or in a clinic, the logistics of preparing for a ketamine journey can be distracting, drawing your mind away from your core reasons for working with the medicine. So, at the beginning of your ketamine session, take time to settle and refocus—reconnect with your heart, offer yourself empathy, and bring to mind your intention. Remind yourself why you have chosen this approach and what you hope to see or heal during this session. Your intention acts as a lens, focusing the insights and information that are revealed throughout your journey.
Surrendering, Opening, Letting Be
Surrendering is a crucial aspect of ketamine therapy. It is like passing through a gateway that immerses or welcomes you into the journey. How readily you are able to surrender depends on several factors: your mindset going into the session, the depth of your preparation, and the specific dose and protocol used.
Releasing control and letting go of resistance or expectations can open the door to ketamine’s transformative potential. But surrendering often requires effort and courage, especially when the medicine experience or the contents of your psyche are unfamiliar terrain. With the right mindset and support, you can develop trust, relaxing into each moment as it unfolds, and allowing ketamine’s effects to catalyze insight and healing.
Surrendering may not come easily, and there’s no exact formula or recipe. Be gentle with yourself as you practice letting go of preconceptions and opening to whatever is arising. Each small release of resistance builds your capacity for deeper surrender in future sessions. Try to meet yourself where you are, and know that this ability develops over time through patience, practice, and self-compassion.
The Middle Way Between Letting Be and Doing
As you move through your ketamine session, strive to find a middle way between letting the experience unfold naturally and actively engaging with it. This is a delicate balance that can take a few sessions to get a feel for, and the middle way is dynamic; constantly changing. Within a single session and over multiple sessions, you may need to adjust when to be passive and when to actively participate. Also, you may not always be able to actively engage the content within your ketamine session. The dosage and your state of mind and body may affect your capacity to do so. If you feel this balance is off in one direction or another, it’s appropriate to speak with your prescriber about your dosage.
Letting It Come to You and Appreciating
During your ketamine session, you might find that your experience unfolds effortlessly. You may see shapes and colors, often dark and moving, and you might witness scenes, environments, memories, or dream-like experiences. Typically, you’ll “see” these visual-like experiences in the same place you dream, in your “mind’s eye.” When a ketamine session is effortlessly unfolding with information coming up from your psyche, practice letting go and allowing the experience to come to you. As thoughts, emotions, or sensations arise, observe them from the vantage of your higher self, your inner advisor, or pure awareness—and appreciate their presence. By embracing the natural flow of your experience, you can create a space for self-discovery, healing, and personal growth. Each moment may hold valuable insights, even if they are not immediately apparent.
Focusing on Parts of Your Experience
To deepen your engagement during the session, concentrate on the details of the specific aspects of your experience. You could focus on a particular emotion, thought, or sensation that arises, further exploring its nuances and meanings. Alternatively, you could direct your attention to your breath or other bodily sensations to anchor yourself in the present moment. By honing in on these various elements, you can gain a greater understanding of your inner landscape, uncovering connections between different aspects of your experience and revealing information and insights. Try to embrace curiosity and openness as you explore what’s coming up for you.
Leveraging Dissociation to Get Closer to Your Experience
Ketamine-induced dissociation, a detachment or distance from your body and surroundings, can be a valuable tool for exploring your experience. As you enter the dissociative state, you may find that your usual defenses and filters relax, loosen, or fade away, allowing you to directly access and engage with deeper parts. To make the most of this opportunity, try to abide with curiosity about and acceptance of whatever arises. You might notice thoughts, emotions, or previously inaccessible or obscured memories, providing fresh insights and perspectives. See if you can embrace the dissociative state as a window into your inner world and use it to foster discovery, self-understanding, and insight.
Replaying and Exploring Memories
During your ketamine session, you may experience memories from your past resurfacing. With non-judgment and openness, try to embrace these memories and allow yourself to replay them in your mind. Let your mind’s eye recollect and display the details of the memory—the people, places, emotions, and sensations it evokes. As you experience the memory, see if it’s more like a movie—where you’re watching it unfold as an observer, or if it’s more like a lucid dream, where you may explore and even participate in the memory. In either case, open yourself to what this experience might be trying to teach you about your current situation or your future path. Engaging and exploring your memories this way can help you gain insights supporting your healing, transformation, and integration.
Imagining Corrective Experiences
During your ketamine session, you can use your imagination to create corrective experiences. Start by identifying a painful or challenging memory and imagine meeting your younger self in this imaginative space. Give that child what you needed and may not have received in that original moment, such as protection, love, or recognition. You can reframe your perspective on past events and experience emotional healing and growth through re-experiencing and rewriting the narrative in corrective experiences like this.
IFS-Style Internal Dialogue
The Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach suggests that each of us has a “family” of inner parts, each with its own role and perspective. During your ketamine session, you may have the opportunity to meet and converse with these parts of yourself. To facilitate this internal dialogue, start by identifying the different parts that may be present and notice any emotions or sensations associated with them. Try to greet each part with curiosity, compassion, and openness, and invite them to share their perspectives, fears, and desires. By going through this process, you can develop new insights and foster better communication between different parts of yourself. The effects of ketamine can intensify this mode of communication. If you find this approach helpful, it may be a good idea to seek assistance from a guide or therapist who specializes in parts work and related techniques.
What If “Nothing’s Happening”?
Sometimes you may find that nothing seems to be happening in your ketamine experience. This common experience can happen for many reasons and is not necessarily a sign of a problem. A general recommendation is to be as kind and gentle as possible towards yourself. Try to bring curiosity about why your experience might be unfolding the way it is.
Sometimes, especially toward the end of the day, your mind may be pulled into thinking or ruminating on any number of topics. This wandering mind and rumination can be like a spinning merry-go-round, making it challenging to step directly into the experience of your session. Ways of responding, in this case, include practicing mindful breathing or deep breathing, allowing your thinking mind to be in the background, and tuning in to what’s happening in the present moment. Alternatively, you could repeat a short phrase that can help settle your thinking mind by giving it something else to do, helping you tune into the present moment.
Resisting or struggling with letting go is another case that often produces an experience of nothing happening. Relaxing your need for control can be difficult, especially in some of your first ketamine sessions. Feeling the urge to control things can make it challenging to embrace the present experience fully. In this case, it can be helpful to recollect and trust in your preparation, intentions, support system, and the fact that many others have safely gone through similar experiences. Doing so gives you the confidence to surrender into the moment.
It’s possible that you have a particular expectation of how your experience should be. You might be hoping for an extraordinary psychedelic display, a life-changing experience, or “five years of therapy in an hour,” as some marketing spiel promises. Even trying too hard to let go can produce an experience where it may seem the medicine isn’t working. Try not to get too fixated on what you think the experience should be like, and instead, try to let go of any preconceived notions or ideas you may have.
There is a chance that a specific issue from your subconscious may be ready to be addressed during the psychedelic medicine session. When you resist what is arising in favor of what you think “should” happen, you may cut yourself off from the medicine’s full potential. In this case, sometimes letting go of the preconceived notion can allow that experience to arise naturally, leading to more of a positive, useful experience.
At times, your intention for a session may need to align more closely with the actual phase of your transformational journey. I guide my clients through a process-oriented, phased approach to healing that goes through phases I call Settling, Seeing, Growing, and Integrating. Having an intention that’s not attuned to your transformation phase can also create an experience where it can seem “nothing’s happening.” For example, if you’re still working on calming your nervous system and building resilience, you may not be ready to gain clear insights or start replacing old habits and beliefs. Similarly, if you’re near the beginning of the growing phase, you may not yet possess the necessary skills and abilities to integrate those changes into your life. In such cases, it can be tremendously helpful and orienting to work with a guide or experienced therapist who can assist you in adapting your intention according to which phase of transformation you’re in.
So, when nothing seems to be happening, try to expand your view, let go of judging the experience as positive or negative, and be open to simply encountering each moment with acceptance. What comes will come in its own time, and your system may be working below the surface in ways that are not yet apparent.
Seek Support and Guidance
Be patient with yourself as you explore these practices and discover what works best for you. By actively engaging in these techniques during your ketamine-assisted therapy sessions, you can access more information and deepen your insights. It requires effort and engagement to realize the transformative potential of ketamine. Consider working with an experienced guide and coach who can help you clarify your intentions, optimize your experiences, and support growth and integration—translating insights into embodied wisdom.
I’ve had the privilege and honor of helping hundreds of people navigate thousands of sessions and the process of integration that follows. It’s been a joy to be part of the healing and transformation that I know is possible through well-guided, intentional psychedelic experiences. If you’d like to discuss how to get more out of your ketamine sessions or how to take a more active role in your healing, schedule a free chat with me to discuss how we might work together. I’d love to meet you and hear about your experience.