The unmooring of reality.

What getting egregiously high on ketamine taught me about life.

Originally published on Substack.

Two years ago I was going through a couple of major life transitions, so I hired a therapist to be a resource and sounding board as I was going through them.

I just felt off, like there were deep-seated roots that needed some unearthing. Therapy was one of my outlets for that unearthing, alongside a healthy dose of introspection, breath work, and meditation.

At first, our sessions were traditional talk therapy. Questions. Poking. Prodding. Looking for the reason behind the reason, the answer behind the answer.

It was a lot like coaching if I’m honest. Inquiry is the root of both after all.

I enjoyed my therapist. She taught me useful tools, like the control box. She helped me process some things through various writing exercises. And she helped me talk out loud about the parts of my life and childhood that typically don’t bubble to the surface.

I always felt better after the sessions than I did going into them, and that seemed like a win.

But whatever those deep-seated things were, they remained underground. It felt like we were using shovels, when what we needed was one of those huge drills they use for finding oil.

That’s where the ketamine came in.

If you’re not familiar with ketamine, it’s a drug that’s historically been used for anesthesia.

Today ketamine has gained steam as a primary treatment for depression and anxiety, which was an unexpected side effect noticed in anesthesia patients.

Ketamine seems to act in a similar manner to classic psychedelics, and is often lumped in with them, though they’re pharmacologically very different.

Both ketamine and classic psychedelics have an ability to turn off or turn down the ego. And if you don’t know what that means, then yours is probably quite loud. ;-)

When the ego is turned down, we’re able to see the inter-connectedness of the world and how we don’t sit at the center of it, much as our normal experience might tell us otherwise.

This tuning down of the me and the tuning up of the we helps us reframe the world and our lives in more useful ways. As many people can attest to, that reframing is oftentimes enough to radically change someone’s life.

But that’s not what this post is about.

I don’t care if you take a ride on the ketamine rocket. I didn’t even finish my full 6 rounds of treatment, and would have entirely dismissed the experience were it not for…

Well…were it not for…that one session where I completely lost my grip on reality.

The ketamine treatments were done at my house. And they were similar to what you might guess they were - some music, some journaling, my therapist to guide me, and of course…my eyes closed while curled up in a ball on the couch as the ketamine rocket exited earth’s orbit.

My first few sessions were interesting. I had some good insights, especially while journaling, and I always felt better after them. But there weren’t any major paradigm shifts.

And let’s be honest…if you’re using psychedelics or ketamine for therapy, you’re not there for small wins. You want to be fundamentally altered in some way.

Then came my fifth session - the one that completely unmoored me from reality and made me question everything.

As is often the case in these types of experiences, trying to describe them is a bit of a lost cause, akin to an astronaut trying to explain what space is like. Whatever words are used will fall far short of the experience.

Alas…I’ll do my best.

I was in said ball on the couch in the basement when the ketamine hit, with an eye mask to limit the visual interference and a pillow to help me settle in.

Everything was dark, both literally from the eye mask as well as experientially. Colors, objects, etc. weren’t part of the experience. Just the darkness.

It felt as if I were floating through deep space, and as I was floating every single paradigm I had about the world became dismantled, one by one.

It was unsettling. Disturbing even.

I got to a point where each and every belief or understanding I had was gone, and I felt detached from life as I knew it. Imagine waking up one morning to find out everything you knew about life was a lie. That will point you in the general direction of what the experience was like.

When I was at the bottom of this experience, the only thing I could think to ask was…

What do I do with this?

I wanted to get out of the experience, because it was so incredibly uncomfortable to be in it, but at the same time I had a sense, or a knowing, that the answer was coming.

The things that had been ripped out needed to be replaced by something, and that’s what I lay on the couch waiting for, begging for. If I had been viewing life through the incorrect fundamental lenses, then what was the lens I was supposed to be viewing it through?

What do I do with this?! was the rallying cry of my internal monologue as I tried desperately to move through, and past, this experience.

And then the answer came.

Suddenly, sublimely, and all at once.

What felt like hours was likely minutes, and in one fell swoop, I had my answer. The disturbing nature of being belief-less, paradigm-less, foundation-less was swiftly replaced by the singular answer to all questions.

Love.

Love was at the bottom of it all; the root of the system I was desperately excavating myself toward.

When everything was stripped bare, love was the only thing remaining.

It was like being a newborn, knowing nothing about the world, but knowing that love was the only ingredient necessary to navigate it.

The playbook only had one page.

The instruction manual only had one step.

The map only had one direction.

Love.

The tension resolved.

The unmooring was replaced by grounding.

The multitude of answers to the riddle of life were distilled into the singular but all-encompassing answer of love.

Perhaps this answer was wired into me from the beginning. After all, pretty much every major religion and philosophy has love as one of its central themes. Was I just regurgitating something that had been drilled into my psyche from the beginning?

Maybe.

But I don’t believe so.

In some way that I can’t fully verbalize, this answer felt true.

And it felt truer than any answer I had ever been gifted.

I could intellectualize this to the end of the earth. But there is a difference in understanding something intellectually and understanding something at the soul level.

This felt like soul work, not knowledge work.

I stopped ketamine treatment, and therapy entirely, after that session.

Perhaps I should have kept going. Perhaps some integration work of that experience would have been useful.

But honestly…

I felt like I got the message; like I received what I had come knocking for.

I’m wired to want to know what the framework is; what the tool is that cuts through the noise. It’s how I operate in my work. It’s how I operate in the day to day doldrum of life.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the answer came packaged the way it did.

It’s easy to hate. Too easy.

It’s easy to drift through life with an underlying frustration toward the people and realities around us.

But living our life with love?

That takes courage.

That takes trusting something that is much greater than us. Something that is hard to define and harder to pinpoint.

But we know it when we see it. And we know it when we feel it.

And that day I felt it.

I didn’t come out the other side as a new person. But I did come out the other side with a new way to understand the world. I had the answer to the questions I had been asking. And I had the answer to questions yet to come.

The imperfect application of love will always be greater than the perfect application of hate.

And that?

That might be the only answer I need.