What Ketamine Actually Feels Like— From Someone Who Has Been in the Chair

I want to tell you something most therapists won't tell you.

I have sat in the chair myself.

Not as a researcher. Not as an observer. As a patient who was grieving, broken open, and completely desperate for something to shift. I have experienced the very medicine I now offer in my practice. I share this because I am not asking you to go anywhere I haven't been willing to go myself.

This is that story.

About two years ago, within the same month, two things happened that changed everything for me.

I was hit by a drunk driver and suffered five herniated discs, a torn rotator cuff, a knee injury, and the kind of PTSD that moves into your body like an uninvited tenant and refuses to leave. My nervous system, already stretched thin, was now holding more than it ever had. And then, the month after the accident, my mother died. Suddenly. Without warning.

I was hollow.

I won't try to put words to what that kind of loss feels like. If you've been there, you already know. If you haven't, no description will allow you to feel the depths of that despair. What I can tell you is that I was drowning. My body was in pain, my heart was shattered, and the grief had nowhere to go.

That is when I came to ketamine.

I had actually already done five ayahuasca ceremonies before my first ketamine session, a journey I'll write about another time, one that I give zero out of five stars and also would not trade for anything. But that's a different story. What I knew coming into ketamine was that I wasn't a stranger to medicine work. And I knew my system was holding far too much.

The ketamine session was a gentle low dose session. Exactly what my system needed at that time. And as the medicine settled in and my body began to soften, something unexpected happened.

I sensed my mother.

Not as a memory. Not through my imagination. She was simply there. I looked down and we were holding hands. I started crying immediately. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep in my belly, from the very center of myself. I told her how much I missed her. I asked her why she had to leave. And she said, “Oh sweet girl, come with me.”

What happened next is hard to describe, as medicine-supported experiences often are, but I will try my best to invite you into what was a most sacred moment. We were together, my mother and I, riding what I can only call a magic carpet through the most breathtaking universe I have ever seen. Colors I don't have names for, deep purples, magentas, blues so vivid they felt alive. Ketamine has a quality to it that many people describe as airy, almost weightless, and that is exactly what it was. We were gliding. We were together again, and my heart was soothed for the first time in eight weeks.

And then she said something that stopped time.

She said: "can you see now why would I never leave this sacred place?"

In that space, there was nothing but peace. A complete absence of anxiety, of worry, of the endless mental list of things I needed to do and people I needed to call. My body was weightless. The pain that had been living in my spine, my shoulder and my knee was simply gone. There was no grief. There was only the two of us, hand in hand, moving through something sacred, vast and completely unhurried.

Two and a half years later, I still miss her. I will always miss her. I miss hugging her and hearing her laugh. I miss her in this ordinary life, in this current reality.

But I do not grieve her the way I did before that session.

Because I know she is with me. Not in a way I can prove, not in a way I would ever ask you to simply take my word for. But in the way that shows up in small signs I've learned to recognize. In dreams where she comes to me with something important to say. In moments where I feel her so clearly that I stop what I'm doing just to talk to her, the way I did this morning, actually, while writing this post. I told her what I was working on. I told her about this day.

I share this not because I think every ketamine session looks like mine. They don't. Each person's experience is entirely their own, shaped by what they carry, what they need, and what they are ready to receive.

I share it because I want you to understand what is possible when the nervous system is finally given permission to let go. When the weight we have been carrying, the grief, the pain, the trauma stored in the body, has a chance to soften, even briefly, healing can find its way in through the opening.

That is what I witnessed in myself.

That is what I now have the honor of witnessing in others.

And that is why I do this work.

If you are carrying something that feels too heavy for words alone, I want you to know there may be another way through. Not around it. Not over it. Through it, with support, with intention, and with someone who has made that journey herself.

Sacred Spaces Counseling exists because of sessions like the one I just described. If something here has spoken to you, I'd love to connect

Next in this series: Not everyone needs to climb Everest — why a gentler path is sometimes the most courageous one.