#6: My First Ketamine Journey: Audio Diary of Ketamine Assisted Therapy Training Experience at Menla

Join me as I share an audio diary of my first encounter with Ketamine, which is a legal psychedelic medication  that can treat depression, trauma and more. 

Set  in the serene Menla retreat center of the Catskill Mountains, this episode describes my participation in a week-long  training program designed to teach mental health clinicians how to utilize the healing power of Ketamine. 

During this immersive experiential training, I become increasingly connected with a team of peers, as we guide each other's Ketamine journeys and learn from a team of expert clinicians led by Dr. Phil Wolfson, Bessel Van der Kolk, Gita Vaid, Licia Sky and Peter Corbett.   This episode may be especially interesting to mental health clinicians who are curious about what it is like to participate in an immersive experiential Ketamine training program.

Timestamps

0:16 - Psychedelic Journey: Welcome to my Audio Diary
11:56 - Tuesday: My First Morning at Menla KAP training, History of Menla
15:00 - Wednesday: Pearls From Our First Full Day
21:39 - Power of Ketamine and Group Dynamics
24:47 - Thursday: My First Ketamine Journey, Bessel's Teaching About Trauma and DMN
36:00 - Friday: Sitting for Others
43:08 - Saturday: My 2nd Journey - IM this time, Combining Breath, Movement and Ketamine
52:00 - Sunday: Sitting a 2nd Time, A Swim with Naga Spirit
55:21 - Meaning and Connection Through Ketamine Journeys

Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff

Music by The Thrashing Skumz

Transcript

Dirk: 0:16

Hello, welcome back to Developing Meaning. Today I have kind of a different episode than our usual episode. In our usual episode I take you along on my own journey through the wide, fascinating world of different types of mental health providers, people who I feel are exceptional clinicians that have taken a wide-ranging approach to understanding and treating mental health conditions, and I learn from them and I ask them how did they become, whatever kind of therapist they are, and then what have they learned from their clinical work about meaning and how to apply that in their own lives? This is an episode where I take you along an inward journey of me doing ketamine for the first time at a one-week experiential ketamine training for clinicians, and in many ways this is a complimentary and opposite episode to the Justin Townsend episode where he, who is the CEO of MycoMeditation's, the oldest and largest psychedelic mushroom retreat center in Jamaica, speaks from a perspective of having had many different personal experiences with psychedelics and group experiences and leading and facilitating and witnessing, and so from a high expert perspective he talks about psychedelic experiences. This is an episode where I take you on a journey of a completely psychedelic, naive person who is doing ketamine for the first time and the story behind it is that through Michael Pollan's book and clinical stories and just being a person who's alive and breathing and absorbing information, I had become aware of this wave of interest in healing power of psychedelics, and so I wanted to learn more about it and felt that the way to do it is to go to experts.

Dirk: 2:48

And I found a group of really interesting people, high-level people, who had organized a week-long training at a Buddhist retreat center in the Catskill Mountains. This is called the Menla Retreat Center. It's the US seat of the Dalai Lama. It's a Buddhist retreat center that hosts many different kinds of training. So this is a training that's led by Dr Phil Wolfson, who wrote the ketamine papers and isa, pioneer in clinical use of ketamine. He's been using it for 15, 20 years clinically and he's done many, many different kinds of trainings. And he teamed up with other high-level teachers like Bessel Vanderkog, the author of the Body Keeps the Score was one of the teachers and trainers there and he's a personal hero of mine, so it was amazing to learn from him and get to have dinner with him. And then his wife, leisha Skye, is also an amazing clinician. She was one of the teachers. And then Gita Vaid is a psychodynamic psychoanalyst who is very much a pioneer in the psychedelic space. She's written many papers and done podcasts and taught courses, so she was a big presence there and then people like Ron Siegel and other really high.

Dirk: 4:12

So this was an amazing set and setting and I felt like it would be fun to just document it by speaking into my iPhone voice memo for five minutes every morning, sometimes before coffee, and just taking you through my fears, my experiences, in real time, not while on ketamine, but each morning, kind of giving you my where I'm at, so you will get to see what it's like to be in my head as a newbie newbie, first time psychedelic user. I'll just say briefly that ketamine is the one legal psychedelic at this time. It is a dissociative anesthetic. Many people who have had surgeries have had ketamine and at low doses it produces psychedelic experiences that are also now being noted to be effective in treating severe depression and anxiety and promoting brain plasticity. So this is a really exciting new medication that I really wanted to learn about, and many people are doing these ketamine trainings, many people are leading them, and so this podcast may be helpful to see if this kind of thing is something you might be interested in. Of course, if you are interested, you should be aware that this is a powerful medication with potential to also cause harm. So you want to make this decision with your own personal clinical people and really pick the right set and setting and be careful. There's risks of addiction. There's risks of potential psychiatric decompensation. There are some health risks. It's a safe medication used in the right context, but don't do this on your own.

Dirk: 6:06

I also want to tell you, update you, where I am now November 2023, in terms of my own journey and looking for meaning, and what you're about to listen to is me. In April of this year, april 2023. And a lot has happened since then. Since that episode, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I had a routine screening that then got worked up with MRI and biopsy, and now I've had a surgery, which the whole thing getting a diagnosis of cancer in that part of my body and just living through that has been an intense process for me and I feel like I'm okay. My surgery went well. I'm hopefully clear, with clear margins and clear lymph nodes, but there's a blood test down the road. That's important as well.

Dirk: 7:14

So I don't have all the information, but I've thought a lot about what's meaningful to me and what I've learned from my conversations, doing this podcast and reading and just living life, and at this point I think it comes down to a lot to connection and people who are important to me and what my relationships are like. It's also presence. It's also connection with nature. I've also become in touch with being grateful for all the experiences I've had, for the relationships I've had, for my family who supported me and for the ability to have a creative outlet with this podcast. Some of this ties into the ketamine experience, because my experience in this training, I think, helped me finally put out this podcast that I had been working on and thinking about for 10 years or more, and so I ended up putting it out not long after this week of first time ketamine use, and also I met an amazing group of clinicians who became friends. This was kind of a wild bonding experience and it's not normal, I think, for a 50-year-old man to suddenly have a bunch of new best friends. But I really got to connect with some people that really have become important to me and a lot of those people have been really supportive through this prostate cancer experience, and so I just want to share that, because a theme of this podcast is my own journey towards meaning, and I also want to break down the veil of therapist anonymity and really understand how high-level clinicians deal with uncertainty and distressing events in our lives, and I feel like there's a lot to be learned there and I want to just share this important piece.

Dirk: 9:37

I don't want to go into it too much. I think there's a lot that one can get into. This is a type of cancer that's extremely common in men. It's the most common form of cancer in men and a very high percentage of us will end up having to deal with it in some way or other, and it's a hard thing to go through to have to take a chunk out of the penile system and learn how to urinate again, go through these early childhood developmental stages again. So I don't want to talk more about that now.

Dirk: 10:14

In the future I may want to do an entire episode on cancer and meaning, but for now I want to send you off into this ketamine experience. I hope you enjoy it and if this audio diary episode is not so interesting to you, I think you will really like next month's episode where I will be speaking with the great Bruce Hersey, who built a really fascinating treatment model using three different types of treatment EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing, ifs, internal family systems therapy and coherence therapy and he's built an institute, a cis-agie institute, where he combines these treatments, and so I think you'll really like his story and his take on meaning. But for now, please travel back with me in time to spring April of this past year, 2023. It's the Catskill Mountains, the leaves are green, the streams are bursting with flowing water and I am about to do some ketamine.

Dirk: 11:56

It's April 18th and I'm upstate in Venetian, new York, at a ketamine training led by Phil Wolfson and Bessel van der Kalk and other colleagues, and I am feeling excited and nervous. I got up here yesterday and there were introductions and meal and meeting people and it seems like everybody up here sort of knows more about ketamine than I do. Even stopping at a diner on the way, the server told me about how he had been trained in this and then staying at this little gram sort of a motel down the hill from the the Menla retreat center. The person working at the front desk also is a deep spiritual Buddhist who has extensive experience in this as a way to expand consciousness and was telling me about the Tibetan book of the dead, which was translated by Robert Thurman, who owns he is a major Buddhist leader, who owns the Menla retreat center up here, which is in between mountains, with lots of running water you can hear everywhere and as hosted the Dalai Lama and led many, many years of practice.

Dirk: 13:41

And so I'm as you can tell by my not being articulate I'm nervous. I don't know what to expect. I worry that I will maybe go a little bit crazy with this experience. I might like it too much. I don't think I'm an addictive personality, but there's always a fear of am I going to get a little bit further into this? And and is this going to change me in some ways? That are gonna. You know, changes scary and mind expansion is scary.

Dirk: 14:19

So I'm at the very beginning of this. I have not tried ketamine yet. Today they're just preparing this ketamine journey for all of us. We are doing orientations and meals together and teachings, but no actual ketamine yet. That will come tomorrow. So I want to take you on this journey with me and you can. You can hear in my voice I'm nervous, so we'll see how this turns out. So I'm waking up on Wednesday, april 19th, and I'm feeling a bit less nervous, even though today I will be taking oral ketamine my first experience taking ketamine, and this has been an intense experience. Yesterday was a long day, started 8 am, finished about 10 pm. There were no real breaks, there wasn't much opportunity to go hiking, there was some hail. It was an intense day and I'll just briefly tell you about this first day.

Dirk: 15:50

So there's about 40 of us staying at the Menla retreat center, which was a Buddhist present preservation center created by the Dalai Lama together with Robert Thurman, and it's a space in Phoenician, new York upstate where there's a 400 million year old crater that created this basically hole in the mountains that supposedly has this really nice spiritual energy and everywhere you hear streams and running water. There's a lake there, these little footpaths with then huts that people stay on and sort of a main Buddhist meal center where everybody has vegan meals together. This is the first time in my life that I have eaten only vegan food. We go between meals to trainings and the first training word, first meeting where 40 of us are in this circle and sort of the Buddhist yoga space. Large room was describing the history of men la and the safe space, that just the energy of the history of this place, and it creates a safe environment to to learn and experience what this medicine can do. And the safe environment is important. And then Leticia sky led us with a body attunement experience how to scan and attune to our body how powerful nonverbal communication is, mirroring exercises and that was our morning, which then moved into lunch and a a ketamine experience where we watched I didn't take, but people who had taken it before lay about 10 people in in sort of the circle of mats, and then observers sat around in chairs and watched I am intramuscular 25 milligram dose being administered and this created quite a sort of a lovely empathic experience, although I felt weird. It sort of took me back to Ram Das and Timothy Leary days, which is an interesting connection because Bob Thurman, the founder of the school I mean founder of this retreat center he married the ex-wife of Timothy Leary and he himself has has sort of came from that world and Ram Das and Timothy Leary and and then creating all of this Buddhist center. Unfortunately he's not here, he is in India now. I was hoping to to get to talk to him, and so that experience has now made me a bit less nervous, but I'll talk about that in a minute.

Dirk: 19:23

The evening post-dinner was a talk, again by Laetitius sky, along with Bessel van der Kalk, who is just a huge sort of idol of mine. By create, writing the body keeps the score and creating this way of thinking about our own development and how our experiences shape us and what different kinds of trauma are and how one can really develop a real tool set that's wide-ranging, that is not just talking, that uses all kinds of wide-ranging treatment approaches and and really studies human connection and tells us a lot about human connection. So that's not so articulate, but I just wanted to mention a few. Oh, I did just to sort of summarize. They talked about their trip to Rwanda where huge genocide a million people died in about a month, killed in the most gruesome imaginable ways, and talking about how that whole group clash was set up by colonial differences that eventually led to this brutal massacre, and how forming groups of about 15 people, little cohorts that were made up of both the Hutu and Tutsi members were created, able to create really amazing healing structures that then stayed together and built economic systems that were incredibly useful in healing their trauma, creating new bonds and families and and also just economically allowing them to to create little communities that were still now, 15 years later, intact, and and so visiting these and seeing how that worked and how it was different than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in in South Africa was, was interesting.

Dirk: 21:39

So pearls. From the first day there were questions about addiction and what the differences between addiction and medicine, and kettysit ketamine can be quite an addictive medicine. So one idea is that a medicine is something that brings us more in contact with ourselves, and addiction is something that sort of obliterates or blocks out the self. So I thought that was kind of a neat pearl. The other pearl is how powerful nonverbal attunement is, both to ourselves and also to our environment and also to to other people and mirroring and being there. And then the another pearl is how powerful groups can be, both for healing but also for doing terrible things, and so how to use that and be mindful of that is something I'm still thinking about. And then next is that ketamine is powerful and that can it can really be used to bring a group together and that can be really wonderful and healing in a safe space like menla, where the mission really is healing and supporting each other, but it wouldn't necessarily be all positive. It could also, if it were in a non-safe space where people had a different agenda of using power to do bad things to other people, it could also end up being used in in bad ways. So, thinking about how, how groups work and how conscious expansion and and you basically mental plasticity can be a powerful tool that we don't quite know where it will go yet. That's basically where I'm at after this first day and I'm excited today. Today I will be trying ketamine for the first time, which still feels kind of scary and it's sort of a losing of myself in joining a group which I have mixed feelings about. But I'm here and I'm going to do it, so I'll let you know how it goes. All right, bye, hello, good morning Thursday.

Dirk: 24:38

Thursday, thursday, august 20th day four of the retreat, 7am. I'm sitting in my room in the morning. Let me turn off the fan which is making noise. I had my first ketamine experience yesterday. So this retreat, it just it is a long retreat. It is going on and on Every day. The meeting started at 8am and at 10pm people have all their meals together and it was quite an experience to be in a room, sort of a big yoga room, where 25 people at the same time were taking oral ketamine lozenges. I ended up taking a 200 milligram dose, which was sort of a lowish dose, and found myself to be pretty sensitive. The morning part, maybe I'll talk about that.

Dirk: 25:55

First. They did a lot of sort of teaching the mechanism and Bessel van der Kalk spent a lot of time talking about his current understanding of trauma and how psychedelics could potentially help reverse changes. As you see, I'm not so articulate today. I don't know if that's the sleep which I slept great but he talked about the main findings that people with attachment trauma have a default mode network which is sort of the brain's sense of self network. That's just not active and except in traumatic situations, in a low stress situation, people don't quite feel themselves. Then in situations where there's more of an abuse situation, they do feel more alive. That's not really here nor there. I almost feel like I should record this over because I'm so inarticulate right now.

Dirk: 27:28

Let me tell you about my journey being in this room. I take these pills you swish in your mouth, hold them in your mouth because it's an oral saliva absorption. For 15 minutes you have kind of these just a lot of saliva in your mouth, swishing it, and there's eyeshade. Everything is blacked out and I'm sitting on a blue cushiony mat, sort of a fold out mat on the floor If you have kids sleepover or something. It's one of those foldy cushions with blankets and pillow. I'm wearing eyeshades and I have a sitter who I've met, a nice person who is there to sort of attend to anything that I might need during this journey. 25 other people, same deal. They're sitting in rows. And then we have a Gita, who is an expert guide and psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, and Phil Wolfson, who is one of the originators of this type of treatment. I'm beyond. There's an interview that we've done with our partner where we set our intention. My intention was sort of more connection, more being kinder to myself, to others, and to help resolve some interpersonal stresses that have been going on and to work for more openness and connection.

Dirk: 29:29

Then the music is going and for a good while there's just a feeling of relaxation, no sensation of anything. And then there's colors, there's shapes. I start to see a sort of the landscape of this Menla Buddhist retreat from above. I see green mountains with a blue stream and it's very intense colors that almost look like sort of a virtual reality, if you ever do landscape and I'm floating above it and I go high and I get to see the whole shapes and landscapes from high up, while the music is sort of ethereal, non-word music, slow, gentle rhythms, but it just sort of moves through me and I feel like I almost like I could be for a bit at a club, kind of wanting to dance. There's sort of this feeling of joy and elation that fills me. And then I take a second tab. So that's the.

Dirk: 30:56

That was the instruction to take one and then to take another one, and after 15 minutes you, I spit out the first one and I do the same thing with the second one, and then I lie down and I start to sort of whoosh, zoom down into sort of moving through a sort of a tunnel and the colors turn, turn red, and it's almost going through like an Inka maze. That then turns into sort of these, these red tubes, almost like I'm a blood cell flowing through a body, and it's really kind of fun and neat and my body kind of disappears. So there's sort of this sense that I'm thinking. You know, consciousness is happening, something's conscious, but where is it coming from it, doesn't? You don't feel like I like if I had had to do something in that moment, like attend to something or do something physical, it would have been, it would have been a problem, but I didn't. I was just able to just lie there and enjoy, enjoy the journey and gradually come out.

Dirk: 32:21

And then we all went around the room and everybody talked about how they had said intention. Some people had I think about two people out of 25 had a little bit of a sort of a disappointing experience. One person was hoping for sort of big insights and didn't, didn't get that. And one person had sort of just kind of all black, no, no reaction, nothing, you know, adverse, but just sort of a disappointment and not not having had a really great experience. And some people had real, it seemed, realizations about themselves and their childhood, and and then some people just had kind of a nice experience. And I feel like I was sort of in that category and I was sort of looking for some kind of a big insight that would maybe, you know, hit me over the head and give me some answers to current difficulties. But I ended up just being kind of a nice experience and sort of puzzling like what, what do I make of this and how does this? Is this really going to be helpful or is it just sort of a distraction from from problems? So those are things on my mind now.

Dirk: 33:56

Today it's still early, I have to shower, then head into breakfast and then we have talks in the morning and processing, and then I will be sitting for the person who sat with me and assisting his journey today, and so I will get to be an observer. And I guess a nice thing about this training is we do get to see 25 times 2 people go through these experiences and talk about them. So we pretty quickly get a lot of experience in what this does. And I'm curious and still skeptical of sort of pros and cons of this. My sense is that the important thing still is to make meaningful changes in the real world and zooming out into this other dimension for a short period of time, which I never did. I was not a psycho-not. I was not a person who used these as club drugs or recreationally. So here I am, whatever, it is Thursday and it just feels long, it feels intense, it feels kind of like work, even though it is play also. So I'll see how it goes. I'll keep you posted.

Dirk: 35:55

So Friday morning this is the second to last day for me and today I will be doing I am Ketamine, and yesterday I did not do any Ketamine. I was watching other people and being a sitter for a specific person, helping him through his experience, and the person that I was helping had a very still experience. So this lasted for the whole thing about an hour, and then afterwards maybe another hour of everybody in the room processing, but during the time when we were listening to the music and he was taking the pills and swishing. So if you do these dissolvable pills, they're sort of this a little bit of a disgusting process of having these pills dissolve in your mouth and having saliva and having to sort of swish for 20 minutes and then you spit it out and sort of dab with a napkin and all of this is wild.

Dirk: 37:12

There is this really beautiful music with really nice speakers in a beautiful sort of a large yoga style room with windows facing trees and so the Siddharth. There's about three rows of total of 25 people doing Ketamine and then a row of teachers, helpers, and then there are with each person who is doing it and they're doing Ketamine. There is somebody who is helping them, guide them on their journey, and just being support, a supportive presence. And since my person was still, I could kind of look around the room a bunch and see it was kind of wild to see there were really there's a big range. Some people were sort of moving their arms to the music, swaying, dancing.

Dirk: 38:18

There was a generally a pretty blissful feeling, but not not for everybody. There was one person across from me who was initially laughing a lot and then crying very intensely. There was another person who seemed like something was just sort of moving through her legs and arms in a way. That seemed kind of disturbing. And so scanning around the room, seeing everybody wearing their eye shades on these blue cushiony mats with pillows, being comfortable, having a sitter with them and some people having what seemed to be disturbing experiences, and then afterwards going around the room and asking everybody well, what was this like? What did you see? And there were visions. There were experiences of moving, of meeting past loved ones who have passed away, or feeling experiences of connection with people that that have been hard to connect to, and I'm still wrapping my head around it. I so so.

Dirk: 39:48

So this is an interesting process to go through with, with a group of 50 people who are together for a week, and so we're we've now everybody's now had the chance to do oral ketamine once, and now today we will start doing two sets of I am ketamine and I will be in that first group. I seem to be pretty responsive, and so I will be taking maybe a lower dose, 50 milligrams. Perhaps the highest that people are taking is like 100 milligrams. 110 is extremely sort of the upper limit, it seems, although not not quite necessarily so. Phil Wolfson is the leader of this course and he he sometimes goes higher.

Dirk: 40:44

So, moving away from the technical stuff, how do I feel? I feel like I've had quite a new experience and I'm still processing it. I had a little bit of a concern that this would be so wonderful that I really want to, just, you know, keep doing it, but I don't quite feel that way. I really could kind of take it or leave it. I think it is a an interesting experience and I'm just going to sort of be pondering. It's like a lucid dream and and we'll see what comes of today it's a little bit of a scary process to lose this sense of self, but it's also a an opportunity, and we had some really beautiful presentations yesterday by Gita of I'd, who is a psychoanalyst, talking about how this this really offers an opportunity to to make changes that when, when we develop their critical windows where things happen, and then after that things happen, can happen much more slowly. And this is a way to sort of get to a very new perspective very quickly and also experience a really sort of a calm and blissful state and that can then become integrated in meaningful ways. So I can't summarize her talk. She's been on podcasts. I may put some podcast links up to for you to check out. I definitely recommend listening to her rather than me speak about this. But yeah, I'm excited and I'm going to have breakfast and I feel like we as a group are getting closer and I'm learning a lot from from other people coming from all over the world and sharing experiences. It's kind of a neat thing. So I'm excited. It's 7am, I'm going to go have some breakfast and then do some ketamine.

Dirk: 43:08

So it's Saturday now, day five of the training, and it's really been kind of an intense time. I had quite a experience yesterday with with ketamine. I'll tell you about it Just to sort of walk you through the day. It's sort of as a beautiful sunny day in this men la retreat mountain, sort of high Buddhist hideaway in the Catskills, and I started the morning with a little hike through the woods next to a stream and just the setting was just beautiful. And I'm getting to know this group of 40 or so health professionals who are all being trained, all having the same experience of learning lectures, and then an experiential component which involves one day of a lozenge ketamine experience and then a day of rest where we then are the helper for a partner who has that experience, and then the next set is with an I am intramuscular ketamine dose injected.

Dirk: 44:39

So I had a dose of 50 and then supplemented by 30 milligrams and my intention was to really you know it sounds not like such a big deal, but to me it was to just be truly more myself, get connected with my essence, get open to open myself to whatever my mind wants to show me, and then also to shift into more of a doing mode, from a being mode. And I have a little bit of a or a lot of a history of being sort of a perpetual student and accumulating degrees and trainings and getting interested in new things and just constantly learning but not really owning being the expert and building things and putting things into action. And I wanted to shift into that mode and so I had a training which was very helpful in breath, body, mind, which is using air, combined with movement and visualization. This is a program developed by a psychiatrist named Richard Brown at Columbia and I've been using this and there's a meditation that he teaches which is called painting the waterfall, where you are doing kind of a Tai Chi or Chi Gong movement of raising your hands up and down as if you are painting a waterfall.

Dirk: 46:22

And as I was sort of going into this ketamine experience, I just one of the phenomenon that can happen or tends to happen is synesthesia, where your senses convert, music converts to light and movement, and light and sound and different senses blend and turn into each other, and so I was able to sort of paint these wild paintings with my hands and my movement and my breath and I was connecting with this experience of making this sort of fabulous art with just dramatic, starting sort of with reds and blacks and then shifting into greens and holding my breath, and there's sort of a flying sensation. So it was really kind of a wild kind of high where I was able to just create and sort of shoot colors out of my hands or shake them from my hands as I was moving. I was lying on a mat down on the floor with my helper sitting next to me and there were 20 or so other people in rows same as the other days, also going through their own experiences, and I had eye shades on and had this experience of just being able to do and create and feeling very powerful, which is not how I usually feel. So with that I was then sort of had this sort of fun moment where I was like, okay, well, I might as well just send a lot of love to people that I care about and sort of send them healing energies. And I did that and sort of had this funny thought of like, oh yeah, now everybody's fixed, everything's solved, and I do kind of have this sensation of being more in a doing, you know, connecting, doing and being, and we'll see what comes of that.

Dirk: 48:56

As I came out of it, I this is sort of this Buddhist yoga space and I walked out of that to the restroom and everybody else was still sort of in this sort of music, ketamine, space, and I did go to the restroom, but then afterwards I, the sun was just beautiful and I walked outside and just sat and sort of soaked in the sun in the beautiful katsuken nature, with the sound of the stream and the light, and just a feeling of sort of beauty and connectedness was very much what I was experiencing and I ended up picking a flower and walking back in with a flower and so, while everybody else was sort of debriefing and talking about their experiences, I was listening. But I was also sort of looking at this, just the details of this dandelion yellow flower, and just noticing it in a different way than I had before. So this, all you know, sounds as I'm talking now, maybe not so profound, but it felt profound and we'll see how it goes from here. Today is my last day here. I have to leave kind of one day early in the evening. I will be helping my partner so she will get her turn to journey while I sit there and in this room full of other people and then listening to everybody else. Well, I'll be listening to everybody else and seeing how their experiences went, and it's a group of people who are very nice and enjoyable to be with. I feel like I've gotten to know a lot of people and we'll see I will probably stay connected with several of them. There is this feeling of group connectedness and bonding which is a component of this experience. I think that many people have.

Dirk: 51:24

And, yeah, now it's still before 7 am. I think I need to throw myself in the water. There's a cold pool outside of the main building and the water is very clear and cold. And today is my last day here and I do like cold water swimming, so I will see if I can throw myself in there. And yeah, then we'll see what this day brings and I'm kind of excited.

Dirk: 52:03

So today is Sunday and it's the last day of the conference. People are wrapping up saying goodbye as I speak and I am not there. I am back in the city. I had to leave a day early in the evening and I just had duties back here and so I had to get back early. I am still really just basking in this afterglow of this experience and just sort of trying to wrap my head around it. Yesterday was another kind of amazing day and was sort of this phenomenon of each day kind of building on the next and the group of 40 to 50 of us getting just closer and deeper and more connected and more open. It sounds weird and corny, I know, but I'll just tell you about my day.

Dirk: 53:04

I got up early, checked out of the little sort of bunkhouse hotel that I was in and came before breakfast and did just an ice cold dip into the pool in the Menla retreat not swimming pool but the pond and it is shockingly cold. I like cold water, swimming, I like all swimming, but I just didn't want to leave before I had a chance to swim and that ended up being sort of the only moment I had to connect with the Naga water dragon spirit of the Catskill mountain that stories talk about as being present in this spiritual center. I did feel energy kind of building inside me and eating all of these delicious vegan meals but face style, which I've never done before. I've never eaten vegetarian for an entire week, and so that was surprising, how delicious that was and how good I felt. And then there was processing in the morning, processing because half of us had had our I am ketamine journeys the day before, and then there's just sort of this intense experience that's shared, people sort of dissolving their ego and their defenses, and in this, mostly in a very positive way. But some people do have sort of difficult, darker experiences, and even those, I think, when they unfold in the context of this supportive group, end up being very helpful and bringing people together.

Dirk: 55:21

And it's so strange to feel so connected to a bunch of people that I really did not know at all A week ago one of the people I knew one of them is a psychiatrist who had been a really great teacher of mine, so that was neat to reconnect. But everybody else is new and I feel like we're sort of connected now. There's not going to be a time, I think, in the future, where I you know, obviously you can't keep in touch with everybody but there's that feeling of meaning and connection that happened. And so then I let people know that I was leaving and the day, well, we went on a nice walk and I went on a walk in the woods and stepped, broke through a little branch and got my feet wet in a stream and it was just anything. Every part of it was just kind of a nice experience, even soaking my feet in socks. I did have a change of shoes and socks, so it was not a big deal, but then we moved into ketamine journeys and I got to administer some IM doses, so I learned how to do that and to be.

Dirk: 56:53

Each of us again was paired with the person that had helped us in our journey. We helped them and lying on mats with music and people again had really just incredible experiences, most of them very positive, some of them not, and I don't want to talk about specifics so much. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but I feel like something really happened and we'll see how this plays out now going forward, and I do feel like I'll keep in touch and I'm still wrapping my head around what this means for me and my patients. I'll see. I'm Dr Bruce Hersey and until that time, I hope you have a meaningful and meaningful month and, as always, if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. I'm Dr Bruce Hersey and I'm a doctor. I'm Dr Bruce Hersey and I'm a doctor. I'm Dr Bruce Hersey and I'm a doctor. I'm Dr Bruce Hersey and I'm a doctor.