Ketamine is a safe, legal and lifesaving medicine proving successful in providing symptom relief for depression, traumatic stress, anxiety, and other mental health conditions when administered in conjunction with professional support and guidance.

During Shefa’s Shuva circles, we utilize a low or “psycholytic” intramuscular dose to induce an expansion of one’s consciousness. In these states, we are able to depart from the usual workings of the mind, making way for things that were hard or intolerable to understand, feel, or remember to become more accessible or clear. This may begin to clear a path towards processing and resolving them.

Ketamine is a controlled Schedule III substance which is legally available through a physician’s prescription. Our circle participants will be screened by our team physician for anxiety, depression, trauma or other underlying diagnoses and prescribed a psycholytic dose of ketamine relative to their bodyweight for the group session.

While not strictly “therapy,” the arc of the experience is intended to be “therapeutic.” As we are coming to this experience to return to ourselves, we are showing up with courage and vulnerability, trusting that the facilitators and other participants are receiving us with compassion and care. When we feel safe to be ourselves as fully as possible, we can reclaim our own power and authenticity, aspects which are often wounded in group contexts. With trained mental health and pastoral caregivers, we aim to attend to your own healing process throughout the arc of the experience.

Although using ketamine therapeutically has the potential for positive outcomes, there are also some potential risks. During the medicine journey, you may experience a temporary elevated heart rate or blood pressure. The most common side effect is mild nausea/vomiting; we will have anti-nausea medication available to you before the start of the session if needed. Overuse of ketamine can become habit forming and can cause many other health issues.

In smaller doses, ketamine can provide an opportunity for the temporary softening of psychological defenses, allowing for deeper self-reflection and psychotherapeutic processing. Even at lower doses, ketamine can have a psychedelic effects, which have been shown to facilitate profound transpersonal experiences. These types of experiences can help people in a variety of ways, offering important clarity and insight into one’s struggles, adding a spiritual dimension to ongoing therapeutic work, and facilitating a sense of meaning and interconnectedness. Even if these subjective experiences are not directly encountered, ketamine has also shown efficacy in creating and repairing synapses in the brain. We try to maintain and bolster these new pathways of neurogenesis by making new commitments during our process of integration.

“Lo tov heyot adam levado—no one should be alone.” Jewish tradition emphatically insists that human life, perhaps all life, is intended to be lived in relation to someone or something else. For this reason, we were created, yet so much of our wounding and shame comes from the relationships and communities that should have been nurturing and affirming. When we do this work in a safe context as a group, we can not only begin returning to ourselves on our own terms, but to examine our relational patterns and connections, as well.

We are convening ten participants (a “ketaminyan”), with five facilitators.

According to SAMSA, trauma results from “…an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. Being “trauma-informed” in our work means creating a team and environment which is safe, trustworthy, peer-supported, collaborative, empowering, and aware of cultural, historical, and gender issues result in trauma. As Jews, we also make space for transgenerational effects of trauma, whether we are conscious of them or not.

This is Jewish because you are Jewish, the facilitators are Jewish, the group is a Jewish community, our ancestors are Jewish, the setting is Jewish, and the ways in which we prepare for, navigate, and integrate the experience are informed by Jewish wisdom and spiritual practice. We embrace the full spectrum of Jewish lived experience, and maintain a strong dedication to the principle of “least dogma,” the minimum belief that we need to constitute and community: we are unconditionally loved, we are infinitely valuable, and we are all radically unique.

Much of this will be covered during the group preparation sessions. After preparing the space for our journey, our doctor will administer your pre-determined dose through an intramuscular shot. Lying down, journeyers place light-shade masks over their eyes and allow the primary experience to unfold over an hour or so while listening a curated playlist. Our facilitators mindfully observe the group, ready to respond in ways to ensure people feel grounded and safe throughout the experience.

After an hour, the strongest effects of the ketamine will have subsided, but participants will be able to stay lying down to meditate or rest, and after some time, we will reconvene to begin sharing what was experienced within our minds and hearts.