The Zenquility Journal
My relationship with ketamine began decades ago, in a field at Creamfields festival, surrounded by friends, music, and absolutely no fucking idea what I was about to experience. By that point in my life, I'd already explored plenty of other substances, but ketamine was completely unfamiliar territory. I didn't know what it was, what it did, or what to expect. I took it anyway, and what followed was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary, terrifying, beautiful, and transformative relationships of my life.
I remember looking down at the dove tattoo on my hand and watching it move. Not metaphorically. To my eyes, that little fucker was actually moving. My perception of reality had started doing things I'd never experienced before, and I was fascinated. Over that weekend, my exploration continued, eventually finding me inside a tiny two-man tent with a friend, experiencing what felt like entirely different worlds. At one point, I was sitting inside some sort of ancient temple. My friend, who was physically right in front of my face, appeared to be miles away. Then came the sensation that my entire body had evaporated and I was floating away into something I couldn't begin to understand. It was wild, beautiful, completely unfamiliar, and I fell in love with it almost immediately.
What I didn't understand at the time was why I loved it quite so much. Back then, I wasn't particularly connected to my emotions. My mind was constantly running, and I mean constantly. Even when I was supposedly relaxing, my body couldn't keep still. My leg would be bouncing away like a fucking rabbit, my thoughts racing from one thing to another, and stillness was something I barely understood. I had built an identity around being physically strong, confident, fearless, and capable of handling whatever life threw at me. I was a bodybuilder, a hard worker, a party animal, and someone who believed he was pretty much indestructible. Underneath all of that, however, was a human being who hadn't really learned how to feel.
Ketamine introduced me to an experience that seemed to exist completely outside the limitations of my everyday mind. Suddenly, I could experience myself differently. My usual thoughts, physical sensations, and perception of reality could dissolve into something entirely unfamiliar. Sometimes it was euphoric, sometimes confusing, sometimes deeply strange, but I loved the freedom I felt. I loved the way my usual boundaries seemed to disappear. I could become more expressive, more playful, more open, and less concerned with maintaining the identity I'd spent years constructing. At the time, I thought I was simply enjoying getting out of my head. Looking back, I can see that I was also discovering parts of myself I hadn't yet learned how to access in ordinary life.
And this is where the science becomes fascinating. Ketamine is classified as a dissociative anaesthetic. One of its primary actions involves blocking NMDA receptors, which are involved in communication between nerve cells through a neurotransmitter called glutamate. These receptors participate in processes involving learning, memory, sensory integration, and the way our brains interpret information. Our experience of reality isn't simply a direct recording of everything happening around us. The brain is constantly interpreting incoming information, drawing upon previous experiences, memories, expectations, and learned associations to construct our perception of the world. Ketamine can profoundly disrupt aspects of this process, altering how different brain networks communicate and how sensory information becomes integrated into our ordinary experience of reality.
This can contribute to changes in our perception of time, space, physical boundaries, and even our sense of being an individual person. For me, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of the molecule. The physical world around me hasn't necessarily changed, yet my entire experience of that world can become completely different. And over twenty years, I've experienced that in more ways than I could possibly begin to count. I've experienced what felt like travelling through different dimensions, finding myself in unfamiliar environments, watching my surroundings transform into entirely different worlds, and losing almost every recognisable aspect of my ordinary identity. I've experienced what felt like a complete life review, watching memories from my existence unfold as though I were observing a film. I've experienced mechanical worlds, strange operational loops, profound sensations of leaving my physical body, and moments where the very concept of being Sean seemed to disappear. Some of these experiences have been beautiful beyond description. Others have been absolutely fucking terrifying.
I've also experienced extraordinary states of physical pleasure where my ordinary sense of self seemed to dissolve into sensation. Through sensual exploration, prolonged pleasure, and intimate experiences with my own body, I've encountered states where there seemed to be no separation between myself and what I was feeling. Just sensation, awareness, and bliss. What interests me is that these experiences can feel so completely different from one another. Losing my ordinary sense of identity has sometimes felt like extraordinary freedom, and on other occasions, like losing everything that makes existence feel familiar and safe. The molecule doesn't seem to offer one particular experience. My internal state, environment, expectations, and the circumstances surrounding an experience all appear to influence how I perceive its effects, and my relationship with those experiences has changed enormously as my relationship with myself has evolved.
One of the most significant changes has involved something that might seem relatively ordinary compared with travelling through imaginary dimensions or watching my entire life unfold before me. Learning to love my own body. As a teenager, I was overweight. I stretched the skin around my stomach and developed stretch marks, and somewhere along the way, I created an internal perception that there was something wrong with that part of my body. That perception followed me for years. I eventually became a bodybuilder, and not a particularly small one either. There were periods when XXXL T-shirts didn't fit me properly. I was enormous, muscular, shredded, with fucking abs, and yet I could still find myself feeling insecure about taking my top off on the beach. Imagine that. I'd completely transformed my physique, but somewhere inside my mind was still that overweight teenager looking at his stomach and judging himself. My body had changed dramatically, but my internal perception hadn't necessarily followed.
Over the years, I began exploring this relationship through mirror work, massage, sensuality, self-pleasure, and practices involving affection and appreciation towards my own body. Sometimes these experiences involved ketamine, occasionally cannabis, and sometimes I explored them completely sober. I remember experiences where I would massage my stomach with beautiful oils, explore pleasurable sensations, and look at myself in the mirror with an entirely different perspective. It was as though I was seeing my body through completely new eyes. Instead of looking at my stomach and immediately noticing the loose skin, the stretch marks, or whatever imperfection my mind had previously decided was unacceptable, I could experience an overwhelming sense of appreciation for my physical existence. I would look at myself in absolute awe. The closest description I can offer is that it felt like looking at myself through the eyes of God. Not through judgment, comparison, insecurity, or expectation, but through complete acceptance and love. I could see the beauty of my body without needing it to be anything different.
And something particularly interesting began happening through these experiences. I noticed that the perspective I experienced during an altered state could sometimes influence how I saw myself afterwards. It wasn't an overnight transformation. I didn't suddenly emerge from one experience with every insecurity permanently erased. But I had encountered a different way of seeing and feeling myself, and that gave me something new to return to, a new baseline of experience. I could continue exploring that perspective through everyday practices, through mirror work, through touching my body affectionately, through sensuality, movement, and simply becoming more conscious of how I was relating to myself. Over time, those experiences contributed to a profound change in my relationship with my physical body.
This is where another fascinating area of ketamine research enters the conversation. Neuroplasticity. Our brains aren't fixed structures. They continually adapt through experience, learning, repetition, and changes in how we interact with the world. Researchers have been investigating ketamine's effects on neuroplasticity, particularly in relation to its rapid antidepressant effects under clinical conditions. Some research suggests that ketamine can influence biological processes associated with the formation and strengthening of connections between nerve cells. That doesn't mean every extraordinary experience under ketamine permanently rewires the brain, or that recreational use reliably changes deeply held beliefs. The science is far more complicated than that. But it raises fascinating questions about how altered perception, emotional experiences, and subsequent learning might interact.
For me, the important part wasn't simply having an extraordinary experience. It was discovering whether I could bring something meaningful from that experience into everyday life. My relationship with my body is one example of that process, and it's something I've continued exploring for years. But before I developed that level of awareness, my relationship with ketamine took me through experiences that fundamentally changed my understanding of vulnerability, fear, and mortality. One of those experiences nearly cost me my life.
It was my thirtieth birthday, and around sixteen of us were heading to Ibiza. For the previous year, I'd been dealing with a hernia that had prevented me from training properly. As a bodybuilder, this was devastating to my ego. I'd developed what I considered a dad bod, which, looking back, probably wasn't quite the catastrophe I imagined. Six weeks before the holiday, I finally had the operation, and I decided I was going to get myself into the best shape of my life before Ibiza. And when I say I went all in, I mean all in. I was training two or three times a day, dieting relentlessly, and pushing my body to achieve the leanest physique I'd ever had. By the time the holiday arrived, I'd achieved exactly what I'd set out to do.
There was an entire culture around this where I came from. People prepared for Ibiza as though they were entering a bodybuilding competition. I would even take diuretics to deliberately dehydrate myself before going away, purely to look leaner. What the actual fuck was I thinking? I was so obsessed with how my body looked that I was completely overlooking what my body actually needed. The morning of our flight, we met at the pub near my house at around eight or nine. The holiday had officially begun, and so had the partying. Vodka, cocaine, more vodka, more cocaine. I remember preparing lines during the journey to the airport while drinking straight vodka. By the time we boarded the plane, we were all paranoid as fuck and completely out of our minds. Just another ordinary Ibiza holiday, apparently.
Once we arrived, we headed straight to the beach and carried on. More alcohol, more drugs, hours in the sunshine, and virtually no consideration for food, hydration, or recovery. That evening, we went to Paradise at DC-10, and anyone who's experienced that environment knows how intense it can be. The heat, the music, the dancing, the sheer physical demand of being in that space for hours. I was absolutely boiling, sweating relentlessly, and continuing to push myself long after my body should have been given an opportunity to recover. When we eventually returned to the hotel, one of my friends handed me a plate with an enormous line of powder across it. I asked what it was, and he told me it was mostly cocaine with a little ketamine. Something inside me immediately screamed not to take it. I can still remember that feeling, a powerful internal warning, an unmistakable sense that this was not a good idea. But at that point in my life, I hadn't developed much of a relationship with listening to those signals. Billy Big Bollocks knew better, apparently. So I took it.
What happened next was unlike anything I'd experienced before. My perception of the world disappeared, and I found myself in what felt like a strange mechanical dimension, trapped inside an endless operational loop. It was almost like being on some sort of rollercoaster, moving through subconscious machinery I couldn't understand or escape. Then, somewhere in the distance, I heard my partner's voice asking where I was and whether I was okay. Something inside me immediately recognised that I wasn't. I became aware of my physical body, and the sensations were terrifying. I felt as though every drop of water had suddenly left me. My mouth was so dry that I couldn't speak. My skin felt completely different, and I remember an overwhelming sensation that my body was shutting down. My partner later described me as looking like an old man, as though I'd lost an extraordinary amount of weight in a matter of moments.
I genuinely believed I was dying. I felt what I could only describe as my spirit beginning to leave my body, and every part of my awareness became focused on remaining present. Stay here. Stay in your fucking body. It's not time to leave. My partner ran out desperately searching for something for me to drink because we had no water or food in the hotel room. When she returned, she handed me a two-litre bottle of water, and I drank it so quickly that the plastic bottle collapsed in on itself. Eventually, the immediate terror began to subside. I survived that night, but I cannot tell you precisely what was happening medically as I didn't seek medical attention. Severe dehydration, overheating, alcohol, cocaine, ketamine, and extreme physical exertion had all been involved. It was an exceptionally dangerous situation that warranted emergency medical attention. I navigated that experience in my usual way, to pretend everything was ok and ignore it.
And what did I do afterwards? I slept for about four hours, woke up, went to the beach, and started partying again. Absolutely fucking ridiculous. But that was where my awareness was at the time. I still believed I was indestructible, even after an experience that had confronted me with the possibility of my own death. Something had changed, though. For the first time in my life, I genuinely understood that I could die, and that realisation opened a doorway I wasn't prepared for.
Over the following years, I began experiencing panic attacks, particularly in nightclubs and during experiences involving ketamine. Initially, I didn't even recognise them as panic attacks. I would be dancing, notice an unfamiliar sensation in my body, and immediately convince myself that I was dehydrating again. I'd rush to the bar, drink enormous amounts of water, become increasingly frightened, and spiral into panic. The more frightened I became, the more overwhelming the sensations felt. I had spent so much of my life suppressing uncomfortable emotions that I barely recognised them when they appeared. Suddenly, fear, insecurity, and vulnerability were becoming impossible to ignore. The enormous bodybuilder who'd built his identity around being a hard man was now vulnerable as fuck, and I didn't know what to do with it.
My partner became an extraordinary source of support throughout this period. She knew me better than anyone, and she was the one person with whom I felt completely safe being vulnerable. She helped me recognise what I was feeling, supported me through frightening experiences, and created an environment where I could begin expressing emotions I'd spent much of my life keeping hidden. I began exploring meditation, breathwork, yoga, and developing a deeper relationship with my emotional world. But there was another experience waiting for me in Ibiza, one that would eventually change my relationship with the original event.
Years later, I was back on the island, dancing in Privilege, which was known as the biggest nightclub in the world. I'd been dancing all night. There was an enormous fan behind me, I hadn't been paying proper attention to hydration, and suddenly, bang, another panic attack. I recognised the familiar sensations immediately. I headed upstairs into the famous dome, where there was a bar, and began desperately asking the staff for water and Coke, drinking them while leaning over the bar. I was convinced I was dehydrating again. Then something extraordinary happened. The sensations became intensely familiar, almost identical to what I'd experienced during that original night in Ibiza. I felt as though my spirit was beginning to leave my physical body.
But this time, instead of fighting desperately to remain alive, something completely different happened. An extraordinary sense of peace came over me. I felt completely calm. I believed I was dying, and somehow, in that moment, I was okay with it. I turned to my partner and told her to live her life. I told her I was going to die now, and that it was okay. She later told me that the peace she saw in me was extraordinary. I wasn't panicking, fighting, or desperately trying to hold on. I had completely accepted what I believed was happening, and then I lost consciousness.
According to what I was told afterwards, my body remained upright, frozen in a standing position. Subjectively, I experienced something entirely different. It felt as though I was outside my body, observing myself from above. I could sense security staff pouring water over my head and neck. I remember the sensation of someone striking the upper part of my back, then another impact, and suddenly, I was back. I regained awareness of my physical body. Meanwhile, my partner had been escorted away after witnessing me lose consciousness. She believed she had just watched me die, and later described experiencing the grief, emptiness, and devastation of losing me. For a period, we had both believed we were experiencing my death, but from completely different perspectives.
I cannot tell you whether what I experienced was anything beyond the effects of losing consciousness, altered brain activity, and the circumstances surrounding that event. Out-of-body sensations, profound peace, and changes in the perception of time have all been reported during fainting, dissociative states, and near-death experiences. They don't establish that consciousness literally leaves the body, and losing consciousness in those circumstances was medically dangerous, regardless of how peaceful it felt. But what happened afterwards was profoundly significant to me. The panic attacks stopped. Not because I never experienced those familiar bodily sensations again. I did. But the emotional charge surrounding them had changed. I no longer experienced the same overwhelming fear. I felt able to recognise the sensations without immediately becoming consumed by panic.
Something about that experience had changed my relationship with the possibility of dying. And when I reflected upon it, I recognised that a significant part of my fear had never been simply about death itself. I was terrified of dying in a nightclub and leaving my partner behind. I was terrified of what losing me would do to her. During that second experience, I felt that I'd somehow confronted both of those fears. I had experienced what felt like surrendering to death, and my partner had experienced what she believed was losing me. I came away with a profound personal conviction that death wasn't something I needed to fear in the way I previously had. That is my spiritual interpretation of what happened, rather than something I can establish as a fact about death. But psychologically and emotionally, the change was unmistakable to me. The sensations that had previously triggered panic no longer carried the same meaning. It felt as though an emotional loop that had remained open for years had finally closed.
Looking back, I find the relationship between fear, bodily sensations, and perception fascinating. Our minds can develop powerful associations between physical sensations and frightening experiences. Sometimes the fear of experiencing those sensations again becomes part of what keeps the cycle alive. I can't know exactly what changed neurologically that night, but I know how differently I experienced myself afterwards. And perhaps that's one of the recurring themes throughout my relationship with ketamine. The external circumstances, physical sensations, or memories don't always need to disappear for our relationship with them to change. Sometimes the perspective changes.
As my understanding of myself continued to develop, my relationship with ketamine became increasingly intentional. That doesn't mean every experience became some deeply spiritual ceremony, or that I stopped enjoying the simple pleasure of being altered. I fucking love dancing. And sometimes, when I'm at a rave or nightclub, my intention is simply to enjoy the experience of music, movement, freedom, and being alive. I can enter an altered state and feel extraordinarily liberated. My body moves, my usual mental commentary becomes less dominant, and I experience the music and environment through a different perspective. Sometimes insights emerge. Sometimes I experience profound changes in my emotional state, or suddenly see something in my life differently. Other times, I'm simply dancing my fucking heart out. There's no requirement for every experience to become some profound revelation about the universe. Sometimes pleasure is enough.
But when I'm alone, my relationship with the experience is often different. I might be meditating, exploring bodywork, engaging with sensuality, listening to music, or becoming curious about particular aspects of my internal world. I've experienced extraordinary spontaneous movements, unfamiliar vocalisations, and sensations that seemed to emerge without deliberate conscious direction. Sometimes my body would begin moving in waves. Sometimes I'd find myself drawn towards unfamiliar positions or movements, experiencing what felt like a profound release of physical tension. I've had experiences where it felt as though I was travelling through different lifetimes, returning to my mother's womb, or being born again. On one occasion, I found myself vocalising sounds that resembled an unfamiliar ancient language. I don't claim these were literal memories of previous lives or evidence of supernatural abilities. They were experiences occurring within altered states of consciousness, interpreted through my own understanding of spirituality and existence. But they were extraordinary to experience.
One evening, I was sitting on the floor of my living room with my partner nearby. I'd taken ketamine and was experiencing the familiar sensation of drifting away from my ordinary awareness of my body. I began engaging with gentle grounding and breathing practices because I wanted to feel more connected to my physical experience. Then something remarkable happened. My living room began to transform, almost cinematically, as though the environment around me was being peeled away. My body started moving in waves without any deliberate intention on my part, and the room appeared to dissolve. Suddenly, I was somewhere else. I was sitting in Ibiza Port, outside a clothing boutique. But this wasn't just any boutique. It was mine.
At that point in my life, I'd already begun designing a clothing brand, and what I was experiencing felt like an incredibly vivid encounter with something that hadn't yet happened. The detail, the atmosphere, the feeling of being there, everything seemed extraordinarily real. Then, just as suddenly, I returned to my living room, where my partner was looking at me, completely bewildered by the movements she'd witnessed. What the fuck had just happened? At the time, my intuition interpreted the experience as a future memory. As my spiritual understanding evolved, I began considering the possibility that consciousness, time, and reality might be far more complex than I'd previously imagined. I now hold a personal belief that everything may exist simultaneously, that there are dimensions and possibilities beyond our ordinary perception of reality. Whether I literally experienced another reality is something I cannot prove. Ketamine can profoundly alter our perception of time, space, memory, and the physical world. What I experienced could have been an extraordinarily vivid internally generated reality, but the experience itself was meaningful to me. It expanded the questions I was willing to ask about existence.
An experience can feel completely real without necessarily representing an external reality. The brain is capable of generating extraordinary experiences, and ketamine can disrupt the usual boundaries between sensory information, memory, imagination, and our sense of self. I find that fascinating in itself. We don't need to prove that we've travelled into another dimension to recognise how extraordinary the experience of consciousness can be.
Another dimension of my relationship with ketamine involves emotional processing. Sometimes life feels like a lot. There are situations beyond my control, circumstances I find myself worrying about, and periods when my mind becomes entangled in thoughts that don't necessarily serve me. I've sometimes experienced ketamine as creating a different relationship with those thoughts and emotions. It's almost as though my usual human identity temporarily gets out of the way. Instead of being completely absorbed in a situation, I feel able to observe it from a different perspective. The emotional entanglement can soften, and I experience what feels like an opportunity to let go, relax, and recalibrate.
That doesn't mean the situation has changed. It doesn't mean I've resolved every problem, or that the substance has somehow repaired my nervous system. But subjectively, the experience can feel like stepping outside a familiar mental pattern and recognising that I don't need to remain so emotionally attached to something I cannot control. There's a scientific concept known as self-referential processing, which involves how the brain relates information and experiences to our sense of self. Researchers are investigating how ketamine changes communication between brain networks involved in perception, memory, and self-awareness. Although the precise mechanisms remain complex, these changes may help explain why familiar thoughts, emotions, and experiences can feel so different during dissociative states.
But I've also learned something important. There is a difference between gaining perspective on an emotion and escaping from it, and I've absolutely experienced both. There have been times when I've reached for ketamine believing I was approaching the experience with intention, only to recognise afterwards that I was avoiding something uncomfortable. My mind can be a remarkably convincing little fucker. It can tell me that I'm seeking growth when perhaps I'm simply seeking relief. It can convince me that another extraordinary experience is exactly what I need, when maybe what I actually need is to sit quietly with something uncomfortable and allow myself to feel it. I've become increasingly interested in recognising that distinction.
I've also experienced periods where I began associating particular states of pleasure, freedom, or internal exploration with ketamine itself. I noticed myself becoming reliant upon the substance to access experiences I wanted to have, and that was something I needed to question. I began deliberately stepping away from those patterns and exploring how I could experience similar qualities of freedom, pleasure, and connection without the substance. Through meditation, breathwork, movement, intimacy, and everyday experiences, I began discovering that some of the states I'd previously associated with altered consciousness could also emerge naturally. Not necessarily in exactly the same way, but with qualities that felt familiar. I wanted to experience euphoria without needing to take anything. I wanted to feel freedom without needing to escape my ordinary consciousness. I wanted to become so connected to my body, emotions, and surroundings that the experience of being alive was extraordinary in itself, and gradually, I began discovering that possibility.
Recently, I had another experience that brought together several of the themes I've been exploring throughout my life. I was at home, engaging with ketamine and cannabis, wearing a blindfold and listening to a guided hypnosis meditation. The meditation was focused on cultivating the energy of a rocket, using that sense of momentum and possibility to pursue your dreams. I was exploring ambition, creativity, and the energy to move forwards with the things I wanted to create. And then something completely unexpected happened. I found myself back in school. Not simply remembering school, but experiencing what felt like looking through my own eyes again. I was back in a classroom, revisiting an experience where I'd been called upon to read in front of everyone and had passed out. As that memory emerged, I recognised what felt like a deeply familiar fear. The fear of being seen.
Considering how much of my life I'm now choosing to share publicly through Zenquility, the timing felt particularly significant. I'm putting my face, experiences, vulnerabilities, beliefs, and creative work into the world. I'm allowing myself to be witnessed in ways I wouldn't previously have imagined. And here I was, intending to cultivate energy for my future, suddenly revisiting a moment from my childhood associated with being visible. What happened next was extraordinary. I began taking enormous, deep breaths. I experienced a profound sense of relief, almost as though something I'd been holding for years was finally being allowed to soften. And then came the laughter. Forty-five fucking minutes of hysterical laughter. Not a little giggle. Full-body, uncontrollable, what-the-actual-fuck-is-happening laughter. My entire body was involved. It felt as though the breathing and relief had created space for an extraordinary amount of joy to emerge.
I wasn't expecting any of it. I'd gone into the experience to cultivate rocket energy for pursuing my dreams, and somehow found myself revisiting a childhood memory before laughing my absolute bollocks off. When the experience finished, I went straight into creating. I felt charged, energised, and ready to channel that energy into my business. And since then, I've felt a significant change in my relationship with being seen. It's still a recent experience, so I can't know whether every aspect of that change will remain permanent. But I genuinely feel that something profound shifted. I'm increasingly comfortable putting myself into the world, sharing my experiences, and allowing people to see me without becoming so concerned about how I'm received.
From my perspective, it felt like releasing an old emotional restriction. Scientifically, I can't establish that the experience erased a particular memory or permanently rewired a neural pathway. Ketamine can alter memory, emotional processing, and perception, while hypnosis and suggestion can influence which associations emerge. Memories experienced in altered states aren't necessarily accurate reconstructions of the past, and intense laughter isn't proof that trauma has been physically released. But the meaning of the experience, and how I felt afterwards, were very real to me.
Perhaps the most interesting part is what happens next. Can I continue embodying that freedom in everyday life? Can I keep showing up, expressing myself, and creating without returning to the same old patterns? That's where the experience becomes part of something much larger than the altered state itself. Throughout these twenty years, I've become increasingly fascinated by the relationship between an extraordinary experience and the life we create afterwards. I've encountered perspectives that felt completely unfamiliar, experienced profound shifts in how I relate to my body, and discovered aspects of my emotional world that I'd previously struggled to recognise. But I've also learned that an experience feeling profound doesn't automatically mean it has changed my life. Sometimes the real work begins when the experience finishes, when I'm back in ordinary consciousness, facing the same relationships, responsibilities, insecurities, and everyday circumstances.
Can I bring that new perspective into how I live? Can I relate to myself differently? Can I become more comfortable with vulnerability, more accepting of my body, more willing to express myself, and less consumed by things beyond my control? Those are the questions that interest me now. And alongside the extraordinary experiences, there's another part of this relationship that deserves complete honesty. Ketamine can cause serious harm. I've witnessed the consequences of prolonged use, including severe bladder problems, and I've become increasingly conscious of how much physical damage this substance can cause. Research has linked repeated ketamine use with urinary tract and bladder damage, sometimes severe and irreversible, alongside risks involving memory, cognition, dependence, abdominal pain, and liver or bile duct complications. Combining ketamine with other substances introduces additional unpredictability and danger.
My own experiences have included combinations involving cannabis, MDMA, cocaine, and alcohol at different points in my life. The fact that I survived those experiences doesn't make them safe, and I wouldn't encourage anyone to reproduce them. I've also become increasingly aware of how my own body responds. My physical system feels more sensitive than it once did, and I notice consequences that I might previously have ignored. And my poor fucking nose has certainly had enough adventures. I've spent years exploring experiences that seemed to take me beyond the limitations of my physical body, only to discover that one of the most important parts of the journey is learning how to listen to that body. There's some beautiful irony in that.
I've always maintained certain boundaries around my professional responsibilities, particularly throughout my construction career operating cranes and heavy machinery. I would never knowingly put myself or anyone else in danger by turning up to work impaired. But I've also learned that being capable of working, maintaining relationships, and functioning in everyday life doesn't automatically mean your relationship with a substance is healthy. Dependence doesn't always announce itself through complete chaos. Sometimes it develops quietly, through the increasing belief that a particular experience, emotional state, or form of relief requires a substance. I've recognised elements of that in myself, and I've had to question them.
I still engage with ketamine occasionally, sometimes within nightlife and sometimes during private periods of introspection. But my relationship with it today is very different from the one I had twenty years ago. I question my motivations far more carefully. Why am I choosing this? What am I seeking? Am I genuinely curious about an experience, or am I trying to avoid something? Am I making a conscious choice, or am I simply creating a convincing story around something I already want to do? And importantly, am I listening to my body?
I don't believe intention eliminates the risks of ketamine, and I don't believe experience makes someone immune to its dangers. I've learned that the hard way. I also recognise that developing emotional awareness, meditation practices, and a deeper relationship with my body doesn't make dissociation physically safe. Someone experiencing profound dissociation may be unable to recognise danger, respond to an emergency, or protect themselves. The vulnerability involved in altered states deserves enormous respect. For me, that awareness has become an increasingly important part of my relationship with consciousness. Not simply exploring how far I can travel beyond my ordinary perception, but recognising the responsibility involved in inhabiting a physical human body.
And that's perhaps the greatest evolution of this twenty-year love affair. When I first encountered ketamine at Creamfields, I was fascinated by how completely it could transform my experience of reality. I loved escaping my constantly racing mind. I loved the extraordinary worlds, the unfamiliar sensations, the freedom from my ordinary identity, and the feeling that consciousness was something far more mysterious than I'd previously imagined. Over the years, I've experienced things that expanded my imagination beyond anything I thought possible. I've experienced profound pleasure, extraordinary fear, unfamiliar dimensions, emotional revelations, and moments where my ordinary sense of being human seemed to disappear entirely. I've confronted my mortality, questioned my identity, explored my relationship with my body, and discovered new ways of understanding myself.
But I don't believe ketamine was responsible for everything I've discovered. I believe my life was always going to lead me towards a deeper exploration of consciousness. That's part of my personal spiritual understanding. I see my soul as being on a journey of expansion, and I believe that journey would have unfolded through other experiences, relationships, practices, and challenges if ketamine had never entered my life. This was simply one of the roads I travelled, and what a fucking road it's been.
Today, I'm increasingly interested in what happens when I bring the same curiosity, openness, and willingness to explore into my ordinary everyday existence. When I dance without needing to alter my consciousness. When I experience profound pleasure through intimacy and connection. When I sit quietly in meditation and discover that stillness can be just as extraordinary as movement. When I look at my physical body and feel genuine appreciation for the vessel that has carried me through everything. When I allow myself to be vulnerable, expressive, emotional, playful, and completely fucking human.
I've come to recognise that some of the most extraordinary experiences of consciousness don't necessarily involve leaving our ordinary perception of reality. Sometimes they involve becoming more deeply connected to it. Twenty years ago, I fell in love with ketamine because it seemed to offer me a way out of my body and mind. Today, what interests me most is discovering just how extraordinary it can feel to be fully present within them. And perhaps that's the greatest freedom I've discovered. Not needing to escape being human, but learning to fall completely in love with the experience of being one.
Big Love,
S E A N
Fouder of
Z E N Q U I L I T Y