Source: Andrea Piacquadio

I live a life built by well-maintained pillars of truth, integrity, community, responsibility, psychological health, and rigor. It is great: really. But ketamine reintroduced me to long lost childhood companions of silliness, goofiness, and play. Besides being delighted to reacquaint with these old friends, I had no idea how successfully they would coral me towards joy.

While I have no recollection in life of a decision to eliminate silliness from my approach to life, or to others, or to myself, I most definitely have lingering critical parts of me that shame signs of personal weakness/vulnerability/naivety/youth/gullibility. Like many of us, “I am a real tough kid, I can handle my shit”. While it is essential in life to be good at holding our stuff together and functioning when necessary, it isn’t a particularly complementary set of skills for finding a pathway to a fun, playful, joyous life.

How Ketamine Helps

To be clear, I did not arouse from a ketamine medicine journey with a free and joyful heart, nor did I even have a psychedelic journey that spoke to themes of silliness or joy. What happened, over the weeks during my ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, is silliness simply started to appear as an option. And for the first time since I was a kid, it felt like a worthy and relevant option to pursue.

And then, I started to choose it. And then, I started to find places to insert it, because it felt good. To be clear, most of this exploration of play and goofiness I did in the quiet of my home, alone. That is what it took to feel safe enough to be uncomposed, undefended, not grown, childish. And once able to embrace my young, naïve, curious, imaginative, playful self, I could undertake a new journey of discovery. Silliness was the most delicious of gateway drugs to a somatic, full bodied, lived, rediscovery of the world, with all the years of self-work, ready to have joyful life breathed into it.

Psychedelics share a common denominator of disrupting default mode processing and providing increased neuroplasticity/mental fluidity, allowing for novel thought pathways. A somewhat unique quality of the psychedelic effect of ketamine is a simultaneous somatic lowering of psychological defense mechanisms. Defenses can be tricky things, of course. Wildly self-protective during the years we build them to defend against real live dangers in our physical and psychic worlds, they become the barriers/resistors to self-actualization. Ketamine helps us kindly set them to the side, still known entities to be considered but no longer the handcuffs tying us to the past.

Silliness Is a Gateway Drug

You don’t need ketamine or ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to find silliness (though they might help)! Silliness can be easy to find if you can open to it.

Have a deep thought? Sing it. Put it to a dance move. Walk around your space saying the deep thought over and over in different silly or powerful or kind voices. “I really am good enough”. “I am f*-king good enough”. “You know who is fine? Me”. “I am totally pulling it off enough”. “In fact, I could be killing it”

Have pets or other things like plants or pictures you like to talk to? Be goofy with them. They can't judge you. You will hear them judging you, but you will know 100% that you are hearing only your inner critic and have to face just how much you won't let yourself have a little fun. If you find out that you can't let yourself have a little fun at home by yourself because of an inner critic, you will be one massive step closer to dismantling you internal prohibition against joy.

Who knows. You may end up laughing, or crying, but you will be alive, and you won’t be stuck in your old, repetitive, boring, stuck narrative. Give it a go. Play.