The Essential Practices of Ketamine-State Yoga
To cultivate mystical experience and support the healing process
I wound up in an accidental k-hole that lasted hours. At the peak, I had no words, no awareness of my body, no sense of myself. But in the midst of this profound dissociation, my yoga practices emerged! The short pranayama I'd been practicing began to happen, as if on its own. The opening of the heart chakra from lovingkindness meditation happened, and the result was dramatic: A sense of all-embracing, all-pervading love. But it wasn't love that I was feeling, or experiencing -- Somehow I WAS it, or I WAS the universe, along with the big reveal that the universe IS love.
By the time the come-down arrived and my ego resurfaced, I was filled with confidence and joy. The stuck energy of depression and anxiety that I had carried around for decades felt spontaneously liberated, transformed to the energy of confidence and action. What happened during that accidental k-hole changed my trajectory. It proved my yoga practice was deep enough to apply itself to the maximal altered state—the most absolute loss of control—my ego could possibly imagine.
From that unexpected discovery, Ketamine-State Yoga was born.
What Is Ketamine-State Yoga?
Ketamine-State Yoga is a collection of practices drawn from many forms of yoga, designed specifically for the ketamine experience in the context of therapeutic and spiritual work. While these practices support virtually any type of therapy or healing modality, KSY itself is neither therapy nor a substitute for therapy.
Let me be clear about what KSY is not:
KSY is not primarily about physical postures. While mainstream culture associates "yoga" with asanas (physical poses), KSY draws much more on other aspects of yoga such as pranayama (breath practice), specific forms of meditation, and chakra yoga. You don't need any background in postural yoga to extract the full benefits.
KSY is not therapy. While many healing modalities mix personal and universal elements of the psyche, KSY is based on yoga's universal understanding of the human being - we all have certain chakras, we all know certain emotions, imbalances, suffering. It may be that an individual's personal obstacles require therapeutic support before universal practices can be fully effective.
KSY is not based on either science or faith. Rather, the practices are built from direct experience, and direct experience is the only basis for our claims. However, KSY will support most faith-based practices AND provide many hints and suggestions for science to explore.
So what IS Ketamine-State Yoga?
At its core, KSY is about cultivating mystical experience and supporting healing modalities - and these two aims are deeply connected. The practices synergize powerfully with ketamine's capacity to simulate a near-death experience, potentially increasing the likelihood of mystical experiences that correlate with therapeutic results.
The Connection to Near-Death Experience
A team of researchers from all over the world used a computer to analyze trip reports from the Erowid database—thousands of accounts of people using over 150 different drugs. They also analyzed the corpus of near-death experience (NDE) reports, 625 narratives of folks who had experienced cardiac arrest or something similarly drastic and survived to tell the tale. Then, they basically asked the computer to mine the texts, words and combinations of words, to measure the degree of similarity of a certain drug experience to an NDE.
As one might expect, the substances with reputations for providing mystical insight, such as psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and Ayahuasca were in the top-10 closest to NDEs. But at the very top of the list—an outlier, far above the rest—was ketamine. More than any other substance, ketamine produces an experience similar to the experience of dying.
This isn't coincidental. Many mystics have explored this terrain through Dream Yoga, NDE-simulating meditation, and awareness during the dying process. Ketamine offers a unique and sacred opportunity to safely simulate this transitional state that mystics across traditions have sought to understand.
Mystical Experience and Healing
There is gathering evidence that mystical experience correlates with robust and durable healing outcomes, for a wide variety of psychedelics (including ketamine). This correlation applies to relief from depression, remission from alcoholism, and more. The higher the mystical experience score on validated questionnaires, the greater the lasting therapeutic benefits.
What's remarkable is how this connects to practices we can cultivate. Recent research has found that simple "awe interventions" can produce significant healing effects. In a 2025 randomized controlled trial, participants were taught to find brief moments of awe through paying attention, slowing down, and expanding on sensations. The results showed a 17% decrease in depression symptoms, 12% decrease in stress, and 16% increase in well-being.
The intervention was remarkably simple: participants practiced just three times daily for less than 30 seconds each time. This connects directly to KSY's integration practices—the simple checking in with reality through one deep belly breath, becoming aware of your state of being and the world around you.
What follows is a condensed version of the KSY practice, focusing on three aspects: Intention, Breathing, and Awareness. These methods have evolved through years of personal exploration and teaching hundreds of folks online and working with yogis and therapists. While KSY is very effective in its current form, it remains a work in progress, open to insights from practitioners who explore this profound intersection of ancient wisdom and modern medicine.
The Essential Practices of KSY
Intention
As one Buddhist master expressed it, the most important part of his rigorous and hours-long meditation routine was "taking the seat." This means the basic attitude toward the posture, the answer to the question, "Why am I doing this?" that is not merely in words but on a gut level.
In engaging with this question, we are having the Conversation with the Ego, a negotiation before we surrender to a wordless state that helps us align our energy.
If the ego is very demanding and addicted to experience and will not settle for anything that's not a promise of pleasurable experience (because it equates this to remission from pain) – and you know yourself enough to notice this! – then you can rest assured, the methods of KSY will draw out the most extraordinary experiences the ketamine state has to offer! The wildest visuals, the most powerful yet inexpressible feels. That is, even if you've got no spiritual motive, maybe you're engaged in a therapeutic process but deep down you are just craving a good time, these methods will deliver.
Note: If this is the nature of the Conversation with the Ego, to admit you're doing breathwork etc. to produce the most extraordinary experience, then it's important to check in frequently. Is it more about learning, exploring, facing challenges, or pleasure and excitement? If the latter category, that could signal an addictive relationship with the practice.
If the reason for engaging with KSY is more spiritual, it can be helpful to remind yourself about what ketamine IS: A substance that simulates a near-death experience. Many mystics have explored this terrain through Dream Yoga, NDE-simulating meditation, and awareness during the dying process. It is a unique and sacred opportunity to use ketamine to safely simulate this transitional state.
Finally, KSY suggests a personal intention rely as little as possible on language. A personal intention is not necessary at all. A universal intention (that could apply to all sentient beings) such as, "May I surrender at the bottom of my breath and let go with love," is sufficient. But if there is a personal reason for practicing KSY, try to feel it in your heart and allow as few words as possible to hem it in. If relying on only a few words makes your intention feel less personal, so be it – reflect on how many other sentient beings would share this intention. Feel it in your heart, on your breath. Resist the temptation to elaborate in words.
Breathing
The pranayama that synergizes with the NDE-simulating nature of ketamine AND can actually be performed in a peak dissociative state where there is no conscious willpower, is a version of Bahya Kumbhaka, retention of the exhalation (at the bottom of the lungs).
It's best to choose a rhythm of deep, conscious breaths that is short and sweet, can almost be heard like music and can certainly be felt in the body without the need to count. Inhalations are deep, from the belly, and exhalations just spill out as you completely let go.
So you choose a rhythm of this deep, conscious breathing – three, four, five breaths, in a rhythm you can both hear and feel – and then you allow the final exhalation of the cycle to keep going, and going…
This is where the infinite subtlety of the practice resides, the most intimate work you can do with your own emotions/energy – the very bottom of the exhalation, as you continue to let a little more air out, a little more, a little more…
Until the desire to inhale is very strong and then you allow the air to rush back in. Remember, it is through letting go rather than pushing that the lungs get very close to empty. Allow yourself to rest at the bottom with (near) empty lungs – feel what you are feeling – this is the moment, the rushing back in of the life-giving breath, that transformation/rebirth/mystical experience is waiting.
Staying with the practice as you near the bottom of the exhalation is crucial. When the breath is fully surrendered and passively held at the bottom, there is often a sudden emergence of all the body is storing, all the emotional pain, very vivid. The mind veers wildly from this place of ultimate surrender (the deep quiet and silence of death) into its usual fixations with a hyped-up urgency – after all, your cells feel, "I can't breathe!"
For those of us carrying trauma, it can feel seemingly impossible to let go. This is where a gentle, self-parenting voice becomes essential. I have learned to whisper reassuringly to myself, "Stay with it," reminding me to return to awareness. A trauma-informed approach calls for less rigid and restrictive practices and expectations – it is very hard to surrender completely, and that's okay. Deep in the ketamine state at the bottom of the breath, there is an incredible opportunity to experience that ultimate surrender, and from the disappearance of the body at that point emerges the wildest creativity of the mind in the most bizarre, vivid hallucinations infused with mystical energy.
Awareness
To both draw out maximal healing benefits of KSY and extend these benefits into everyday life (integration), work with awareness.
During the come-down of the trip – which can be seen as a slow fade from the peak back to "ordinary mind" – bring awareness to points of the body while breathing consciously. The simplest version of this practice involves the three upper chakras – the forehead ("third eye"), the throat and the heart center (in the middle of the rib cage).
Each time, you bring awareness to that point with the deep-belly inhalation, and when you exhale fully, you let everything go, allow all tension in that area to dissipate.
The mind will flare up with thoughts and you return to the body and breath – inhale, focus on the heart center (for example), all the feelings in that region, and exhale letting everything go. Mind flares up again, return again to awareness of body and breath.
On the most superficial level, this gives immediate insight into the nature of the ego (ordinary mind). You can see the habitual thoughts spring into being and feel how your body responds with habitual emotions constituted of clenching, holding, movement and even pain in the body. You can realize so viscerally that this mechanism of thoughts and feelings is not YOU – after all, you return again and again to awareness, momentarily leaving the swarm of thoughts and feelings (the ego) behind.
But on much deeper levels, the transformation is underway. Each time you return your awareness to body and breath – each time this cycle ends with a long, surrendered exhalation, the nervous system re-learns safety, presence, the capacity to re-ground itself despite all those years of re-traumatizing habits.
And on the deepest level, awareness IS the rebirth, the glimpse of the mystical truth. It is available at any moment, no ketamine required!
When therapeutic interventions may be most needed: While KSY prepares the ground for healing, full translation to therapeutic results may require professional support, especially when there's stored deep trauma. A therapist will have ideas about what prevents their patients from letting go and can provide guidance for working with whatever emerges at the bottom of the breath.
Integration
Once the come-down is over, the trip is in the past, the long slog of integration commences. You can rely on the foundational practices of Tibetan Dream Yoga adapted for KSY.
All it takes is one deep belly breath. You "check in" with reality, become aware of your state of being and the world around you – one deep belly breath, let it go with the exhalation, all the way out. And repeat, the next time you're inspired. There could be a single, mantra-like word associated with it, if that moves you, like, "This." Or, "I." Or, "I am." The words don't matter – it's the feeling of presence, the awareness of body and breath.
When this practice, of awareness of body and breath, is conducted in the ketamine state and in everyday life afterwards, a profound connection can be made. This is akin to what the Tibetan Dream Yoga master told the assembled students years ago. He had taught lucid dreaming practices for several days, yet here he raised his arms to indicate the whole room, the whole world, and said, "You have to remember. THIS is the ultimate lucid dream."
This applies to deeply integrating the mystical experiences that may arise in the ketamine state. The moment of unity, of abiding in your True Nature (or however you put it), is the peak of the ketamine trip – and it's also this moment right NOW.
A Path Forward
Ketamine-State Yoga offers a path to the most profound experiences the ketamine state can provide while supporting genuine healing and transformation. Those (like me) working with deep trauma may benefit from professional therapeutic support alongside these practices.
KSY is not a rigid system - personal engagement and creativity are emphasized, and practitioners are encouraged to design their own practices, tweaking and adjusting as needed. However, to qualify as KSY, the goal must be some form of self-realization (union of body, breath and mind; union with the "True Self") with the ketamine state serving as a place to practice more deeply and learn more quickly.
I discovered these methods by accident about six years ago and have been refining them through teaching hundreds of folks online and working with yogis and therapists. The paradigm suggested by KSY - infrequent sessions with careful preparation and integration - is relevant to harm reduction and clinical practice. But most importantly, it offers a path to deep transformation through direct experience of mystical states, supported by time-tested yogic methods.