Beads on a Mala: Birth of a Medicine Woman

Insights from my introduction to ketamine assisted psychotherapy, and the path of Becoming.

I grew up taught to fear drugs and especially psychedelics. Do you remember that old commercial, “this is your brain on drugs”? Yeah, that was my indoctrination.

Psychedelics are not “drugs”. They are sacred and powerful medicines and when held that way, with respect and honor, they can open doors and remove obstacles you never knew existed.

I set off on the next stage of my psychospiritual evolution, without having a clue of where it would lead. I only knew that it was calling to me. This stage would take me deeper into myself and into the mystical than I ever thought possible. I stepped into the world of ketamine assisted psychotherapy with optimism, trepidation and a very talented ketamine psychotherapist.

What follows are my integration notes, written after each session and sent to my therapist, from my first two ketamine psychotherapy sessions.

Ketamine assisted psychotherapy was an entryway, not only to myself and my disowned parts, but also to the world of embracing my inner Medicine Woman.

Ultimately it was an entry to becoming a certified psychedelic psychotherapist, but that is a tale for another day.

Beads on a Mala: My First Journey

I entered my therapist’s office with my eye shade and favorite pillow in hand for comfort and security. The most I had ever experimented with was a bit of weed in college so this was truly unbroken ground.

I selected a card from an oracle deck as part of the preparation ritual and was immediately blown away. I would continue to read this card and meditate on it’s message for months to come. The words landed deep in my soul and began to resonate with something that I had forgotten long ago.

Now, I was beginning to remember.

from the Rumi Oracle Deck byAlana Fairchild

When you are conscious, a cloud of sadness surrounds you.  When you are beyond consciousness, the moon rests in your arms.  When you are conscious, the beloved moves out of your reach. When you're beyond consciousness, The ecstasy of love moves your way.  When you are conscious you are depressed like fall. When you are beyond consciousness, the winter cold feels like Spring. All your wavering is due to your longing to be stable! Look for instability Until you become stable.  - Rumi

“All your wanting comes from your longing to become stable… I am the you that is wise, that trusts in life, that knows. I am the you that sees reality rather than appearance. I am the you that knows how to be happy and free.” - Alana Fairchild

After discussing my intent for the journey with the therapist, I took the medicine, placed a mask over my eyes, trusted in my Inner Healing Intelligence and my therapist

and I let go.

I saw colors, mostly purple and green. And more surprisingly, I felt those colors too. I remember saying “I feel purple!” which made no sense to me but still somehow felt right.

My notes of the session, recorded the day after, follow.

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There was so much in the journey that it’s hard to parse it. It feels like if I try to capture it with words then I’ll lose something. But if I don’t crystallize it with words, I might also lose it. Memory is fleeting.

Beads on a mala.

Connecting to the divine feminine and a lineage of women healers.

Feeling like I was “home”.

I am a divergent being, a walking dialectic.

Cognitive and spiritual, male and female, need to control and desire to let go, skeptical and trusting, powerful and fragile, crass and refined, goofy and elegant, thinking and feeling, work-obsessed and collapsed, introverted and desirous of community, highly intelligent and gullible, kapha and pitta.

I vacillate between extremes and struggle to live in balance, in the in between, in the Both-And rather than the Either-Or.

For most of my life, since my father’s passing, I have been terrified of death. The terror isn’t about my death, it’s about being left alone by those I love. It triggers a very old abandonment wound.

Connecting the beads of memory and the lineage of women, I believe, will help me feel stronger and less alone.

I am drawn to powerful, self reliant and magical women. Those who presence is palpable when they walk into a room. Those who have a magical, ethereal essence. Those who stand strong and challenge stereotypes. My maternal grandmother was a pilot in a time when women didn’t work. My mother raised me to never be dependent on anyone financially. My paternal grandmother was elegant, sensitive and magical and she was a Healer. My teachers in the psychotherapy and healing worlds - Susie (grad school professor with Goddess energy), Janina (trauma expert and mentor), Manuela (somatic therapist and professor), Maniko (songstress and healer), Joyce (voice teacher from high school), my old kundalini yoga teacher, and Meg (a shaman I worked with for soul retrieval).

They were all attuned to a higher resonance.

I am drawn to the idea you shared that I am part of a “secret tribe of healers”. A part of me feels that this is true. And a part of me is skeptical and thinks that this is a bid for relevance and self importance and really means nothing. It’s painful to experience both and be in such self doubt. If this is true, then it’s painful to not be seen.

When I was a freshman in college a few of us would stay up through the wee hours talking about life and philosophy. I recall a conversation with my friends at 3am (everyone is brilliant at 3am). One of my friends said I was just a person: “You’re not special. You’re not shit. You’re just a person.” I spun out on that for days.

I had never learned to live in the in-between.

I was told by my mom “You are special, you have the world by the tail”. I was told by my father that I didn’t work hard enough, that I only excelled because society had low standards. Am I one or the other and if so, which one?

What if I am NOT special? What then?

I feel tears in my eyes as I write this last line. I want to believe that all these beads of memory are meaningful, synchronous and synergistic. I am scared that I am assigning false meaning.

Beads on a mala. Women healers.

I remember being in a workshop on vicarious trauma with Manuela, a trauma therapist and author. She led us in a visualization exercise where we called in our imaginal support team.

When I started to connect the dots under the medicine, it felt like connecting to that imaginal support team.

I also want to work on connections to my voice, which feels stuck and stagnant in my throat. I first learned of the connection between my voice and my psychological/emotional state from my voice teacher, Joyce. I was working with her during the timer of my parents divorce and through my dad’s death. She wrote her dissertation on voice analysis. She could tell a lot just by the sounds of my voice. I remember one time that we spent the whole lesson breathing. She didn’t want me to try to sing that day because she could hear the turmoil in my mind and body just by listening to the tones in my voice.

When I am in the flow of song, it feels like I am a vessel and my voice flows effortlessly.

When I am anxious or upset, my voice sticks and I feel betrayed but it. My 5th chakra is blocked. I haven’t sung in years. I don’t even listen to music any more and it used to be my whole world. My fondest dream was to be a singer. I turned my back on that dream because it hurt to not be able to realize it.

That is part of what I want to discover from this work. To connect with these parts of me.

Physically I have been very tired. I also had a terrible headache for most of the day yesterday. Woke up with it in fact. There is sadness not being able to communicate any of my experience to my husband. This is not something he can comprehend and I don’t want to try to explain it to him, or to anyone really.

Reflections from my KAP Therapist:

You had quite a beautiful and magnificent first KAP session.

I’m glad you’ve been able to stay in a low-key and reflective space so your system can absorb and realign with what happened.

It was wonderful as well to witness your reconnecting with so many points (beads on the mala) of magic mystery sacred and feminine goddess lineage.

As I said, a rare first journey, and one to be remembered.

So much is happening so quickly in your KAP process and I’m very excited about where it’s taking you… Especially beyond the symptom relief part of the process to the deeper integration of various parts of yourself, to understand yourself in new ways, into walking in the world in new ways. I think you will be reclaiming some things you started earlier in your life and then linking them up with aspects of your gift as a healer which does include walking in two worlds at once and understanding yourself even if others don’t understand you.

Consciousness expansion then contraction can be exhausting until you get used to it. Much around KAP is very hard to share with people and that can make it many things from sacred and private to lonely and frustrating.

KAP works on many levels. As you will learn from all the patients you’re going to treat, anxiety that the benefits are going to go away is a very common response to the benefits appearing.

You cannot separate the journey from the biological from the psychological from the archetypal or spiritual. I know you know this somewhere deep inside of you.

My intuition is keep slowing down, less is more, lots of silence and quiet and stillness. Give your system a chance to find a new balance.

Take it slow and Don’t Push the River.

Questions, the Womb and the Cosmos: My Second Journey

The second journey was much different from the first, but just as powerful and maybe even more so. I find myself wrestling with many questions and though I want the answers.

I wonder if what I need to do is to marinate in the questions themselves.

💭 (“It’s the question that drives us Neo”) 💭

I am finding that silence and stillness are very appealing, and healing for every part of me. Perhaps it is because I need space to contemplate those questions.

The image that stands out to me the most from the journey yesterday is that of being in a womb and the cosmos simultaneously. There’s a deep comfort and nurturing in that space.

I can be at once alone and connected, and feel completely fulfilled.

When starting this work I had concerns that psychedelics would be frightening and I found ketamine to be gentle and loving. I saw and felt a female presence and it became clear to me that ketamine, at least for me, is feminine.

I also had a realization that “I am a creature of polarity”.

The phrase sounds odd but it’s the one that came to me so very strongly. I no longer feel like I am a duality or a walking dialectic but rather it’s my nature to exist simultaneously in two different polarities. It’s just who I am. I think it actually may be one of the things that I use in my work as a therapist, and also a reason that it’s difficult for people to truly understand me.

I see synchronicities everywhere.

The minute I try to begin to articulate them I get flustered and I can’t seem to capture it with words. I know I’m the right track but I don’t know where this leads.

I do know that the way I am in the world is going to be different.

Some themes I’m seeing throughout this process...

divine feminine, synchronicities across my whole life, connections to a lineage of healers past and present, craving quiet and stillness, craving color, disinterest in the mundane.

I realized that I have been driven by fear - that’s the urgency. I feel an urgent need to “outrun” the fear.

It was a massive cosmic download to take in. I have so many questions and so much to sort through. Please re-affirm for me that this is all real: the tribe, universal truths, cosmic connections. When I am in that space I don't question it, but the further away I am, the more I fall back to skepticism. I know it's real, but it would help to hear that again.

Therapist:

Yes it is all very real, very very real. I understand this is new for you to be able to hold it between experiences of direct access and direct awareness. Don’t worry about that, it takes time to be able to hold this level of expanded consciousness in every day life. It takes a lot of time and a lot of practice a lot of meditation a lot of journeys. But just give it a lot of time. There are aspects of you that are not fully in alignment with this yet and that takes more time.

Yes, it is real. Sometimes the real and the almost real remains hidden, as it should.

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I contemplated that last note from my KAP therapist deeply. Somethings are private, sacred and not to be shared. Am I violating that sacredness with sharing this very intimate view of my first journeys? Perhaps. But years have passed since those first journeys and I think that there is beauty in reflection and in sharing. While these medicines are not for everyone, I believe that the experiences of awe and reawakening lost parts are an important piece of healing work and

I am choosing to share my story based on the hope that some will find it resonant and inspiring.

Years later I am a certified psychedelic psychotherapist myself. I still reflect on those early lessons, now deeply integrated into my being. I am grateful that I journaled the experience. I never intended those words to enter the light of day. They were private, intimate. But now that years have passed it feels ok to share them. Perhaps they will help someone who is on their own path of self discovery.

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Linnea Butler, LMFT is a trauma therapist, psychedelic psychotherapist and founder of Bay Area Mental Health. She writes about healing journeys from both a personal and a professional lens. Before becoming a psychotherapist, Linnea was a research scientist and she is deeply intrigued by the intersection of science and spirituality. and the liminal spaces in between.

©2025 Linnea Butler