SKetamine as a molecule is powerful, but cannot be considered complete without its extra-pharmacologic processes. These are known as “set and setting” and can be thought of as the context in which you experience the psychedelic medicine. These are important in all types of health interventions; for example, when a person takes a weight loss medication, we know that the medication is assisting with the weight loss but cannot succeed without deep work on the person’s behaviors and emotions. Stress eating will successfully overcome any benefit the weight loss gives the person. Even a surgery, such as one to repair a knee injury, cannot be effective without the proper exercises to strengthen muscles around the knee and learn proper movements to extend recovery.

Psychedelics are special in that they are perhaps the most subject to set and setting. The attitudes, culture, and knowledge you bring into the experience will vastly affect your healing and growth with the medicine. This is why we focus so much on preparation. It is one of the three most important components of your journey. The other two are the medicine itself, and integration, which we’ll learn more about in our integration module.

Set refers to your mindset as you enter your psychedelic experience. This includes your attitudes and expectations for the experience. It also includes what we refer to as your intention. Ketamine is a powerful internal journey type of medicine, and at the right dosing you will experience a starkly different state of consciousness regardless of your mindset. However, your mindset towards healing, growth, openness, connection, or other concepts will greatly affect your experience.

Note that this is different from what you might think of as a placebo effect. Most people understand the placebo effect to be getting an expected effect out of a medication. For psychedelics, it is a bit more about the interpretation of what happens during the session. The medicine will give you an experience, and whether you dismiss it and go back to your routines in life or you take the insights and integrate them will change the power of the experience.

Setting is a vast concept, and includes much more than simply the room in which you have your ketamine session. Setting includes your space, the sounds, the people around you in the building you’re in, the city and country you belong to, and even the world around you. The culture of the time you live in has a large effect - some of the early research studies conducted with LSD were done with a very harsh and clinical approach which led to “bad” or challenging trips. Now, as we are entering the psychedelic renaissance, people are experiencing more positively transformative experiences during their sessions with psychedelic medicine.

For many people, you may not yet have community in your experiences around psychedelics. We offer integration done in groups so that you have others going through similar experiences to share with. We will also offer some tips about how to talk about your experiences with others in Talking About Your Journey.

We will go into specifics around preparing your set in   Intention Setting / Mindset Preparation and your setting in Setting Preparation, but here is a brief overview of your checklist to help you understand the upcoming steps:

• Preparation call with your Curio Coach

• Reflection on your current mindset

• Reflect on your cultural and world setting

• Prepare your immediate setting (your room, tokens for your session)

• Prepare your music playlist

• Set your intention

• Experience your ketamine session

• Rest and reflect

• Integration call with your Curio Coach

• Integration in groups and with your loved ones and/or therapist

• Continued integration over time with those around you

While we have gone over a lot of details in this chapter on set and setting, remember that this is an unpredictable and magical journey. When you are deep in your ketamine experience, it may be hard to change anything about your set and setting. This is okay, and we recommend you remember to “let go.” By releasing control to the medicine, you will find often that this makes room for more magic to happen. Remember that you are safe, and that you will come out the other end regardless of how it is feeling. Recall all the time you spent preparing and recognize that you have done all you can. Try not to over-optimize and allow the medicine to help you self-heal.