Ketamine Didn’t Take Me to the Cosmos. It Took Me Home.

Ketamine Didn’t Take Me to the Cosmos. It Took Me Home.

When I started ketamine treatment, I didn’t drift into galaxies or meet spirit animals. I wasn’t floating in some psychedelic daydream. Instead, I landed right back where everything began—home. Not just emotionally, but literally: Curitiba, Brazil. The smells. The streets. The soundtrack of my youth. My body was in a chair in Utah, but my soul? It was dancing through Jovem Pan’s Eurodance playlists, walking past street vendors, sitting in the classroom where I first felt broken.

If I’m going to talk about what ketamine is helping me uncover, I have to start there—with the roots I tried to outrun. Because healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about returning to the parts of yourself you were forced to abandon just to survive.

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Psyche. Delos. Soul Reveal.

The word psychedelic comes from Greek: psyche (soul) and delos (to reveal). And that’s exactly what this journey has been—a soul reveal. Not through trippy visuals or angelic downloads, but through flashbacks, echoes, and emotional muscle memory.

As a child, I was obsessed with techno and Eurodance. Jovem Pan was my life source, blasting the energy I didn’t know how to express. That music didn’t just hype me up during the day—it was my lullaby at night. It matched the storm inside me. This song? The Summer Is Magic. Still gives me chills.

Brazilians don’t do subtle. We’re loud. Expressive. Full of color, flavor, volume. You see it most in how we sing Happy Birthday—listen to this chaos. Now compare that to the American version, which, let’s be real, sounds like a  funeral. I love you, my American friends—but that birthday song was one of my biggest culture shocks. Why are we mourning someone’s life instead of celebrating it?

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The Loud Kid Who Felt Invisible

I was a shy, undiagnosed ADHD kid growing up in Brazil. That’s not a quirky childhood anecdote—it was hell. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t sit still, couldn’t keep up. The only reason I passed third grade was because my teacher, Professora Daniela, stayed after school with me every single day. She saw something in me I couldn’t even see in myself.

Still, I felt powerless. How do you ask for what you need in a world that doesn’t feel safe?

Then came the move to the U.S.—Utah.   And four years later, ninth grade. And suddenly I wasn’t invisible anymore. I’d walk down the hallway and people would yell my name like I was a celebrity: “Fernando!!” I didn’t know how to handle it. It was like being handed a megaphone after years of being muted. And yeah—I got loud. Obnoxious. Disruptive. Still undiagnosed. Still emotionally raw. I didn’t have the tools to regulate any of it.

Then came the whiplash: I had to move again. Three moves in two years. Every time I found a sense of belonging, the rug got ripped out from under me.

But nothing compares to what broke me open during the first half of senior year. I won’t unpack it all here—but let’s just say I was spiraling. Hard.

And yet… people showed up.

I’d wake up in class to handwritten notes, cookies, even flowers—sometimes left at my house. A girl from Spanish class showed up to school, still swollen from wisdom tooth surgery, just to see me before I moved.

After I left, my Pleasant Grove friends made a damn club just to be in the yearbook. They mailed me a hoodie with my name embroidered on it. The debate team went to Georgia and hand-delivered my yearbook. Who does that?

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Receiving What I Didn’t Know I Deserved

For the first time, I wasn’t chasing love—I was receiving it.

When you grow up emotionally neglected, you learn to perform. To people-please. To disappear in just the right way so you don’t upset anyone. But here they were—loving me just for existing. Not because I was useful. Not because I was easy. Just because I mattered.

That cracked something open.

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The Healing of Feeling Big

I used to think my problem was that I felt too much. Too intense. Too dramatic. No brakes, no filters. Just a firehose of feelings and nowhere safe to put them.

Ketamine didn’t quiet that down. It turned up the volume. It brought me face to face with every emotion I’d shoved into the corners of my nervous system—rage, longing, grief, shame, even love. But instead of exploding, they unfolded.

I went back to Colégio Marista Santa Maria. Parque São Lourenço. Passeio Público. I saw the boy I used to be—trying so hard to be good, to be quiet, to not be too much.

And I got it. I didn’t need to stop feeling big. I just needed a container big enough to hold all of it.

That’s what ketamine gave me.

Not a high. A homecoming.

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Psychedelic Doesn’t Mean Escaping Reality. It Means Finally Facing It.

I didn’t dissociate—I re-associated. With my pain. My story. My joy. My  worth. I finally stopped running from the boy I used to be—and started speaking for him.

This isn’t a miracle cure. It’s not a shortcut to happiness.

But it is a space to feel all the shit you’ve been too afraid to touch.

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Ready for Your Return?

If you’re holding pain that therapy alone couldn’t crack, if you’ve felt like you’re just too much—maybe it’s time to try something different. I trusted Better U with my journey, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Go to betterucare.com and use code NANDO84 at checkout.

Start your return.

A Love Letter to My Mom – Happy Mother’s Day

Today, I want to take a break from writing about ketamine treatments—though healing might sneak in here anyway—to focus on something pure and simple: how much I love my mom. 

 My mom is the kindest, most empathetic, and loving soul I know. 

 I've watched her bring water to the mechanic working on her car, buy groceries for missionaries, and consistently go out of her way to compliment people in the service industry—always making others feel seen and appreciated. She used to feed stray cats, who became so attached to her they practically adopted her. That’s just who she is—love in action.

 I’m so proud of the work she’s doing in launching her small business, and she’s been one of my biggest cheerleaders in building mine. She’s been incredibly supportive through my ketamine integration, helping me find direction and grounding when I needed it most.

 And let’s talk about her food—absolutely delicious. She brings so much joy, energy, and comfort wherever she goes. Hanging out with her is simply the best. She's been a rock for me as I push through my final college classes, always offering encouragement and reminding me that it’s never too late to bloom.

 She also has the best taste in music. Car rides with her are like personal soundtracks to our memories—so fun and full of life. 

 When we were kids and bored out of our minds, she threw a birthday party for our stuffed animals. That kind of love sticks with you. She was also the most devoted dog mom to our beloved Lacey.

 There’s so much more I could say, but I’ll end with this: Mom, I love you with all my heart. Happy Mother’s Day. Thank you for being you!!!

Finding Creative Outlets Post Ketamine

 

If you’ve done ketamine therapy, you already know—the real trip starts after the session. The medicine cracks your emotional armor wide open, and for the next 24 to 48 hours, you’re swimming in a flood of insights, memories, grief, hope, and sometimes straight-up chaos. Especially if you have ADHD like I do, your brain’s just on. Constant downloads. Constant spinning. No off switch.

And then what?

That’s where creative outlets saved my ass.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, ketamine sessions often come with journal prompts. You reflect beforehand, and then again after. In my case—someone with deep grief wounds—I was asked to write letters to loved ones I’ve lost. In later sessions, I imagined how they would write back. Sounds heavy? It is. It’s also healing. It cracks open emotional doors I didn’t know were still sealed shut.

But you don’t get to stay in that soft, spiritual state forever. Eventually, the trip fades, and you’re left with the hangover. You feel exposed, vulnerable, sometimes straight-up raw as hell. I even made the mistake of doing a session too early once to try to “fix” that feeling—spoiler: it backfired. You can’t rush integration. You have to live it.

So how do you hold yourself through that emotional storm?

You create.

Right now, I’ve got this blog. I’ve gone back to jiu-jitsu. My love of math came roaring back—and not just as an academic pursuit, but as a source of self-compassion. I even wrote about that here.

Since my cousin died, I picked up the sax again. I’ve done improv classes. I’ve thrown myself into my Amazon FBA business. I'm prepping for actuary exams. Every one of those things is a way to anchor myself after the ketamine sessions. Not to escape the pain, but to process it. To transmute it.

I’ve realized that sharing my ketamine journey publicly has added another layer of meaning. Just being real about the ups, the missteps, the breakthroughs—it gives me purpose. And it lets others know they're not crazy for feeling completely unmoored afterward.

So if you’re on this journey too, I want to say this:

Don’t let the insights rot inside you.
Create something.
It doesn’t have to be pretty.
It just has to be real.

And if you're considering starting ketamine treatment, I highly recommend checking out Better U. Use my promo code NANDO84 to get started with a $100 discount. It’s a way to support my journey and maybe change your own life in the process.

Let the medicine crack you open.
Let creativity be the way you stay open.
This is what healing actually looks like.

How Ketamine Helped Me To Heal From Religious Trauma

 

One of the most powerful things ketamine brought out of me was the ability to hold both honesty and compassion—to name my truth without needing to erase someone else’s. I know quite a few people reading this are still in the religion I grew up in. And I want to be clear: I still love and have a great relationship with many individuals in that faith. This post is not about shaming people. It's about naming the wound. It's about calling out the system. It’s about reclaiming what was stolen from me.

Let me start with this story:
Back in 2017, I was on a short Sunday hike. And out of nowhere, I had a full-blown panic attack. I lost my breath. I felt like I was carrying a fucking boulder on my chest. Over and over, I had to whisper to myself, “I am not sinning for going hiking on a Sunday.” That panic didn’t come from nowhere—it was the residue of years of indoctrination. And the worst part? This happened four years after I had stopped going to church… and seven years after I stopped believing.

Let’s go back to 2010. That’s when I found out the narrative I was taught in church didn’t match the actual history. I felt completely isolated, terrified to tell anyone. I was afraid. Angry. And that anger started leaking into other parts of my life. I fell into a rabbit hole of doubt, shame, and confusion. It took me eight fucking years to stop feeling guilty for drinking coffee. I had major trust issues—especially with myself.

Even earlier—when I was a missionary in Orlando—we were required to read a quote or scripture every single day reinforcing the idea that your happiness and prosperity were conditional on obedience to the church. I had a zone leader companion tell me I had to choose between my antidepressants or Jesus Christ. My dad had died just 18 months before. I was carrying grief, untreated ADHD, and barely threatened with deportation. When I got home, everything I had buried came flooding back. The guilt. The anxiety. The belief that if I wasn’t suffering, I must be doing something wrong.

I read The Miracle of Forgiveness multiple times—this book that used to be recommended by the church as part of the repentance process. All it did was teach me to hate myself more. If a book written by a so-called prophet—quoted in General Conference—can just be tossed aside and go out of print, then none of their prophets, past or present, hold any value for me anymore. Same with their whiplash rebranding—spending millions on the “I’m a Mormon” campaign, only to later say that “Mormon” is a victory for Satan? Fuck that. But I’m gonna stop there before my blood boils.

When I first started ketamine treatment in June 2024, it wasn’t even for religious trauma. It was for grief. In February of that year, I lost a friend who was like a father figure. Two weeks later, I lost another friend to suicide. My nervous system tapped out. I had already spent almost two years crying over my cousin’s death… and that grief resurfaced the old pain from losing my dad.

My first ketamine sessions felt like a full replay of my life—but through the eyes of an observer. I wasn't trapped in the story anymore. I was witnessing it. And what blew me away wasn’t just the medicine itself—the emotional surgery happening in real time, the rewiring I could feel happening in my brain—it was also how in sync Better U was with the entire process. They knew exactly which songs would touch which parts of the brain and when. It wasn’t random. It was precise. It was fucking sacred.

Part of the ketamine treatment protocol is to go really easy on yourself for the next 4–8 hours. And you don’t just “feel relaxed”—you become this walking embodiment of self-compassion. That kind of softness toward myself? I had never felt it before. No disrespect, but I never once experienced that kind of self-compassion as a Mormon.

Here’s a snapshot:
On my mission, my companion and I passed out from pure physical exhaustion and took a nap. We needed it. We were done. But instead of anyone checking in to see if we were okay, the zone and district leaders saw us, ratted us out, and the mission president chewed us out over the phone. That man was Joseph B. Wirthlin’s son-in-law. So you know what kind of rigidity I’m talking about. No empathy. Just punishment.

Ketamine? It does the opposite.
You start with journal prompts that get under your skin in the best way—pulling up buried memories, thought patterns, emotional knots. Then the medicine hits, and it drops you into this deep meditative state, expanding your sense of self and opening your brain to neuroplasticity. The gold comes in the integration afterward—which is what this blog is really about.

In math, integration is about summing up the tiniest pieces of a region infinitely, to find the area under the curve. That metaphor landed hard for me. Ketamine integration isn’t about "avoiding the appearance of evil"—it’s about sitting with the truth of what’s actually there.

Integration is the act of reflecting back on the treatment experience while your mind is still open and flexible. You take the insights, the images, the feelings that rose up during your session, and you zoom out. You look at them as a whole and ask: What is this showing me? What needs to shift? What patterns can I let go of now that I’ve seen where they came from?

It’s about giving new meaning to old pain.

It’s about learning to listen to your body, your emotions, your memories—instead of just shutting them down or quoting a hymn to push the “unwanted thoughts” away. Ketamine doesn’t tell you to shove your pain in a drawer and fake joy. It teaches you to sit with the pain long enough to learn what it’s here to teach you.

If you've made it this far, thank you. Writing this wasn't easy, but it was necessary. Ketamine didn’t just help me process grief—it helped me reclaim parts of myself that had been buried under shame, fear, and rigid conditioning. It gave me space to finally breathe, to finally feel, and to finally heal—not through suppressing my truth, but by facing it head-on.

This work isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not a magic pill. It’s a guided journey into the depths of who you are—and who you were before the world (or a church) told you who you had to be. But if you're carrying the weight of old trauma—religious or otherwise—then maybe it’s time to let something new in. Something that honors your healing. On your terms.

If you’re curious about starting your own ketamine journey, I can’t recommend Better U enough. Their process is thoughtful, trauma-informed, and backed by science—but more than that, they see you as a whole person, not a project to fix.

You can get $100 off your first treatment by using my promo code NANDO100 at betterucare.com.

Whatever path you're on—whether you're still in the church, out of it, or somewhere in between—just know this: you deserve healing that actually heals. You deserve to feel whole.

And you're not alone anymore.

Jiujitsu, Ketamine, and the Art of Coming Back

Wow. That’s the only word I can think of. It took me nearly a year to understand just how truly beautiful a ketamine journey is. I don’t even know how to describe it. I wish everyone could experience this level of healing—this bird’s-eye view of your own life, where even your pain starts to make sense. Where it doesn’t crush you anymore. And I couldn’t have done it without my favorite ketamine song:

 Passage

 I wrote a previous post about it here.

 Lately, my traumas have been screaming louder than usual. I visited Pitada Brazil with my mom. It was such a sweet experience—the food was amazing. I finally shared with her a song I heard on the radio the last time I visited my grandparents.

 Then I ran into an old assistant from jiujitsu. It stirred up memories of a version of me I’d left behind. I reconnected with my instructor. I felt so good about it—like pieces of myself were finally reintegrating. I was starting to feel unstuck. So I shared a message in our group chat: a heartfelt reflection on returning to jiujitsu, how it’s become part of my ketamine integration, and how much it’s meant to me. 

 No one responded. And then my instructor didn’t reply to an important question either. 

 Cue the RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria)—that firestorm of pain when it feels like everything is crumbling, even if nothing’s technically wrong. I was triggered by everything: rude drivers, rude customers, even silence. It all touched the same nerve: “You don’t matter.” 

 So I took it into a ketamine session. I brought all of it—every unanswered message, every invisible wound. And the medicine held it all with gentleness. It reminded me: silence doesn’t always mean they don’t care. Sometimes people freeze. Sometimes life is too loud. Sometimes they’re just scared to say the wrong thing. 

 That session showed me how to embrace the messiness of relationships.

 And yeah—it still hurt. But the point isn’t to avoid pain (or assign blame or shame). 

It’s to alchemize it.

To breathe into it. To hold space for it without being consumed. 

 Jiujitsu does the same thing for me. It’s not just exercise—it’s a moving meditation. It’s breathwork. It’s discipline. It’s something deeply Brazilian that grounds me in my body and my culture.

 It complements ketamine perfectly.

 One takes me out of my body to show me the map. The other grounds me back into the terrain. 

 That’s the lesson I had to learn with ketamine: You process things. You integrate. You’re broken apart—and then you’re put back together. 

 If you’re curious about this kind of healing, I can’t recommend Better U enough. Go to betterucare.com Use my promo code NANDO84 to get started with $100 discount—it could change your life the way it’s changed mine.