Ketamine Therapy, Breathwork, and Healing: Finding Your Way Back to You with Lena Walker

Lena Walker remembers coming home from her first ayahuasca ceremony feeling like something fundamental had changed. She had experienced what she describes as a profound spiritual awakening. She felt reconnected to God, deeply grateful, and more alive than she had realized was possible. Then she returned to the same job, the same friends, and the same everyday life, with no idea what to do with what had just happened.

“I was not who I was before, but I was not yet who I was becoming,” Lena told us.

That space between transformation and everyday life became a defining part of Lena’s story. Years later, it would also shape her work with breathwork and ketamine therapy. The experience itself mattered, but Lena came to believe that what happened afterward mattered just as much. For her, that is where integration enters the story.

Lena is a registered nurse, shamanic breathwork facilitator, ketamine integration coach, and founder of Embodied Integration. Her background includes emergency medicine, hospice care, breathwork, and ketamine therapy. Her path between those worlds was anything but straightforward.

Before the Healing Came Survival

Lena takes us back to around 2017 or 2018 to explain where this story really begins. At the time, she was a nurse and raising two sons. She describes herself then as someone who wasn’t involved in spirituality or personal healing work. Her life looked very different from the work she does today.

She was also in a volatile, on-and-off relationship with the father of her sons, who struggled with addiction. Eventually, his addiction escalated suddenly. Lena remembers having to run out of their home with her boys during a crisis. She doesn’t even remember whether they had shoes on their feet.

Suddenly, she was navigating her own pain while helping two boys process the loss of the father who had once been very involved in their lives. Lena also carried anger and low self-worth she hadn’t really examined before. She began looking at how her own childhood might have shaped her relationships and the way she moved through the world.

There was one thought she kept coming back to: if she was going to lead her boys, she had to learn how to lead herself.

That realization became the beginning of a healing journey Lena never could have predicted. It would eventually lead through ayahuasca, breathwork, hospice nursing, and ketamine integration. It would also change the way she understood healing itself.

The Experience That Lena Describes as “Coming Back to Life”

Years earlier, while working as an ER nurse, Lena had heard about ayahuasca almost in passing. She knew very little about psychedelics and didn’t know anyone working with them. Still, she remembers having a strange certainty that someday she was meant to experience it. That moment came after the crisis in her family.

Lena describes her first ayahuasca ceremony as a profound turning point. She felt reconnected to God after years of feeling disconnected or forgotten. She also became aware of how numb and dissociated she had been. Before that experience, she says she hadn’t even realized it.

One of the things she remembers most vividly is gratitude. Lena had always thought of gratitude as something you said. During that experience, she felt it throughout her body. “For me, one of the most profound gifts that ayahuasca gave me was what I would name actually as coming back to life,” she told us.

That experience opened something for Lena. But it also created a problem she hadn’t anticipated. She had experienced something enormous and then returned home without anyone to help her understand how to live with it.

When a Breakthrough Doesn’t Tell You What Comes Next

This is where the idea of integration first appears in Lena’s story. After her ceremony, Lena went back to her normal life. Nobody around her worked with psychedelics. Her job hadn’t changed. Her relationships hadn’t changed. Yet she felt profoundly different.

She listened constantly to Icaros, ceremonial songs she had heard in the ayahuasca space. Looking back, she believes she was trying to keep the experience alive because she didn’t know what else to do with it. “I was not who I was before, but I was not yet who I was becoming,” she said. The question became how that new version of herself was supposed to show up on an ordinary Tuesday.

That experience stayed with Lena as her work eventually moved toward breathwork and ketamine therapy. For her, integration became the bridge between an insight and an actual life. A profound experience might reveal something, but Lena’s own story taught her that revelation doesn’t automatically show someone how to live differently.

Lena Went for the Cold Plunge. Breathwork Changed Everything.

After her spiritual awakening, Lena made a commitment to move toward some of the things that scared her. Being cold was high on the list. Lena is an Arizona girl who, in her words, despised being cold. She planned around avoiding it. Even being in a bathing suit around other people brought up longstanding discomfort around her body. So naturally, she decided she needed to attend a Wim Hof workshop involving breathwork and a cold plunge.

She went because of the cold. The breathwork was what surprised her. During three rounds of breathing over roughly 15 minutes, Lena says she entered an experience that felt remarkably similar to her ayahuasca journey. She was stunned that her breath alone could take her somewhere that profound. In the same moment, two things became clear to her. She wanted to become a breathwork facilitator, and she wasn’t ready yet.

That second realization mattered. Lena already sensed the responsibility involved in holding space for what might come up for another person. So she started smaller. She found breathwork practices online and began developing a personal relationship with her own breath. Years later, that personal practice would become one half of Lena’s work with breathwork and ketamine therapy.

Hospice Had Already Taught Lena How to Hold Space

At the time, Lena was working as a hospice nurse. As she explored breathwork, she began noticing a connection between these two worlds that might seem completely unrelated from the outside. Hospice had taught her how to sit beside the unknown. She had spent years holding space not only for people who were dying, but for entire families facing fear, grief, uncertainty, and change. She describes it almost as “midwifing” the ecosystem surrounding death.

Lena began to recognize something familiar when she watched facilitators hold space during ayahuasca ceremonies. She felt it again with breathwork. The circumstances were completely different, but the quality of presence felt familiar to her.

She wasn’t leaving nursing behind as completely as it might have appeared. In her experience, she was carrying something hospice had already taught her into a different kind of room.

Breathwork also gave Lena a way to talk about profound experiences without asking someone to enter the psychedelic world. That mattered because she was still a nurse and worried about the professional consequences of openly discussing illegal psychedelics.

It also mattered because Lena’s perspective on ayahuasca had changed. Early in her awakening, she remembers feeling like everyone needed to experience what she had experienced. Over time, she came to feel very differently. “I would never say to somebody, ‘You should do ayahuasca,’” Lena told us. Her own experience had been transformative. That didn’t mean it was right for everyone.

How Ketamine Became the Next Bridge

Even as Lena became more involved in breathwork, she felt there was another layer to the work she was meant to do. She didn’t know what it would look like. Then she unexpectedly reconnected with Dr. Sandy Indermuhle, a physician she had worked with during her ER nursing days. They ran into each other at a mutual friend’s wedding. Lena discovered Sandy had also left emergency medicine and explored psychedelic medicines. She was opening a holistic ketamine space in Scottsdale.

At first, Lena wasn’t convinced. She considered herself a naturalist and had been drawn to medicines that came from the earth. Ketamine was synthetic, and that gave her pause. Sandy continued inviting her to see what she was building, and eventually Lena visited the space.

Something clicked. Lena was especially drawn to the emphasis on preparation and integration. She says clients weren’t simply receiving ketamine and leaving. The experience included support before and after each journey.

She initially joined the team on the nursing side. Over time, she trained as a psychedelic integration coach and began preparing clients, sitting with them during their ketamine sessions, and supporting them afterward. Breathwork also became part of her role.

That was where breathwork and ketamine therapy came together for Lena. They weren’t replacements for her nursing background. They became another expression of the kind of presence she had already spent years practicing.

Why Integration Became So Important to Lena

When Jenna asked what integration actually means, Lena described a process that begins before a ketamine session ever happens.

In the model Lena works within, clients typically begin with a preparation conversation. Lena wants to understand what is happening in someone’s life and where those patterns may have started. She says the issue bringing someone in can sometimes lead back to much older experiences.

Then there is the ketamine experience itself. Afterward comes integration. For Lena, that last part is essential because she has lived the opposite. She knows what it feels like to have a powerful experience and come home asking, Now what? Her own first psychedelic experience gave her insight without a framework for carrying it into daily life. Later, she saw how intentionally creating space before and after an experience could feel different.

That became one of Lena’s central beliefs about breathwork and ketamine therapy: the experience may open something, but integration is where she focuses on how those insights meet real life. That might involve relationships, boundaries, old patterns, or the ways someone responds under stress. The details vary because the people do too.

The larger theme felt familiar to us. So much of Wake Up, Sunshine is about the distance between realizing something about ourselves and actually becoming different because of it.

Healing Didn’t Mean Lena Stopped Being Human

One of the things we appreciated about this conversation was that Lena never presented herself as someone who had completed healing. Her work grew out of her own experiences, but those experiences didn’t turn her into a person who never struggles. She has continued to encounter her own patterns, fears, and edges. The difference is that she has more language for what she notices now.

That matters in a conversation about breathwork and ketamine therapy, because it would be easy to tell this story as a clean before-and-after. Lena doesn’t describe it that way. Her path has moved through nursing, motherhood, crisis, psychedelics, breathwork, hospice, ketamine, spirituality, and integration. Each piece changed what she understood about the others.

Even the things that once seemed separate started connecting. Hospice taught her about presence. Ayahuasca showed her an experience she struggled to integrate. Breathwork showed her that her own body could create a profound altered state. Ketamine brought her back into a medical setting with a completely different understanding of what care could look like. The thread running through all of it was learning how to stay present with what was happening.

The Part After the Big Moment

We talk a lot about transformation as though there is one moment when everything changes. Lena has certainly had moments like that. But her story also made us think about what happens the morning after. You still wake up in your own life. Your relationships are there. Your history is there. The parts of yourself you’ve just started seeing are there too.

For Lena, breathwork and ketamine therapy eventually became part of her work because they intersected with something she had been learning for years. Transformation wasn’t only about reaching a profound state. It was also about what happened when she came back.

Her first ayahuasca experience left her wondering how this new version of herself was supposed to exist in her old life. Years later, integration became the work she helps hold for other people. Maybe that’s why the word feels so important in this conversation.

Lena’s story isn’t simply about what changed her. It’s about what she did with the change.

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Listen to the full episode: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Connect with Lena:
Embodied Integration Coaching | Instagram @heyitslenarae

Other References/Links:

• inLIGHTen Wellness