Exploring the psychedelic properties of your breath
How breathwork can help you journey inward, plus an invitation to join a full moon breathwork ceremony on 4/16
The number one question I get from people interested in psychedelic healing is where to start. That’s closely followed by I want to experience this but I’m so scared.
Good news, there’s a beautiful solution to both of these problems.
What if I told you there was another way to access the healing properties of altered states? A way that’s risk-free and doesn’t require the ingestion of any substances? A solely reliant on manipulating the way you breathe?
Enter breathwork.
While breathwork is not the same as a psychedelic trip, there are commonalities. Breathwork can help you access non-ordinary states of consciousness and release emotions, connect with your subconscious, and experience bliss. For some, it even produces visual, psychedelic experiences. It’s a powerful modality to venture inward and a great way to support your psychedelic integration.
Read on if you want to learn about the origins of this practice and how and why it works so well. If you’re ready to give it a try, I’m hosting a virtual, donation-based Full Moon Breathwork Ceremony next Saturday, 4/16. More info below.
Breathwork Is an Ancient Healing Practice That’s Become Increasingly Popular
In recent years, breathwork has proliferated across conscious communities all over the globe — from yogis to meditation teachers, psychonauts, and sound healers. You’ll find many spiritually-inclined Westerners raving about “the magical power of breathwork”. By some, it’s even dubbed as “the new Yoga”.
Yet, there’s nothing new about it. Breathwork has been around for thousands of years.
In Latin, the word “spiritus” was used for both the spirit as we know it, but also to describe the physical intake of air. In the Yogic Vedas, the breath is the connection between body and life force, “prana”. Shamans have been using breathwork as a tool to connect with the spiritual realms for millennia, often practicing for multiple hours to reach altered states for the purpose of healing and divination.
Our breath a spiritual force. It’s what connects our inner with our outer world.
Breathwork Is an Active Meditation With Fast-Paced, Rhythmic Breathing
Similar to meditation, “breathwork” is an umbrella term that covers a variety of different techniques. Most people will hear the term and think of some type of controlled breathing to relax. But that’s only one form of breathwork.
Breathwork techniques generally fall into two different categories, “calming” and “activating”.
The specific type of breathwork that we're talking about here falls into the “activating” category. There are several trademarked names such as “holotropic”, “transformational”, or “clarity” breath, but they essentially all refer to the same thing.
So, what exactly is it?
It’s an active meditation during which we manipulate the pace and depth of our breath and with that, increase the oxygen levels in our body. During breathwork, we perform a fast-paced, circular breath for anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours.
Breathwork Can Induce Profound Experiences of Emotional Purging and Bliss
So you may ask yourself now: we’re breathing fast into our bellies, so what?
To answer this question, let’s look at why breathwork is so deeply anchored within the psychedelic community.
If we travel back a few decades in time, we’ll find that there’s a very special man to thank for that. It’s the 1960s, and now-famous psychiatrist Stanislav Grof begins working with altered states of consciousness in his patients using mainly the psychedelic LSD. When Nixon passes the Controlled Substances Act prohibiting the use of all psychedelics, Grof is suddenly forced to stop his promising research. Instead of stopping altogether, however, he ventures to find legal ways to induce altered states and a “natural high” in his patients. He proceeds to develop “holotropic breathwork” together with his wife, based on ancient practices.
It’s not only the natural high that draws people to breathwork, it can also be a profound healing tool for emotional release. You may laugh, cry, or even scream throughout an hour-long session.
The Effects of Breathwork Are Part Science, Part Mystery
By now you’re probably wondering how just our breath can achieve all this.
There’s some science, but there’s also a lot of mystery.
Physiologically, breathwork alkalizes our blood through “controlled hyperventilation”
Let’s start with the easier part, the science. By manipulating the depth and pace of our breath, our body’s pH level changes. We “alkalize” our blood.
As a doctor from Parsley Health describes in more detail:
“The physiologic changes we see during sustained, rhythmic breathing are caused by a shift of the blood pH that follows hyperventilation — a state called “respiratory alkalosis.” Thanks to the field of anesthesiology we know a lot about what the body does during respiratory alkalosis.
You probably remember that we take in oxygen during the inhale breath and get rid of CO2 with every exhale. When we take faster breaths we get rid of more CO2. CO2 is an acidic molecule, so you can think of hyperventilating as getting rid of acid in the blood and shifting to a higher, or more alkaline pH (thus the term respiratory alkalosis).”
This “controlled hyperventilation” usually manifests as tingling sensations, numbness, muscle contractions, and feelings of hot or cold.
Those are all common side effects of breathwork. (It sounds worse than it is, most people aren’t at all disturbed by them.)
Emotionally, breathwork helps process and release stuck energy
If you want to understand why breathwork can lead to emotional purging, you need to accept the underlying premise that emotions are stored in our bodies.
You hopefully agree that you feel your emotions in your body. Whether you have a heartache, butterflies in your stomach, or feel a lump in your throat —it’s a physical sensation that triggers your brain to make meaning and identify an emotion.
You may have come across the saying that emotion = energy in motion. The word itself originates from the Latin e-movere, “to move out”. Emotions are intended to move through you, which is evident when you look at a child that cries one second and laughs the next. Unfortunately, as the human mind matures it develops the ability to intervene.
When the motion doesn’t happen, your body ends up storing your emotions. In the words of Bessel Van Der Kolk, “your body keeps the score”.
When we breathe, we move this stagnant energy around in our body. That’s why for many people memories may come up and emotions resurface to be released. We’re activating our subconscious.
Spiritually, endogenous DMT is believed to play a role in breath-induced altered states
Finally, how then is breathwork able to induce altered states of consciousness?
It’s believed that our brain produces DMT, the chemical compound found in psychoactive substances like Ayahuasca dubbed as “the spirit molecule”. The theory is that through breathwork we trigger the release of DMT, which is why some people have “psychedelic” experiences. It hasn’t been scientifically proven yet, even the presence of DMT in our pineal glands is still debated. Here we can only rely on individual accounts and your personal experience.
No Two Breath Journeys Will Be Alike — My Experience
Just like a psychedelic journey, the experience is different every single time.
The first time I practiced breathwork it catapulted me right into my childhood bedroom, then into the ocean, and shortly after straight into space. Needless to say, I was pretty blown away — and extremely curious.
I’ve also had deeply emotional experiences. Once a facilitator gently placed a finger on my throat mid-way through, and immediately tears started pouring out. The crying didn’t stop for at least 20 minutes. At the moment I didn’t know why I cried, and while I realized it a few days later, I don’t think we always need to know what we release in order to feel lighter.
Whatever the experience, one thing is guaranteed: you will feel something.
It’s such a simple modality that allows us to so profoundly connect our mind, body, and spirit — I encourage everyone to give it a try at least once. It’s quite awe-inspiring what we can achieve and experience, just with our breath.
Your Journey
I’m excited to offer a virtual Full Moon Breathwork Ceremony next Saturday, April 16. We’ll meet on Zoom for an hour-long practice. The event will be donation-based. In case you’re wondering, I completed my breathwork facilitator training two years ago with AlwaysPlay Studios.
Here’s some praise from people I guided through breathwork previously:
“This was the most beautiful experience. Julia held the space beautifully, her energy and presence is so calming. I love how she weaves in music that takes you deeper” - Angelica
“Breathwork with Julia was such a unique experience. I felt a body vibration that created this incredible unity in my energy, which I’d never felt before. After the session, I felt so light.” - Lisa
Dig Deeper
If you want to learn more about the breath, I recommend two resources:
James Nastor’s mega best-seller, “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art”, which is a more elaborative exploration of the breath that covers breathwork (among many other topics)
Stan Grof’s work, which is more specific and details what these journeys reveal about the human psyche (“The Way of the Psychonaut” and “Holotropic Breathwork” are super fascinating albeit more technical reads)