Breathing is fascinating! Let’s acknowledge this feature of the human experience for a second. The constant flow of respiration is always with you: Your first breath marks the beginning of your life. And life ends after your last one. No matter where you are or what you do, your breath is always with you.
It is well known that breathing fulfils important tasks such as keeping you alive, but people from various spiritual traditions insist that the breath — which serves as a bridge from the conscious to the unconscious mind — can do much more for us. But let’s do some theory first:
The conscious mind joysticks everything we assume to have control over such as our body movements. The unconscious mind regulates everything we suppose to be beyond our control such as the functioning of our organs. Therefore, it is common to say: “I move my arm” but no one would say: “I beat my heart” since we suppose the beating of the heart to be beyond our conscious control. The breath serves as gatekeeper from the conscious to the unconscious mind because one can breathe on autopilot or take over consciously.
The unconscious mind is where gurus, philosophers, psychologists, artists or humans with extraordinary capabilities such as Wim Hof claim to be the realm where the real magic happens. It’s a territory beyond language which is totally connected, full of creativity and the ultimate source of health and intelligence.
So how can we tap into this thing and download health, creative ideas or piece of mind into our conscious mind?
Humankind has have come up with various solutions, of which psychedelic drugs seem the quickest and most reliable vehicle to deliver on this quest. A psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof came to a similar conclusion and was at the forefront in establishing psychedelic-facilitated therapy in the 1960s. After psychedelics got illegal in the 1970s he searched for something that could mimic the dramatic effects LSD has on our psyche. And he founded Holotropic Breathing.
The practice is rather straightforward: You lie down on your back and breathe in- and out as hard as you can for around 2.5 hours. At the same time, you are being exposed to “evocative music” that is meant to stimulate different areas of your brain. And off you go.
Following a short introduction at the workshop, I laid down with 4 other people and started to breathe as hard as I could. After a few seconds, it felt like someone plugged an electricity cable into my body: Everything started to tingle and went a little numb. My hands and legs started to show signs of tetany, but I did not seem to control them anymore. At first, I had to put in a great effort to maintain the heavy breathing, but after a while, it just continued on its own. I did not really know whether I was breathing or whether It was breathing me? The experience peaked when I started to scream — again, I did not feel like I was doing the screaming. It just happened. But it felt extremely releasing, even though I did not know what was being released. Throughout large parts of the experience, there was no me or any intellectual concepts of mine. It was nothing but raw emotion processing, one might say catharsis.
Looking back on the workshop, I concluded that it was one of the most intense experiences I ever had. It surprised me how much my sense of self can change as a result of intensified breathing. It surprised me how my body and my mind seemed to know what had to be done, even though I have never done anything like this before (much like how women know how to give birth to a child, even though they have never done it before.) It surprised me how much my sense of time and space got distorted. Often, I could not tell whether a few minutes or hours had already passed, nor could I make up a clear point at which my body ended, and my surroundings began.
I’ve always been sceptical towards mainstream psychology due to the tricky relationship between language and reality. Holotropic Breathing bypasses this problem and goes straight to emotion processing on the most fundamental level. My mind has never been so quiet as in the 24 hours following the workshop and I felt a profound sense of peace, alertness and mental balance for the next few days.
However, since the experience is so intense, I could not do it more often than once a year. Or maybe once in a lifetime.
