Breathing is a religion – maybe even a drug? In any case, there are people who rearrange their lives after a breathwork course. Nicole Zepter tried out the latest trend: Psychedelic Breath.
“Something has to come out of this,” I said to my friend and pointed to my chest. I wanted to refer to everything that had accumulated in my body: pressure, stress, far too many worries. Sometimes it was just the feeling of heaviness over the last few years. Being a mother, being a freelancer, always rolling up your sleeves. With this statement, I registered with my friend to “breathe” because she is currently training to become a breathwork teacher.
Breathwork is a new name for an old form of therapy: breathing. Breathing properly can reduce stress, strengthen the immune system and lower blood pressure. Our breathing is controlled – unconsciously for us – by the autonomic nervous system; when we are afraid it becomes shallower and faster, and when we relax it becomes deeper. Because we are often tense due to work, noise, stress, our breathing tends to be too shallow. But we can consciously control them – the key to breathwork therapies.
The American author James Nestor (“Breath”, Piper Verlag) says he has reorganized his life with Sudarshan Kriya breathing. This involves repeatedly inhaling and exhaling slowly; it is intended to reduce stress, focus and cleanse the body. Hillary Clinton calms herself down with alternating breathing, known from yoga, in which one alternately closes one nostril and holds one’s breath. The Dutch extreme athlete Wim Hof is now considered a real breathing guru; he has his participants take deep, quick breaths before sending them into an ice bath. On Instagram and YouTube, the disciples imitate him and sit smiling in the ice bath after a gasping “hoo-ha” breath. Wim Hof puts the art of breathwork this way: “If you can control your breathing, you can also control your mind.”
Psychedelic Breath developed as an alternative to the LSD trip
I want to go a little further: I want to let go of my mind. The Berlin yoga teacher and psychologist Eva Kaczor developed a suitable method five years ago: Psychedelic Breath. It sounds like what I’m hoping for: it can be psychedelic, I want to lose myself in the breath. There are now around 120 teachers in Germany who teach a mixture of quick, deep breathing, also known as holotropic breathing, and holding your breath.
There are eleven cycles with which you can breathe more and more into the depths of your own soul. A session lasts 90 minutes, with electronic music playing at each session. I had already heard that it was about the depths of the soul from a friend who was able to largely free herself from her depression through breathing. That impressed me.
But I have a little respect for holotropic breathing. It is intended to create access to my consciousness that I cannot achieve in everyday life. It was developed by psychotherapist Stanislav Grof after his research on LSD was banned. It is similar to hyperventilation, in which the proportion of carbon dioxide in the blood decreases, but the pH value of the blood increases. And perhaps unfamiliar images will pop into my head. I have to admit, I’m not really relaxed before the session.
Leave the outer world and go into the inner one
After all, I’m a control freak, which is one of the reasons why LSD wouldn’t be an option for me. The best thing about breathwork for me, my friend had said, is that I can stop at any time, slow down my breathing and find my way back to reality. In addition, in everyday life we would breathe much too shallowly anyway, which often imbalances the proportion of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our body and can lead to fatigue or, on the contrary, to unwanted excitement. And I can be happy: the best thing is the breaks in which you can hold your breath. “This is the departure,” she said and smiled. She should be right.
The fact is that breathing in this form of breathwork carries a kind of escapism – even though the word means “breath work”. However, you don’t work at all, you leave everything to your body. You leave the outer world to move into your inner one. It doesn’t surprise me that this is currently a trend. The world can become very bright and loud every day due to social media or news.
So on a June day I’m sitting on the mat with my girlfriend. She has just come to the end of her breathing training, the teacher training, and I am her penultimate test subject. “All right,” I say, folding my legs into a cross-legged position. I will be informed about the contraindications. Pregnancy, high blood pressure, stroke, epilepsy are excluded. Ready to go. As I close my eyes and the music begins, I hear her voice gently circling my head. I’m too excited to really listen. But I’m breathing. On, off, regularly and deeper and deeper. We start with the first circle.
Always something new
Each session is linked to a topic, an intention that the teacher brings into the lesson. My friend talks about appreciation in this session. Of imprint. Then she says: “When you think back to your childhood, what do you see intuitively?” I see a six-year-old girl effortlessly climbing up the chestnut tree, the light shimmers through the leaves, I move from branch to branch, higher and higher. It’s as if I have grown together with the tree. I can feel the wind and the humidity in the air. My friend says, “You were fearless.” The music gets louder. The sentence resonates.
Eva Kaczor says in the interview that breathwork itself doesn’t need a topic because it brings out what is waiting in us to be “seen, felt and sometimes let go.” However, she combined the method with a varying topic per session to inspire personal growth.
The oxygen level drops and the trance begins
The nice thing about my state after a few minutes is the relaxation. It comes automatically. And then with force. The oxygen supply to my brain is changed and my brain waves are slowed down. With a bit of luck you can go from a normal so-called beta state to an alpha state. This means: the brain waves oscillate more slowly, you become calmer and clearer. For someone who likes to meditate like me, this is beautiful.
I continue to lose myself in the breath, forget my surroundings and am completely in the rhythm of the music and of inhaling, exhaling and holding my breath. This also awakens the emotions I face in this trance. A wall of grief is creeping up from the depths of my body, it is big, but I can no longer defend myself: I sob like a child, tears flow, I am consumed by the pain. But I’m breathing. On off. My girlfriend puts her hands on my shoulders. I keep breathing. And hold your breath again.
I can only describe what begins then in vague images. You literally lose your mind a little: the conscious senses are pushed into the background, but a kind of world of your own emerges in front of your mind’s eye. Is that the LSD effect? I feel my chest expand and where my solar plexus is it literally explodes: I see the sun, like a billowing, yellow cloud of gas. She is strong and beautiful. And that’s how I feel: There’s a tremendous power that I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe never before. I am overwhelmed and afraid to fully allow this power and I slow my breathing. It feels like I can’t quite make the jump yet.
The “Magic Touch”
My friend’s voice is getting louder again, the music is there and yet everything is completely removed from my closed eyes. My cheeks suddenly go cold and tingle. Sensations that occur when the oxygen supply to the blood is reduced. But I never feel uncomfortable or afraid. My spine becomes cold, I see it ice blue in front of me. At that moment my girlfriend puts her hands on my back. The breathing instructors call it “Magic Touch”.
Your hands are hot, way too hot. I ask myself why. Then the breath slows down and we reach the end of the last cycle. When I open my eyes, I am not exhausted, but relaxed. It also feels a bit like my head is in a balloon. I’ll probably need an hour to get back to the real world. During this time I feel strangely relaxed. Worries far away.
Letting go can be addictive
Weeks have now passed. I breathed several times and no session has ever come close to my first big trip. But each one is enough to turn off my senses and take a shortcut inward.
Is it addictive? A little yes. Once you have the pleasure of letting go, you will want to experience this state more often. It’s like connecting with yourself, faster and deeper than I’ve ever managed with meditation. I can understand when participants talk about a place of silence that they have never been able to experience before in their lives. Others report seeing colors and shapes in their mind’s eye. Some simply experience deep relaxation. By the way, my girlfriend’s hands were never hot, they were cold, but my body perceived it differently. Like I was in another world.
Try breathing work?
Eva Kaczor gives a live session every Wednesday at Psychedelic Breath via Zoom. Information and registration at psychedelicbreath.co
Nicole Scepter, 46, is an author and journalist. In addition to her newly discovered breathwork, she has been swearing by daily meditation for years, always in the morning.