Why isn’t everyone talking about this?

That’s the loudest thought in my mind as I reflect on my experience doing a full-day Holotropic breathing group workshop in Toronto this summer. It was powerful, surprising, deeply healing to mind and body, and safer than eating a ballpark hotdog.  How come more people aren’t talking about this?

And then my next thought is:  Man, I can’t wait to tell everyone!

In these days where the healing of trauma in therapy is no longer taboo, and where the idea of trauma being stored deeply in the tissues of the body is common, we are eager to debate about any process that can help unlock and shift the gunk that we have stored deep within us.  Incredibly, EMDR and somatic therapies are now well-known, and even the most academic schools are making sure that the students are coming out with a trauma-informed perspective on mental health.

Add to that the fact that hallucinogenic drugs like psilocybin (mushrooms), ketamine and MDMA are all gaining momentum and stamps of approval from not just the far-left therapists who have been playing with these substances for years, but from the medical and governmental establishments that once made these things out to be the gateway to evil.  Now we are slowly recognizing that under the right guidance, these powerful substances can be a doorway that can facilitate healing in ways that were almost impossible to access through normal modes of consciousness.  Drug-assisted trauma therapy has huge money behind it right now, and clinics exist in pretty much every big city in the western world where these substances are being used and researched for their therapeutic applications.

Of course one of the great concerns is about the safety of these substances, and fair enough. There is a lot of cultural baggage around these drugs, and like many psychotropic medications, they can certainly be dangerous when used recklessly or without healthy intent and supervision.  But also, what’s new. So can alcohol.

We are developing regimented, very safe, and very rigid protocol to administer and use these substances and all of this is costing a lot of money that is coming from various places.  You can be sure that the large pharmaceutical companies want their hand in it all, so they are working hard to come up with a way to make sure they can patent their particular mix.  And the government is doing its job to make sure that research is conducted with all its traditional triple and quadruple checking.  All this to say that these procedures are currently in the works but they are not cheap. And they are not very accessible. As is often the case in mental health, you either have to be an extreme of dysfunction so you get priority in the medical, hospital stream, or you have to have plenty of money.  If you want doctor administered hallucinogens for the sake of healing the regular trauma that all of us carry, it is likely going to cost you a lot of money.  No wonder most people are doing their own experimentation “at home”.

But what if there were a safer, cheaper and equally effective way to access some of the stored trauma of the body?  Well of course there are.

I’m pretty sure that is what Holotropic breathing offers us.

I participated in a fairly standard model of the workshop – a large group where you are paired off and take turns throughout one full day.  We met in a large open indoor space – looked like a cool dance studio – and there was 20 people total. It was led by a couple from Montreal that had clearly done this a thousand times.  Each person has a turn for 2.5-3 hours to be the breather with their partner supervising as the sitter and after lunch, they swap. With formalities, a break, and bit of time to debrief as a group, that’s a whole day.

I volunteered to go first as the breather in the morning session.  We were given minimal instruction (not much is needed) and told to “breathe until you are surprised” and then “to lean into what you find”.  I was there because I had an intuition that I had something to heal at a pre-verbal level, some trauma from very, very young – like, birth or before – and I knew I was not scratching that itch through my other therapy and meditative practices.  Plus, I have been super curious about Holotropic breathing for a long time since hearing about it from friends in much less academic training programs who had actually done some of this in their school.  It was finally my turn.

I got out my yoga mat for a cushioned spot on the floor, and got a pillow and blankets to get cozy, put in my earplugs and eyemask to keep my experience internal, and started the breathing.  Deep, full breaths, with no pause at the top or bottom.  Deeper and fuller, deeper and fuller.  Off we go.

After just a few minutes – hard to say since I have poor sense of time to begin with – but in less than ten minutes I was feeling something palpable in my body.  There was a buzzing energy in my hands and feet, like that feeling of warm static fuzz when circulation comes back to sleeping extremities.  A warmth grew and spread from within to encompass me.  The mind got more and more quiet as the energy, both calm and intense, cranked up and became homogeneous.  Meanwhile, the tribal, heavy bass and drum music was blasting the room and started to feel like it was happening right inside me.

It didn’t take long for me to realize: ok something physiological is legitimately happening here. I’ve used hallucinogenic drugs in the past, and my mind and body were definitely, absolutely in an altered state. At some point, still early on, my body started to tremble, shake and downright convulse with incredible energy. And mentally, I was on some kind of hallucinogenic trip or self-guided shamanic journey.  I won’t get into the details here too much, but I had this whole experience of being in the womb, experiencing the shock of birth, getting a chance to see my life thus far, and my complex and challenging family of origin, from a new space.  I am not sure I have ever cried so hard for so long in my whole adult life.  And it was awesome.

I can’t imagine what I must have looked like – the lovely person who was sitting with me, supervising, said at one point that she felt so much pain emanating from me that she had to leave the room.  But I had to break it to her that in my experience I was not feeling pain but liberation- my wracking, convulsing sobs where those of release.  I was being shown a million images and feelings that had been stuck in my body, and I got the sense that I was cleaning the slate.  It was honestly ecstatic.

For 2.5 hours I just leaned in.  Whenever the body got tired and slowed down breathing, as soon as I realized it, I would just start the deep bellows again.  Eventually, I just got the sense that was enough was enough, and it mellowed into a deep, peaceful body buzz where I likely dozed off for a few moments.  When I was told it was over, it took me a few minutes to come back to reality but ten minutes later, we’re outside in the sun, having lunch, and I’m completely sober, completely fine, ready to drive my car or whatever, and I’m just beaming, buoyant, and elated in seemingly every cell of my body.

And you are telling me that this happened not with drugs, not with some mystical guide, but by me sitting there just breathing?

Why isn’t everyone doing this?

I had just experienced a significant healing. I was, and am still convinced, months later now, that there was some truly deep cellular release happening there.  You don’t cry and shake and encounter birth and family symbology for two hours with it not being transformational.  This is incredible.

And utterly, totally safe.  One of the most important things to see about this is that the whole time, it was my own foot that was on the gas pedal.  Not so with ingesting substances like mushrooms, LSD, ayahuasca, ketamine, etc.  Once you take the drug, you’re on a trip for a while, like it or not.  But with breathing, its like having your own dosing pump.  And instead of it taking 4 hours to come down, it takes 4 minutes.  I drove home at the end of the day.  Got up early for a bike ride the next day, feeling great.

But I did learn a bit about why everyone was not talking about this. I think there are a few reasons. One, is that if you don’t lean into it, you can also barely have any experience at all.  I learned after watching my partner in the afternoon, and talking to others – many people just didn’t feel comfortable plunging in so hard.  They breathed less deep, and leaned in less when they encountered emotional material.  Plus, I’m a trauma therapist by vocation – so this is water that I’m familiar swimming in.  Not so for the graphic designer I was working with.  Her experience was much less dramatic, but according to her, still potent and powerful.  But she went another direction – into a more trancelike sleep state.  But who knows. I could see that afternoon many people flailing and crying and moving in strange ways, and many people completely still.  By the time we had a group discussion before closing, it was clear that every single person had had some kind of altered state experience. Some were mild, some were huge. It does seem like my experience was one of the more intense ones.  Like many of them had stated they were wanting, it was like ‘drugs without the drugs’.

Another reason we don’t hear about it is likely because we cannot ‘standardize the dose’ for research purposes. Maybe the bigger reasons are just that, unfortunately, things like this are just never going to make anyone a ton of money, so there is little reason to throw big research dollars at it.  You can’t patent this.  You can’t own the process.  It’s far too easy to teach and replicate. Basically, anyone can do it, whenever they simply want to bother, and it is likely going to be profound. I paid $150 CAD for the group experience for the day.  No one is going to get rich on this.

Here is another reason why this is likely not so popular, despite being invented in the 70’s:  it takes work.  It’s free, sure.  But it takes effort.  And you know, we’re kinda a lazy bunch, us North Americans.  We would prefer a pill.  Or if that can’t work, then a therapist who can do it for us.  We don’t want to do the tough dirty work ourselves.  And hey, I can’t blame you!  I would rather pay someone to fix my car.  But this doesn’t work like that.  All this talk of healing?  Ultimately it is on you.  Only you can do it.  And that is both the blessing and the curse of it.  If someone else could do it for you, that would not be it.

There are very few robust academic studies on Holotropic breathing as of yet.  Jon Hopkins university did a study back in 2021 which was pretty good, but not much besides that.  My guess is that it will have its day at some point.  But maybe we have a ways to go yet.

Do we know what is happening in the body during this experience?  I’m curious about what the biochemistry really is.  We know that this type of breathing can truly alter the chemistry of the body by drastically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood (which leads to tingling sensations, dizziness) and also the alkalization of the blood, which can be responsible for shaking and spasms in the extremities.  Though this sounds a bit sketchy, these states actually release toxins, reduce systemic stress, and improve the immune system.

But why the high?  Why the hallucinations?  Well these can come from these aforementioned states, but it also could be that other brain chemistry is changing in this process.  I’m sure that further studies will reveal a massive shift of neurotransmitters during this breathing process, though I’m not convinced that it is a way to “create your own DMT” as some adherents would like to promote.

I suspect that something about the state brought on by this ‘holotropic breathing’ is simply a primal, pre-verbal, and deeply body-attuned state that brings us simply more in contact with energy and feeling that is stored in the body.  It is a doorway to primitive data held in us, and a possible gateway through which to move it.  Maybe it is physiologically similar to birth, and to what happens in other ancient ceremony experiences, like a sweat lodge or fasting or all-night dancing.  I just love that it is within us already.  I love that the more we learn, the more we see that all the best tools are actually not elitist or expensive but available to us with only our courage and volition.

I hope that we put more study into this, and I hope that we can all keep an open mind and consider the utter magic of healing that is available within our own body and mind.  I am convinced that all we would ever need is deep within us.  Go try this out and see for yourself.  If your mind is open and your body is healthy, it could be quite the experience.

At the end of the day, we all have our unique experiences. My trip is different than yours, even if we are travelling in the same car.  For me, this was a powerful and instructive event.  Clearly, for many others as well.  I will be recommending this whole- heartedly to many of my clients and friends, as I already have done.  And I will be considering ways to bring breathwork, in a more general sense, into my treatment plans for trauma.

This morning I was out for a run on my favourite local trail.  As I panted at the top of a hill, slightly delirious at the exertion and joy of the early fall colours, the smell of the rich dirt and quiet company of the trees, I thought of Holotropic breathing and that other thing we know is much more effective at dumping a lot of dopamine into the body – good old exercise.  Another thing that just makes us breathe deeply for a while.  My runner’s high doesn’t give me any huge life insight, necessarily. But a little! And I’m not sure it is deeply healing.  But somewhat.  It is certainly sustaining.  Joy is a nutrient.  I’ll take it.

Since my day of breathwork, I’m not going to pretend that my life is suddenly miraculously super different.  But every healing is a small shift in the arc of our trajectory, and this one did seem to set me in a good course.

I’ll continue to do whatever I can for my own healing, and to facilitate the healing of not just my clients, but all those around me.  That is our job, whether you’re a therapist or not.

Be good to yourself, out there.  You’re doing the work of the universe in a way that no one else can.  Be generous with yourself, so that you can be generous with others.  Lord knows we all need the grace.

https://holotropic.ca/events/

New study hopes to prove that breathwork therapy can treat PTSD in veterans | Hub (jhu.edu)