Psychedelic therapy and breathing

I know that the whole secret of yoga lies in two practices concerning which I have been unable to obtain any guidance from any body else or make any progress myself; control of breathing and meditation.

Of all the functions of the body, breathing is the only involuntary one that can be performed at will. The object is to make it voluntary and take possession of it. Through control of breathing, step by step, one can gain control of other functions. And to will is to know. If you want to know your body from within, this is the rope that goes down into the well.

– Lanza Del Vasto, Return to the Source

Ernesto Londoño, Breathing Their Way to an Altered State, NYTimes, 1.9.23. The opening paragraphs:

The instructions were simple: Lying on cots while wearing eyeshades, participants were directed to take deep belly breaths without pause to the beat of fast-paced music booming from loudspeakers.

The exercise, they were told, had the potential to induce an altered state of consciousness so profound that breathers sometimes describe it as reliving the terrifying moment of their birth. Past participants claim to have caught glimpses of past lives.

A few minutes into the session, which lasted nearly three hours, several participants began to weep. Some shook their limbs wildly, looking possessed. An outsider walking in would have been startled by the scene.

But the dozens of attendees at the recent breathwork workshop in San Francisco were far from hippies or cult initiates. They were health care professionals completing the final step of a certificate program in psychedelic therapy.

The vigorous modality, known as holotropic breathwork, is offered at the end of an eight-month training to provide a lawful taste of the therapeutic potential and pitfalls of altered states of consciousness.

New therapeutics needed:

Mental health experts say that traditional interventions to treat depression, trauma and addiction are failing many patients in the United States, which is grappling with a high suicide rate and an opioid addiction epidemic that killed approximately 75,000 people in 2022.

“In psychiatry and psychology, we’ve hit a brick wall,” said Janis Phelps, the director of the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at the California Institute of Integral Studies, the first program of its kind at a university.

Stanislav Grof:

“Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or what the telescope is for astronomy,” he wrote in “LSD Psychotherapy,” a book published in 1980.

By then, the war on drugs had stifled the field, prompting Dr. Grof to develop a new breath-based modality that borrowed from ancient Indian and shamanic practices. Holotropic breathwork — a term that blends Greek words that mean moving toward wholeness — became a means to induce altered states of consciousness without drugs. [...]

In an interview, Dr. Grof, 92, said that he had discovered, much to his surprise, that breathwork sessions could be as powerful as psychedelic trips. Altered states, whether breath- or drug-induced, he said, often allow people to unravel the root causes of their suffering quickly, making them more effective than conventional treatments like antidepressants.

There’s more at the link.