As psychedelics move from the underground to mainstream medicine, clinicians aspiring to work in the field are inducing altered states with deep breathing.
Credit…Damien Maloney for The New York Times
Supported by
Reporting from San Francisco
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.
Dr. JJ Pursell, a naturopathic doctor from Oregon, was among the trainees who walked into the early October session skeptical that a couple of hours of intense breathing could induce anything close to a psychedelic trip. But she was stunned.
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To Prepare for Psychedelic Therapy, Doctors Breathe Their Way to an Altered State – The New York Times
