HOLY Holotropic Breathwork!!

The yoga studio I usually go to recently had a guest instructor, Brigitte Toussaint, who specializes in “breath work”. I had no idea what this meant but I decided to check it out assuming it was some sort of combination of yoga and meditation with a particular emphasis on your breathing. However, what we walked into was truly a mind alternating experience. The instructor started off by giving us her phone number and her email and encouraging us to reach out to her later in the evening or at any time if we needed to “talk through our emotions”. I was very unclear what exactly she meant by this and cynically thought it was just a branding/marketing thing. However, by the end of the class, it was more than apparent why she would make herself available for any support. It was a wild 45 minutes!

Brigitte had us lay on our backs for most of the class. The breathing involved taking two consecutive in-breaths through the mouth, (yes the mouth) the first sourced from the stomach then the second through the chest, then, only after this two-staged in-breathe, comes the out-breath. All through the mouth. Music played in the background. About 15 minutes into this breathing my face started to tingle, then quickly followed by my hands then arms, and pretty much my whole body. I started sweating profusely, dripping sweat everywhere! Emotionally, I felt sort of high and euphoric, yet with a sprinkling of fear given that my whole body was tingling, literally paralyzed. I was hallucinating like I just taking some serious drugs.

I have never experienced anything close to this feeling. There were moments where it took all my strength not to break out laughing, and other moments not to cry. When Brigitte brought weened us off the breathing patterns, I had completely sweated through my shirt and pants, I was slowly able to regain movement of my arms and then my body. Out of the 20 or so folks in the class, it took me by far the longest to finally sit up. As I exited the studio I was in a complete daze, and I just stared at the river behind the studio still in recovery mode and also bit of shock to what I had just experienced. When I finally spoke, I looked at my wife (who was also in the class) and asked: “was the hell was that?” She said yea I was worried about you, I knew you were going to go full-tilt. She had, perhaps wisely, slowed her breathing when she started to first tingle, but I had clearly not (nor were you supposed to, according to the instructor). A few hours later, my fatigue had certainly lessened, but I believe it more the impact of being crowded out by this new experience.

The rest of the day I felt pretty good, relaxed, calm, any worries had dissipated. But, while this was a very positive, albeit strange, experience for me, it was one that I haven’t yet tried to replicate given how powerful, and a bit unnatural it felt. I may do it again, but don’t fully see the need to at this point. While I do reflect on the experience with very positive emotions, when I spoke to my acupuncturist about the breath-work he noted that such a technique is usually completed during the last stages of serious meditation practices. If done too early it can bring up many and potentially harmful emotions that the practitioner is not necessarily ready to experience. He related to a bad mushroom trip. Hence the phone/email distribution at the beginning of the class. This sort of overlapped with my intuition about not really feeling a need to do it again.

All said and one, I would certainly recommend trying this technique if you are already in a good headspace and also under the eye of an experienced practitioner. The whole process definitely moves stagnant energy around in your body, which may be beneficial to your recovery and overall health. It is probably something that need not be done frequently, but that said, for me, it was a pretty cool experience.​

NIH Research on the improvement in temperament from Hylotropic breathwork: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677109/

Books on the topic

+ Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy (SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)

+ Breathwork: How to Use Your Breath to Change Your Life (Breathing Techniques for Anxiety Relief and Stress, Breath Exercises for Mindfulness and Self-Care)