Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts. Whenever your mind becomes scattered, use your breath as the means to take hold of your mind again.
—Thich Nhat Hanh
A brisk frost coats the windows of a yoga studio not far from my house in Denver. Outside, people walk by with scarves bundled up to their chins, hunched over to keep the cold at bay while cars zoom up and down the busy street. Inside, the space’s womb-like interior is warm and quiet. Two dozen humans lie down on yoga mats with their faces pointed toward the roof. Most of us have our eyes closed.
Unlike in a typical class, the teacher isn’t leading us through sequences of sanskritized stretching. Instead, we’re breathing in unison. That’s all. Long, deep inhales followed by equally long exhales. This is the sound of humans doing what is absolutely necessary to be alive. Inside our bodies, our lungs perform a bit of chemistry. We take oxygen into our bloodstreams and then exhale the acidic byproduct of respiration: carbon dioxide.
I’m relaxed and stretched out on my mat. I inhale, then exhale, urged onward by the rhythm of the music. We start out slowly at first, but as the session proceeds, the instructor urges us to pick up the pace. We breathe until our fingers begin to tingle and our legs come alive. I’m dizzy, but still putting effort into every inhale and exhale. We work on our breath together, reaching new peaks of exertion, then slow down into relaxation.
As I lie there, I am amazed at how odd the bodily function of breathing really is. Nearly all respiration runs on autopilot, without any need to consider how important it is. It just takes the slightest effort to consciously hijack control and determine for ourselves how deeply we breathe, how often, and even stop it altogether for long stretches until our bodies have no choice but to wrest back control when we pass out. This makes breathwork the perfect wedge between our autonomic and somatic systems. And yet the control switch between consciousness and unconsciousness is so perfectly smooth that we don’t always notice what a feat it is.
I’m enjoying the gentle way that the teacher leads the group into connecting to their own bodies by alternating between deep, focused breathing and long breath holds. There’s something amazing about breathwork in a group that is impossible to duplicate at home. I feel myself going deeper into my own mind with every pattern.
Elizabeth Lee, our guide, takes us through the basic Wim Hof Method. We start to breathe faster as the music from her portable speaker matches our pace. When we’re lightheaded, she tells us to exhale and hold long enough so that the automatic urge to breathe starts to become uncomfortable. Many of the people in the room have never tried Wim Hof breathwork before, and Lee is watching everyone closely to be sure they stay with her script. She doesn’t want to push anyone too far.
Lee, who goes by Elee, is a slight, elfin lady in orange psychedelic-patterned yoga pants; she calls out to the room with the voice of a person who has made breathwork a central part of her life. She’s a Wim Hof Method instructor with a breezy style of teaching. The real reason I’m here is that she asked me to give a talk at the beginning of the class about my own journey with Hof and the power of breathwork. But I have stayed to experience the energy of the group breathing together. I’m glad I did. I’m learning a few new things, diving deep into my experience and reconnecting with my own Wim Hof journey, which began almost a decade ago. My experimentation with the Hof Method was the gateway into my curiosity about hacking the human nervous system. My own journey has developed over the years.
In the beginning, I’d almost always feel slightly lightheaded, have tingling in my hands and feet and see an array of colors flash behind my eyes—and then I’d experience intense euphoria between tension and release. Over time, as my practice matured, those feelings fell into the background. I’ve conditioned my body, and because of that, the luster of newness has dulled.
But it’s different in the group experience. Now I feel connected back to those first sensations of the method. I am going deeper. My breath holds are getting longer. A shifting pattern sparks behind my lids, and I realize that my body is primed to do a maneuver that Hof once taught me that will send my consciousness to a place I seldom try to visit. I start to stray off Elee’s script into what Hof calls “DMT breathing,” and I’m so deep that I’m not thinking about how it might look from the outside. If I were a fly on the wall, I would have seen that Elee was getting concerned about me. It’s understandable. It must have looked freaky, as if I were actually taking the drug DMT, this breathing method’s namesake.
…
The breathing pattern gets its name because it produces a particular type of hallucination that resembles the experience that people report when they smoke the chemical DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine). Aficionados of psychedelics, often called psychonauts, consider DMT to be one of the most powerful and profound chemicals on Earth—characterized by brief but intense visions of spirits, aliens and even traveling to other worlds. What makes DMT so fascinating is that many people report seeing the same exact hallucinations and meeting the same otherworldly entities in their visions. Some claim that the visions are a peek into what happens during death. The chemical basis for so-called near-death experiences occurs when the pineal gland releases DMT into the brain and you take your last gasps.4 While difficult to prove, this is why DMT sometimes goes by another name: the spirit molecule. Whether or not the breathing pattern does release DMT has never been the subject of medical study; nonetheless, many people initiated into the practice report life-changing experiences from the protocol. Regardless of the mechanism, I’m getting to the point in the breathing where I can trigger my own near-death experience.
Giving into my impulses, I shift away from Elee’s instructions.
At first I concentrate on that familiar lightheadedness and tingling in my fingers. Then there’s a swatch of colors behind my eyelids, and I know that I’m getting somewhere. My chest heaves up off the mat thirty more times. And then, just like that, the room disappears. Now I’m traveling down a tunnel of concentric halos. Splashes of color arc across the walls, interspersing deep pitch-blackness with smatterings of violet, red and yellow. I take another lungful of air and hold it at the top of the inhale. Following a protocol that I’ve been tweaking for years, I clench the muscles in my feet, legs, stomach and chest, one after another, like I’m pushing blood and air up to the top of my head. This process, called a “push,” intensifies the experience. Suddenly everything goes white, like I’m staring into the flashbulb of a camera. After a few seconds, the glow fades into a familiar bearded face. Then I’m rushing forward again, down an infinite plane of shifting colors toward...well...I don’t know exactly what. Maybe I’m reaching the end of something. Or the beginning. I’m not even thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve taken a breath.
Parallel to whatever might or might not be happening with DMT in my brain chemistry, the body responds in predictable ways to long breath holds like the one I’m doing now. When starved of oxygen, the brain starts turning out the lights—shutting off higher cognitive functions in order to concentrate energy on the life-sustaining systems in the lower brain stem. There’s a certain magic to this moment, because as long as I don’t push it too long, I can remain conscious of that process and turn it into a lens into my lizard mind. It doesn’t feel like I’m being turned into a lesser version of myself. I feel expansive.
…
My experience in Elee’s class makes sense. The breathing method has starved my brain for oxygen. But I don’t experience this as impairment. Instead I feel expansive, as if I’m moving into a higher state of consciousness. It’s paradoxical, but I feel more connected to the world when my higher brain functions take a back seat. With the thinking brain turned off, I’ve stopped seeing all the ways that I’m separate from the world around me. Instead, I’m experiencing the way that I’m part of the universe.
The philosopher and CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] scientist Bernardo Kastrup recently wrote in the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics that mystical and spiritual experiences often correlate with neurological impairment in the brain. Drawing on research from cases of hypoxia—oxygen starvation, where parts of the brain turn off—as well as instances of chemical impairment through drugs and even brain injuries, he shows how diminished brain function correlates with feelings of expanded consciousness and spiritual insight. Kastrup writes, “A potential explanation for this is that brain function impairment could disproportionately affect inhibitory neural processes, thereby generating or bringing into awareness other neural processes associated with self-transcending experiences.”
I’ve used the Wedge to get here—first priming my body with an exercise that pushes me toward a physical limit, then breaking beyond the barriers of my body’s programming by adding just a tiny bit more stress. And I believe that states like this that put breathwork in the center of spiritual practices across the world. Indian yogis wrote about this 5,000 years ago. Indeed, there have been thousands of different related protocols—from the earliest form of breath control, called pranayama in the yogic tradition, to the Tibetan tradition of tummo, which builds up heat in the body, to the hallucination-inducing holotropic breathing from the 1960s and the easy-to-learn box breathing that predictably lowers the heart rate. Like them, I’m approaching one of life’s thresholds simply by manipulating a tool with which all of us are born with. After all, breathing means life; not breathing means death.5 In other words, as I manipulate my breath, I’m pushing a wedge in the space between life and death.
Outside of whatever psychedelic space I’ve vaulted into, in the real world—the one where I’m lying on the floor with a bunch of other heavy breathers—Elizabeth Lee is worried about me. I’m on the floor at the top of a several-minute-long breath hold and my skin is turning bright purple. She’s worried that I might pop.
She puts her hand on my chest and shakes me gently. “Are you okay?” she asks. When I don’t react to her voice, she suggests that maybe I should just take a breath.
But back in the tunnel, whatever is happening in the yoga studio doesn’t seem so important. I know that a woman is next to me, and I can feel her concern. Unwilling to open my eyes and not exactly thinking clearly, I conjure an image in my mind of the person who I think is talking to me. I imagine that she’s a woman with dark flowing hair and a wide beaming smile. (Later, I’ll look back on that image and realize that it’s not Lee I’m seeing.) I don’t want to come back just yet. I feel like I’m getting somewhere I’ve never been before. I’m not connected to my body
She shakes me again, this time hard on my sternum. I reluctantly abandon my travels in the kaleidoscope. I open my eyes and take a breath. The flush leaves my face and I feel comfortable and relaxed. More than that, I feel filled with love and gratitude for the world around me.
For her part, Lee looks stressed. Her eyebrows furrow upward in the middle. After the workshop, she says that I hadn’t taken a breath in at least five minutes and was turning purple. Whatever blissful plane I was headed toward, she was the one responsible for a room full of people on their own individual journeys and wasn’t interested in having any casualties.
Make no mistake: It was irresponsible of me to indulge this way in her class. And while definitely alarming to look at, I’ve used these breathing patterns dozens of times before and don’t think I’m any worse the wear for it. In my experience, I don’t believe it’s actually possible to completely shut off the autonomic nervous system. The ability to override breathing patterns only works while I’m conscious. Eventually, when I hit the limit of oxygen starvation, I’ll pass out. The lowest area of my brain stem will simply take over, and breathing will continue on autopilot as usual. It’s not unlike hitting the reset button on a computer. This is why it’s a near-death experience and not just straight up death. I’ve seen this happen to other people. Then again, human biology is complex, and I don’t know for sure how much danger I was really in while Lee looked on in horror. I do wonder what I’d find at the end of the tunnel. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just passed out. Either way, as I gaze upward at the ceiling of the studio, I’m filled with gratitude for the experience.
Whatever the case, breathwork like this shows how active protocols create physical changes that directly alter my experience of consciousness. However, this type of exercise is only one of thousands. There’s too much ground to cover in just one book, or maybe even a library of books. Suffice it to say, breath is the most basic wedge—one that that we’re all born with. In Elee’s yoga studio, I turned off parts of my brain, which I believe made me look deep inside my internal physiology. The diminished higher brain functions provided a peek at the interior layers of the Russian dolls that make up my consciousness at the same time that I connected to something greater than myself. It could be that the cognitive complexity of the human brain evolved in order to force a sense of absolute individuality—even isolation—onto the way we experience the world. This may have made it easier to pass on our genes, but that always-on filter can also prevent an inherent sense of connection to our environment. I wonder whether our ability to circumvent that filter is a bug, or a feature of being human in the first place. Whatever the truth, breath is also a wedge between the body and the environment—the outer layers of the Russian dolls. Instead of using it to delve inward and shut down, maybe I can also use it to reach outward. To do that, I’m going to have to head back to California.
4 This often-repeated statement is controversial among neurobiologists. While it’s well known that the pineal gland produces melatonin and DMT, identifying exactly what chemicals release at the moment of death proves predictably difficult to study. A similar controversy surrounds whether or not the pineal gland ever releases enough endogenous DMT to even spark a hallucination. Chemical similarities between DMT and melatonin (the hormone that regulates circadian rhythms) have caused some scientists to speculate that maybe DMT also occurs naturally in the lungs, and not the pineal gland at all. This is because DMT is just one carbon dioxide molecule away from melatonin—which is exactly what is released during an exhale.
5 The Vinaya—one of the earliest Pali texts that are sacred to Buddhism—contains the story of Migalandika from the Buddha’s earliest years, when he decided to teach his followers the surest path to enlightenment. The first method he revealed revolved around contemplating our own inevitable mortality in open graveyards in front of rotting corpses. Unfortunately, his followers did not take to the lesson the way he anticipated, and they began to commit suicide. Sensing he had made a terrible error, the Buddha came up with a new pedagogy that focused instead on watching the rising and falling of the breath. For more about this conflict in the earliest years of Buddhism, see my book The Enlightenment Trap.