Transcription
The Joe Rogan Experience. It's so interesting to me that breathing and breath work, and and knowing how to breathe properly, is it's not common knowledge, but it's so critical to health, and it's free. It's not like we're not talking about something that requires devices or or like a long learning curve, or just just some of these benefits. So so many of them, and especially the most simple ones, right? Anyone can breathe in six seconds, in six seconds out. If you want to really go up to the next stage and figure out what breathing can really do for you on on a bigger and more powerful level, you can do Tummo, you can do Wim Hof, you can do Holotropic, you can do Kriya, you can do Pranayamas. They're all doing the same thing. And Holotropic, I haven't done it, but it makes you trip, right? It's an interesting experience. What was hard for you? You know, I know a lot of people have found profound benefits from this. They used it in a hospital. 11,000 people were put through this thing, and they showed it was more effective than any other therapy. Me personally, that the science is much more thin in Holotropic breathwork, and what I had been told by the instructors kind of threw me off, where they're like, they sit you in a room and they blast music, and for three hours you breathe as hard as you can. And they told me that you're gonna be able to enter into the space because so much oxygen is getting into your body. The opposite is happening. You're inhibiting blood flow to your brain, and so your brain is processing that as a threat. And sometimes you inhibit so much blood flow that perhaps your brain is interpreting this as though you are dying, which is why so many people have this reaction where they said, I am reborn after Holotropic. And that's awesome. I don't want to take that away from anyone. But but what I've seen is that this side, there is not, there's been a ton of subjective anecdotal studies, not a ton, a few of them, but the actual science behind it, no one's gone into an FM or and looked at what's really happening. And that's something I really want to do, and hopefully I'm gonna be doing in the next few months, just just for curiosity.
That makes sense. If people are having psychedelic experiences, because many psychedelic experiences are tied to near-death experiences. A lot of people that have near-death experiences, they report these moments that mimic what a lot of people have experienced on psychedelics. Yeah. So what they're doing through this Holotropic breathing, not harming themselves, right? Or do we not know? Not not that I know of. The the doctor who put 11,000 people and said there nobody had any problems, there were no side effects. So I've heard that some people can can freak out. I heard that there's possible bowel issues involved, and some some real meltdowns in in the class that I took. I wasn't sure how much was psychosomatic and how much was actually because of the breathing. I had a pretty strange experience where a guy turned into a wolf for a while. Whoa. Whoa. Real wolf? Went humping around the room. Oh. So a guy, not really. You, if I wish if it were a real wolf. Oh yeah, that would have been incredible. But he thought he was a wolf. He inhabited the body. He was just an [ __ ] that's possibly - and just like act it out, or maybe he really became a wolf. We will never know, which is why the Stumm should be studied. You know, there's a lot of talk that breathing this way will trigger endogenous DMT, and that's the reason people trip out so hard. I tried to do a study in which I would breathe this way, and they would take blood before and after, but the scientists that I was talking to said it would be such a small amount, they wouldn't be able to detect it. So there there's a lot of gray area, which to me is not a bad thing. It's great. There's still mysteries to breath. There's mysteries to the human body, right? And if people are finding great benefit from this, and there's no side effect, and then that's great. I just found it was a little little thinner than the other techniques, like Wim Hof method or like Kriya.
Um, no, I, this guy that had this experience and he turned to well, did you talk to him before? Awesome guy, super solid, normal. He was a lawyer working in San Francisco and and left and went to live off the grid in a cabin in Mendocino, which is completely legit and admirable. And he was a he was a groovy dude, and afterwards, really warm, welcoming guy. So I don't want to take away any any process that he went through. He said it was very cleansing for himself, and I think that that's that's great. You're a very nice guy. We might have to rip on it, right? Yeah, I understand. I understand. Yeah, I'm just saying you're a very nice guy. With your disclaimer, I'd like to talk to him. You know, where we can find him? He's out in the tundra right now. Yeah, you gotta go hunt him down. Busy. No, I've no idea. Maybe right. Maybe he's got a like a caribou in his mouth. Could be. So this guy ran around. Do you have clothes on? We do. Yeah. Yeah, he was he was scratching his crotch a little bit and growling and growling. And it got it got interesting. Yeah, everyone saw it. And again, you know, he was going through his process. That was cool. But the whole time I was watching him breathing, and he wasn't really breathing any differently than me. Because what you do is you have a half the class or the sitters for the people who are breathing, and you watch over these people in case they have problems. So I was a sitter during this process. I was not breathing. I was looking at his respiration. Really didn't look any different. So I'm wondering how much of this is is the set and setting of this. You're in Mendocino, you're the hot springs, there's really loud music, fake lutes. Music is, you know, that's that's something I wish they could have worked on a little bit. I wish. But it was a lot of like, fake keyboard lutes and cymbal, the fake tinny cymbal crashes, the the maqam, hollow, that's the kind of music they're playing. Yeah, that would seem like, you know, when you're talking about set and setting, that would seem to be like a terrible set and setting. Well, a lot of people enjoyed that music, and and good, good, good for them. It would be interesting to mix it up with with three hours of death metal, right? And just see where that would take that one. Something good. Blend that. That would be fine. Yeah.
Just um, so when you did it, so you were a sitter, but then you also did it, right? And when you did it, what did you experience? Uh, well, it definitely affects you because you're breathing in a certain way, it's gonna affect your physiology. So no, I got really cold, I got really hot, got really spacey. I felt like I was kind of dreaming for a while. Three hours is a long time to breathe as hard as you possibly can. But the shifts in temperature and in circulation, because the body is trying to compensate, right? Mm-hmm. So the more your breathing, your pH is gonna be, you know, going down. So you're becoming more alkaline. So so your body doesn't like that. It really wants the pH because all the cellular functions happen at a certain pH. Some point for. So it was to me, it was fascinating to feel my body fighting against this and constantly trying to balance itself throughout the whole thing. But it's definitely spacey. There's no doubt about it. Spacey. Would you believe, uh, you are extremely lightheaded. You feel very high. Starting to Ben Greenfield about it, and he said it was the most profound spiritual experience he's he's ever had, just by breathing. And a lot of people say the same thing. I, you know, those subjective experiences are cool, but I think it would be a lot more interesting to find out what happens to everybody, not just one person, when they do this, and to look at the brain, and to look at the body, and really analyze that to see if there's some physiological reaction. We know what's happening with blood flow to the brain. We know what happened to the brain when it's denied blood for the blood flow to certain areas. But but how does that affect us psychologically afterward? How does it affect us physically? I think these are good questions, and it'd be interesting to find out.
How long did it take you to feel like you recovered from that experience? Pretty pretty quickly. I went outside afterwards and drank a beer in my car and just sort of re-entered. But but it was mostly just that the feeling of extreme lightheadedness, dreaminess, and then everything just sort of boils back down, and you're back in Mendocino at the hmm. And when when they sell you on this, like what, when they have a class for Holotropic breathing, what are they, what are they saying it's going to do? Well, they can't claim any medical benefits because the FDA would come after them. But but they say it is a spiritual journey, and for many people, it is. And and I think that's a wonderful thing that they're getting benefit from this. And they use this this fuzzy language, light like that, because they can't say it's gonna help with your asthma, right? But but what's interesting is there are other methods, like like Kriya. Sudarshan Kriya, 60 independent studies. And it's so similar to Holotropic. The difference is, you don't breathe super hard for three hours. You breathe extremely intensely for about five minutes, and slow it down.
But let me ask you about the reason first. For Kriya, so Holotropic breathing, what is the actual technique? Like, how does it, how do you do it? You breathe as hard and as fast as you are. So you're not taking big deep breaths. Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do is fingered breathing through the nose, through the mouth, whatever you want to do. They say through through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in, you know, real. This was um, yeah, yeah, you get more larger volume. Yep. Yeah, for sure. And this was created in the 70s by Stanislav Grof, who is a psychiatrist who was one of the first test subjects of LSD. And he started using LSD at Johns Hopkins and in other universities and found had this profound effect for people with with schizophrenia and other serious problems. It got banned in what '68. And so he wanted to find a way to allow people to have these experiences without the drug. And so he developed this specifically to mimic the effects of LSD. So and he's he's written 12 books on this stuff, some of the science, mostly the psychology of what's happening with it. I wish that there was some more hard science to it. There's not yet, but hopefully that's forthcoming. And that number, three hours, is that consistent? They've been, it's interesting. When I did this, and this was several years ago, it was three hours. So you had to go three hours. Now they're doing, I guess that was too hard for a lot of people. They're doing these hour sessions, which is uh, which is news to me. Again, everybody wants to be Swami Rama, nobody wants to live in a cave for 30 years. Three hour sessions, man. Oh, man. I think you too much time, bro. You got it. I but but if you're gonna go into that zone, I think you want the the full pie, not not just the piece. Yeah, I would imagine. Um, but I guess it's it's pretty hard for people to do that for that long. I've had some friends who've done the Holotropic breathing, one of the reasons why I asked you this. And these friends are pretty hardcore psychedelic experimenters, and they found it very profound. They said that they could achieve states that are very similar to psychedelic experiences. You hear that all the time. And you didn't find that? I found it very lightly. I did not go into the the spectral universe. And you've done that before? Have you had psychedelic experiences before? I have. I went to college. But but I did not know them too deeply. All these disclaimers. My mom's mom. Oh, I understand. Okay. You can wink. Okay, I got it. [Applause]