James Nestor Had a "Transformative" Experience in His Holotropic Breathing Class

It's so interesting to me that breathing and breath work and knowing how to breathe properly it's not common knowledge but it's so critical to health and it's free. We're not talking about something that requires devices or like a long learning curve or just some of these benefits. 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 a bigger and more powerful level, you can do TUMO. You can do Wim Hof. You can do Holotropic. You can do Krios. 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 it like for you? 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, the science is much more thin in Holotropic breath work. 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 going to 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 what I've seen is that 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 fMRI and looked at what's really happening. That's something I really want to do and hopefully I'm going to be doing in the next few months 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. So what they're doing through this holotropic breathing, they're not harming themselves, right? Or do we not know? Not that I know of. The doctor who put 11,000 people into it, nobody had any problems. There were no side effects. So I've heard that some people can freak out. I heard that there's possible bowel issues involved and some real meltdowns. 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. A wolf, like a real wolf? Went humping around the room. Oh, so a guy, not to you. I wish if it were a real wolf, that would have been incredible. But he thought he was a wolf. He inhabited the body of a wolf. Maybe he was just an asshole. That's possible too and just acted out. Or maybe he really became a wolf. We will never know, which is why this stuff should be studied. 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'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. And if people are finding great benefit from this and there's no side effect, then that's great. I just found it was a little thinner than the other techniques like Wim Hof Method or like Kriya. This guy that had this experience and he turned into a wolf, did you talk to him before? Awesome guy, super solid. He was a lawyer working in San Francisco and left and went to live off the grid in a cabin in Mendocino, which is completely legit and admirable. And he was a groovy dude. And afterwards, really warm, welcoming guy. So I don't want to take away any process that he went through. He said it was very cleansing for himself. And I think that that's great. You're a very nice guy. I wish I was there. Who might have to rip on it, right? 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. You got to go hunt him down. Is he? No, I have no idea. Maybe, right? Maybe he's got like a caribou in his mouth. Could be. So this guy ran around. Do you have clothes on when he did this? Yeah, he was scratching his crotch a little bit and growling. Growling. And 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 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 the set and setting of this. You're in Mendocino. You're in the hot springs. There's really loud music, fake lutes. What kind of music is this? You know, that's something I wish they could have worked on a little bit. Death metal? I wish. But it was a lot of like fake keyboard lutes and cymbal, the fake tinny cymbal crashes. The Macam, Hall of... That's the kind of music they're playing? That kind of thing, yeah. Well, that would seem like, you know, when you talk about set and setting, that would seem to be like a terrible set and setting. Well, a lot of people enjoyed that music and good for them. It would be interesting to mix it up with three hours of death metal and just see where that would take them. Or Zeppelin, something good. Zeppelin, that would be fine. Yeah. I just... 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? Well, it definitely affects you because you're breathing in a certain way, it's going to affect your physiology. So I got really cold, I got really hot, I 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? So the more you're breathing, your pH is going to be, you know, going down. So you're becoming more alkaline. So your body doesn't like that. It really wants the pH because all the cellular function happen at a certain pH, some point four. So 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. I would say spacey. What do you... You are extremely lightheaded. You feel very high. I was talking to Ben Greenfield about it and he said it was the most profound spiritual experience he's ever had just by breathing. And a lot of people say the same thing. 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 happens to the brain when it's denied blood flow to certain areas. But how does that affect us psychologically afterwards? How does it affect us physically? I think these are good questions and it'll be interesting to find out. How long does it take you to feel like you recovered from that experience? Pretty quickly. I went outside afterwards and drank a beer in my car and just sort of re-centered. But it was mostly just the feeling of extreme lightheadedness, dreaminess, and then everything just sort of boils back down in your back in Mendocino at the hot tubs. And when they sell you on this, when they have a class for holotropic breathing, 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 they say it is a spiritual journey and for many people it is. And I think that's a wonderful thing that they're getting benefit from this. And they use this fuzzy language like that because they can't say it's going to help with your asthma. But what's interesting is there are other methods like Kriya, Sudarshan Kriya, 60 independent studies and is 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 then slow it down. But let me ask you about holotropic breathing first before Kriya. So holotropic breathing, what is the actual technique? How do you do it? You breathe as hard and as fast as you are able to breathe. So you're not taking big deep breaths? Whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to do. It's hard. You can do that. Absolutely. And you're breathing through the nose, through the mouth. Whatever you want to do. They say through the mouth is going to allow you to get more air in. Is that real? This was, yeah, yeah. You'll get more air in. Because you get larger volume. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And this was created in the 70s by Stanislav Groff, 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 it had this profound effect for people 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. And 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. In that number, three hours, is that consistent? 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 news to me. Again, everybody wants to be Swami Rama. Nobody wants to live in a cave for 30 years. Three hours is America, man. That's too much time, bro. But if you're going to go into that zone, I think you want the full pie, not just the peas. Yeah, I would imagine. But I guess 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. But you didn't find that. I found it very lightly. I did not go into the spectral universe. And you've done that before? Have you had psychedelic experiences before? I went to college, but I did not dabble too deeply. All these disclaimers. My mom's. Oh, I understand. Okay. You can wink. Okay, I got it.