WTF is transient hypofrontality, anyways?
I was already way down the yoga rabbit hole when I first started hearing whispers about Breathwork in yoga studios and Kundalini circles.
“It’s like a deep cleaning for all that stuck emotional gunk”
“It’s as trippy as an Ayahuasca ceremony, but much safer”
“I had no idea how much stuff I was holding on to before Breathwork”
I was skeptical. I had, for many years, been a regular practitioner of vigorous breathing styles like Kapalbhati, Breath of Fire, cannon breath, etc. What could possibly make generic-sounding Breathwork different?
A lot, it turns out. My first Breathwork session was a one-on-one conducted via Zoom with my lovely friend Briana Kurtz. I chatted with her a bit about a few blocks that seemed stubbornly lingering in my life, then laid down as she taught me the breathing pattern.
….WOAH.
Yes, I felt literally electrified, with an exploding heart within a few minutes. I felt charged up, but in a way that felt completely from within– charged up with my own soul’s energy, as though my spirit were a flaccid balloon and the breath just expanded it so I felt buoyant and free.
Pretty soon after that experience, I was on a plane to Los Angeles to complete Healer’s Training with David Elliott. Since then, I’ve led about 50 live Breathwork Ceremonies and just as many private Breathwork sessions. I have been astounded at the heroic journey of the human soul and truly touched by the bravery and compassion of the students I have been privileged to guide with Breathwork.
So what exactly is going on during Breathwork that makes it such an unusually electric experience? Here are a few things I’ve learned.
- Breathwork is meditation on steroids.
Sam Harris often says that psychedelics provide a guaranteed shift in consciousness, while meditation produces the same effect but subtly and over a great period of time. Breathwork offers the best of both worlds: you are virtually guaranteed to have a powerful experience, whether on the emotional, mental, or spiritual level (most commonly, all three). At the same time, you are in control of your experience at all times. And unlike ingesting a psychedelic substance, your breath will merely give you a magnified experience of your own self, without the side-effects of external substances.
2. Breathwork conditions the nervous system and instantly relieves stress and anxiety
During Breathwork, we take deep, rich, diaphragmatic breaths. These breaths massage the vagus nerve and tonify the parasympathetic nervous system, sending the brain a message to relax its fight-or-flight impulses.
In this relaxed state, the body and mind are free to follow their deepest impulse towards integration and flow. Francoise Bourzat writes in Consciousness Medicine, “The resolution of inner conflicts is possible through accessing a more resourced state than the one in which a conflict or pattern of tension was created.”
3. Breathwork is alkalinizing and supports your body’s immunity.
Contrary to popular opinion, Breathwork- at least as I have been taught to practice it- is not the same as hyperventilation.
Hyperventilation is the body’s natural response to anxiety and speeds up the heart rate. Breathwork is a controlled, active pattern. Nevertheless, in the breathing pattern which includes vigorous exhaling, carbon dioxide is dispelled from the body. You’ll know you are lowering the CO2 levels in the body if you experience tingling or pins and needles while breathing– with the changes in your body chemistry, your nerves start firing. This is completely safe and can be soothed by simply softening your exhale.
An alkaline body is a natural antidote to inflammation. It aids in repairing free-radical damage, supports cellular regeneration.
When the body is in an alkaline state, more red blood cells are produced so the body can transport O2 more efficiently in the future, so you’ll feel like you have more energy. Athletes benefit from the red blood cells for short endurance sports, such as football and middle-distance foot races – from increased VO2 max.
Stem cells are able to move more easily around the body to help with repair and anti-aging [still unconfirmed but has been shown in rats to increase neural cell regeneration in the brain.
4. Breathwork facilitates deep emotional release and can be cathartic.
It’s not uncommon for people who haven’t cried in years to spend some part of a breathing session weeping from a place they haven’t been in contact with for ages.
When we practice Breathwork, we enter into an expanded state of consciousness. Expanded states are ‘amplifiers of the psyche’ (Stanislav Grof), where our recurrent patterns and phobias are brought to the surface so they can be addressed and ultimately blown past.
Once the conscious mind is temporarily disabled by the breathing pattern, we enter an expanded state of consciousness and our places of deepest imbalance or trauma come to the surface so we can attend to them with loving breath and compassion.
5. Breathwork tangibly boosts intuition and creativity
Think of your mind like an infinite web of train tracks– billions of neural networks fire together and wire together. If you feel like your mental habits tend towards just a few staid railways, you’re not alone– neuroplasticity means that our mental patterns and triggers create deeper and more familiar grooves within.
Breathwork creates a state called transient hypofrontality– a fancy way of saying that, temporarily, your frontal lobe and the default mode network- basically, the TV channel of your brain that ruminates- is disabled. The focused thinking part of our brain gets a rest. This allows other parts and functions to become more dominant.
With that pesky TV channel turned off, there’s an opportunity for you to access the myriad of other neural networks in your brain, as well as listen for input from the other centres of cognition which the yogis have described for millennia– for example, the centre of gut-knowing at the solar plexus, intuition at the third eye, and compassionate understanding at the heart. Over time, you’ll find that you are much more deeply resourced and able to check in with the different centres of cognition that your magnificent human-machine contains.