TiltedConsciousness Podcast Episode 2: Conscious Breathwork

Welcome to the Tilted Consciousness Podcast.

I'm Brandon Tilt,

I'm your host,

And today I want to talk about conscious connected breathing and why I absolutely love this spiritual practice,

Why I love this sort of emotional,

Physical,

Embodiment practice,

And how much it's meant to me to learn how to listen to my body and allow it to teach me how to breathe,

How to feel,

And ultimately how to heal,

Which is a really beautiful experience if you ever get the chance to just sort of breathe within a container or within your own safety of your home.

But breathing using this technique,

It's quite powerful.

And I wouldn't be able to express myself in some of the ways that I have felt I really had to and needed to really,

But couldn't or struggled with.

And offering some compassion that we can find tools,

We can find ways,

Various different ways,

To enter into these healing spaces.

It's not just a.

.

.

You don't have to heal the way someone sort of shows you to or the conventional method society tells you to.

You heal however you need to heal.

Conscious connected breathing,

It's also known by some as holotropic breath work,

Was first developed by a.

.

.

I believe he was a psychologist or psychiatrist who also did research in the field of working with LSD in therapy.

And Stanislav Grof was this LSD researcher,

Who he was known by,

Who after they reached a certain point in the regulations in the probably 70s,

Sorry if I'm wrong there,

Where they didn't allow scientists or researchers or even clinicians to work with LSD in therapy anymore.

So there was a tightly regulated law or introduction of laws that just said,

Nope,

Can't do it,

LSD is no longer something you can use in a clinical sense and allow people to experience these deeply,

Deeply expansive emotional experiences.

So Stanislav Grof,

As being someone who was a researcher and a clinician,

Decided to develop a type of breathing that allowed a person,

Through actively applying this process,

To access these deeper sort of repressed neurological states similar to the ways that he would.

.

.

Allow and facilitate experiences of emotional release in LSD therapy.

So Stanislav Grof was the first to sort of patent holotropic breathing,

But nowadays there's a man who's actually based in Vancouver.

So Robin Clements,

He wrote a book,

An audio book is also available,

But it's all about his experience and how he teaches people to breathe.

So the holotropic breath work,

Now the conscious connected breathing as I was introduced,

It involves doing belly,

First belly breaths that are continuing a cycle of breathing through the mouth,

And it's essentially allowing a sort of contraction outward of the stomach and eventually the chest,

If you can get to that point,

And then allowing it to sort of all just release and continuing this flow in a sort of circle,

Circular breathing,

Without having any pause,

Which is like completely unnatural to humans.

So you know,

Animals will do this,

Animals will breathe in a way that does not.

.

.

Sorry,

Take that moment of pause in between breathing.

But we as humans,

We're actually.

.

.

At some point we trained ourselves to take those moments of just those breath holds,

Micro breath holds even,

Like they're done unconsciously.

So it's interesting when you start to lean into this process,

You recognize how unnatural it is to just have a continuous flow of breath like you would in the conscious connected breathing sessions.

So these would take about 30 to 45 minutes,

And they are intense,

You know,

It's not just the physical exertion of breathing,

But the sort of committing and leaning into that experience,

Sort of trusting your body,

And allowing its expression to sort of really fill you with sensation.

And there will be a lot of different sensations,

Physical sensations,

And there's really no other way to do it other than to kind of just like try it,

On some level suffer through it,

And reach that point,

You eventually will reach this point of release.

And this release can look like anger,

You know,

This could be a very pent up aggression that you held on to for your entire life that maybe started in an experience when you're a child.

And then you just sort of released that bottled up aggression and maybe just scream.

And there's like a primal sort of connection that's being made there.

Or for many people,

Such as myself,

It was really about crying,

Like finding how to have that deeper,

Deeper,

Sort of like,

You know,

Ugly cry,

Where you're just letting it all out.

It doesn't matter how much you filter anymore,

It doesn't matter how much.

.

.

For some people,

It doesn't matter how much you want to cry,

There is a physical inability to do so on top of the very real social conditioning that you know,

For men,

Especially,

It's not okay to cry.

You have to kind of hold it in,

You know,

Sort of like this sort of tenseness of it.

But this flow is very counter to that,

Right?

Like you're allowing the body to sort of very sensually,

You know,

Getting into the senses of the body in a very feminine way,

Really,

Like the dynamic movement within the nervous system,

You know,

Embodying the divine feminine,

Allowing you to access these stored or sort of blocked energy systems that are essentially your primal nervous system,

The areas of your brain that you can't really engage with just through,

You know,

Conventional talk therapy,

You can't really just recognize these emotions on the same sort of intensity.

So this breathing technique is nice because it will allow a person who's feeling a bit repressed or maybe doesn't have access to certain sort of communication systems within their body,

To just start to establish that dialogue,

Start to listen very deeply to the experience of your body and what it's trying to tell you.

So it's a really nice accompaniment to those who do movement work or dancers or people who work in like somatic therapy.

I personally have found it to be very beneficial for myself while learning counseling and learning to work with my emotions and feel sort of like the nuances of certain emotional expressions.

And also being more familiar with like triggering feelings and kind of like understanding how they show up in your body.

So developing that emotional intelligence,

But also maybe localizing that to certain areas of your body is one of the many benefits of conscious connected breath work and breathing in this way.

And I was also very blessed to have the opportunity to breathe in a space,

In a ceremonial circle with a facilitator whom I'm very close with,

A friend of mine,

Damien,

He brought me into this space where he's made it his mission to have safety within a container where you can just authentically show up and you can breathe as a group and you can essentially be with those experiences and allow them to sort of flow through you,

Surrender to those crying moments,

Surrender to those angry sort of outbursts and bringing a lot of like toning and a lot of authentic movement.

And what this does is this allows you to really tell your body that it's okay to express,

It's okay to be vulnerable in these places.

And I was at a very pivotal point in my journey,

You know,

Having done some psychedelics and had some releases that way,

Having done some trauma counseling as a client and really starting to understand my connection to my past experiences.

This really nicely brought it all together and allowed me to start to recognize the connection between mind and body that exists or between trauma and the nervous system and not just understand them conceptually,

But really experience them.

And there's a lot we hold on to,

Right?

There's a lot of we hold on to from childhood.

There's a lot we hold on to from literally like a month ago.

And it's,

It's,

Yeah,

It's testament to how we choose to express ourselves.

It doesn't necessarily have to be through breathing either,

Right?

It doesn't have to be through one specific thing.

I kind of spoke to this a little bit in my first video.

It's just like you can get healing or release of stored energy or trauma within the body through a variety of different expressions.

But I personally like conscious connective breathing because it is something I will return to in the,

You know,

The safety of my home or sometimes in the group settings.

And it's just really easy to apply.

Once you get it down,

It's nice because you can just sort of pull it out when it's like,

Wow,

It's been a hard week.

You feel like you've been really pulling some emotional strings and you're just trying to kind of check in with yourself that,

Well,

The breathing is also a really nice check-in.

Doesn't necessarily have to be like a super hardcore cry that,

You know,

It can be and it hopefully will be for you.

But for myself,

I do just kind of like having the check-in and giving yourself the time and the space just to sort of discipline but also surrender in this way,

I find is a treat.

It's a treat for your nervous system.

And it's a great accent to healing.

It's a great accent to understanding your own internal healing process.

And yeah,

I loved it.

It was a wonderful experience.

I had varieties of different containers and tried it in different ways.

And I always found myself just returning to the breath,

Returning to kind of like saying yes to the experience that you're in.

And so that's a little bit about my experience,

My sort of journey into breathing.

It's only been about like a year,

But I can imagine I'm going to get deeper into that,

Potentially doing facilitation myself.

If I get the proper training and find myself in those situations where I can apply it.

And just trying to sort of offer some perspective on how that's been for me.

And it's been a honestly a wonderful journey.

And I would highly recommend you check it out.

You know,

Just breathe for a bit.

And yeah,

These types of experiences will definitely open you up to deeper experiences within yourself and within your body.

Thank you all.