Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

by James Nestor

Daubard had spent his teenage years bedridden in a village hospital with tuberculosis, chronic lung inflammation, and other illnesses. By his 20s, the doctors had given up. Daubard decided to heal himself. He read books, trained in yoga, and taught himself Tummo.

Decades before Wim Hof, he immersed himself in ice from the neck down and sat there motionless for 55 minutes. Later, he ran 150 miles beneath the searing sun of the Sahara desert. At 71, he toured the Himalayas on his bike at an elevation of 16,500 feet. But his greatest feat, Daubard said, was helping thousands of others with illnesses learn the power of Tummo to heal themselves, just as he’d done.

“[Tummo] is for the reconstitution of man’s immune system,” Daubard proclaimed. “It’s a fabulous way for the future of man’s health.”

Several years ago, when I was early in my research, I’d heard about a practice called Holotropic Breathwork created by a Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof. The main focus wasn’t to reboot the autonomic nervous system or heal the body; it was to rewire the mind.

today more than a thousand trained facilitators run workshops around the world. I paid a visit to Grof, whose home was just a half hour north of me in Marin County.

Grof told me how it all began. — It was November 1956, and Grof was a student at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague. The university’s psychology

The drug was originally developed to treat menstrual and headache pain, but Sandoz found that the side effects, which included hallucinations, were too severe to make it marketable. Sandoz thought psychiatrists might use it to better understand and communicate with their schizophrenic patients. Grof volunteered to try it. An assistant strapped him to a chair and injected him with a hundred micrograms. “I saw light as I had never seen it before, I could not believe it existed,” Grof later recalled.

Consciousness had no boundaries, I was beyond the planet. I had cosmic consciousness.” Grof was one of the first-ever test subjects of lysergic acid diethylamide-25, better known as LSD.

By 1968, the U.S. government had outlawed the use of LSD, so Grof and his wife, Christina, sought a therapy with the same hallucinatory and healing effects that wouldn’t get them thrown in jail. They discovered heavy breathing. The Grofs’ technique was essentially Tummo cranked up to 11. It involved lying on a floor in a dark room, with loud music playing, breathing as hard and quickly as you could for up to three hours. Willingly breathing to the point of exhaustion, they found, could place patients in a state of stress where they could access subconscious and unconscious thoughts.

The Grofs called it Holotropic Breathwork, from the Greek holos, which means “whole,” and trepein, which translates to “progressing toward something.” Holotropic Breathwork broke the mind down and moved it toward wholeness. It took some doing. Holotropic Breathwork often included a journey through “the dark night of the soul,” where patients would experience a “painful confrontation” with themselves.

for most of its 50-year history, Holotropic Breathwork has been sparsely studied, and the studies that do exist gauge subjective experience—that is, how people say they felt before and after. I wanted to feel it for myself, so I signed up for a session.

All this suggests that for the past hundred years psychologists may have been treating chronic fears, and all the anxieties that come with them, in the wrong way. Fears weren’t just a mental problem, and they couldn’t be treated by simply getting patients to think differently. Fears and anxiety had a physical manifestation, too. They could be generated from outside the amygdalae, from within a more ancient part of the reptilian brain.

Perhaps the best step in treating them, and hundreds of millions of others around the world, was by first conditioning the central chemoreceptors and the rest of the brain to become more flexible to carbon dioxide levels. By teaching anxious people the art of holding their breath.

As far back as the first century BCE, inhabitants of what is now India described a system of conscious apnea, which they claimed restored health and ensured long life. The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu spiritual text written around 2,000 years ago, translated the breathing practice of pranayama to mean “trance induced by stopping all breathing.”

One text, A Book on Breath by the Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan, offered this advice: Lie down every day, pacify your mind, cut off thoughts and block the breath. Close your fists, inhale through your nose, and exhale through your mouth. Do not let the breathing be audible. Let it be most subtle and fine. When the breath is full, block it. The blocking (of the breath) will make the soles of your feet perspire. Count one hundred times “one and two.” After blocking the breath to the extreme, exhale it subtly. Inhale a little more and block (the breath) again. If (you feel) hot, exhale with “Ho.” If (you feel) cold, blow the breath out and exhale it with (the sound) “Ch’ui.” If you can breathe (like this) and count to one thousand (when blocking), then you will need neither grains nor medicine.

Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention. We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, and do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow and erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer.

Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute to the same maladies as sleep apnea. How could modern science and ancient practices be so at odds? Again, it comes down to will. The breathholding that occurs in sleep and constant partial attention is unconscious—it’s something that happens to our bodies, something that’s out of our control. The breathholding practiced by the ancients and revivalists is conscious. These are practices we will ourselves to do.

Royat physicians would eventually bottle up carbon dioxide and administer it as an inhalant. The therapy was so effective that it made it stateside in the early 1900s. A mixture of 5 percent carbon dioxide and the rest oxygen made popular by Yale physiologist Yandell Henderson was used with great success to treat strokes, pneumonia, asthma, and asphyxia in newborn babies. Fire departments in New York, Chicago, and other major cities installed carbon dioxide tanks on their trucks. The gas was credited with saving many lives.

The patients would stay in this coherent, lucid state for about 30 minutes, until the carbon dioxide wore off. Then, without warning, they’d stop mid-sentence and freeze, staring into space and striking statue-like poses or sometimes collapsing. The patients were sick again. They’d stay that way until the next hit of carbon dioxide.

Donald Klein, another renowned psychiatrist and expert in panic and anxiety, suggested years later that the gas might help reset the chemoreceptors in the brain, allowing patients to breathe normally so they could think normally.

“As a psychologist, I think, what are my options, what is the best treatment for these patients?” Feinstein says. Pills, he tells me, offer a false promise and do little good for most people.

To help cope, 13 percent of us over the age of 12 will use antidepressants, most often selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, also known as SSRIs. These drugs have been lifesavers for millions, especially those with severe depression and other serious conditions. But less than half the patients who take them get any benefits.* “I keep asking myself,” says Feinstein, “Is this the best we can do?”

the vast majority of people who try to meditate will give up and move on. For those with chronic anxieties, the percentages are far worse. “Mindful meditation—as it is typically practiced—is just no longer conducive to the new world we live in,” Feinstein explains.

Meuret crunched the data and found that panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume and rate and a decrease in carbon dioxide. To stop the attack before it struck, subjects breathed slower and less, increasing their carbon dioxide. This simple and free technique reversed dizziness, shortness of breath, and feelings of suffocation. It could effectively cure a panic attack before the attack came on. “‘Take a deep breath’ is not a helpful instruction,” Meuret wrote. “Hold your breath” is much better.

I’ve signed up to see what a few heavy doses of carbon dioxide would do to my own body and brain.

The mixture I’ll inhale is 35 percent carbon dioxide, and the rest is room air—about the same percentage of carbon dioxide once used to test schizophrenics, sans the oxygen.

The concept of prana was first documented around the same time in India and China, some 3,000 years ago, and became the bedrock of medicine. The Chinese called it ch’i and believed the body contained channels that functioned like prana power lines connecting organs and tissues. The Japanese had their own name for prana, ki, as did the Greeks (pneuma), Hebrews (ruah), Iroquois (orenda), and so on. Different names, same premise. The more prana something has, the more alive it is.

But the most powerful technique was to inhale prana: to breathe. Breathing techniques were so fundamental to prana that ch’i and ruah and other ancient terms for energy are synonymous with respiration. When we breathe, we expand our life force. The Chinese called their system of conscious breathing qigong: qi, meaning “breath,” and gong, meaning “work,” or, put together, breathwork.

Western science never observed prana, or even confirmed that it exists. But in 1970, a group of physicists took a stab at measuring its effects when a man named Swami Rama walked into the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, the largest psychiatric training center in the country at the time. Rama was wearing a flowing white robe, a mala bead necklace, and sandals, and had hair that drooped down past his shoulders.

“At six-feet-one-inch and 170 pounds, and with a lot of energy for debate and persuasion, he was a formidable figure,” wrote a staff member.

In the spring of 1970, Rama was sitting at a wooden desk in a small, pictureless office at the Menninger Clinic with an EKG over his heart and EEG sensors on his forehead.

A former Navy weapons physicist, Green headed the Voluntary Controls Program, a lab within the clinic that investigated something called “psychophysiologic self-regulation,” or what would become known as the mind/body connection.

He sat motionless, breathed a few times, and then, when given a signal, slowed his heart rate from 74 to 52 beats in less than 60 seconds. Later, he increased his heart rate from 60 to 82 beats within eight seconds. At one point, Rama’s heart rate went to zero, and stayed there for 17 seconds. Green thought Rama had shut off his heart completely, but upon closer inspection of the EKG, he found that Rama had commanded it to beat at 300 beats per minute.

Swami Rama should have been in cardiac arrest, or dead. But he seemed unaffected. He claimed that he could maintain this state for a half hour. The results of the experiment were later reported in The New York Times.

Rama went on to shift the prana (or blood flow, or both) to other parts of his body, willing it from one side of his hand to the other. Within 15 minutes, he was able to create a temperature difference of 11 degrees bet...

Once a day, they were to lie down, take a brief inhale, and then exhale to a count of 6. As they progressed, they could inhale to a count of 4 and exhale to 8, with the goal of reaching a half-minute exhale after six months of practice.

His name was Albert Szent-Györgyi, and in the 1940s he’d made his way to the United States and would end up heading the National Foundation for Cancer Research, where he spent years investigating the role of cellular respiration.

“All living organisms are but leaves on the same tree of life,” he wrote. “The various functions of plants and animals and their specialized organs are manifestations of the same living matter.”

“Taking out electrons irreversibly means killing,” wrote Szent-Györgyi. This breakdown of electron excitability is what causes metal to rust and leaves to turn brown and die. Humans “rust” as well. As the cells in our bodies lose the ability to attract oxygen, Szent-Györgyi wrote, electrons within them will slow and stop freely interchanging with other cells, resulting in unregulated and abnormal growth. Tissues will begin “rusting” in much the same way as other materials. But we don’t call this “tissue rust.” We call it cancer.

The best way to keep tissues in the body healthy was to mimic the reactions that evolved in early aerobic life on Earth—specifically, to flood our bodies with a constant presence of that “strong electron acceptor”: oxygen. Breathing slow, less, and through the nose balances the levels of respiratory gases in the body and sends the maximum amount of oxygen to the maximum amount of tissues so that our cells have the maximum amount of electron reactivity.

I am eager to compare notes with DeRose. I’m eager to see what he knows about prana and the lost art and science of breathing that I don’t.

The Indus-Sarasvati was the largest geographically—some 300,000 square miles—and one of the most advanced of ancient human civilizations.

There was, perhaps, no belief in God. But the people here believed in the transformative power of breathing.

Things seemed to be going so well in the region, until around 2000 BCE, when a drought hit, causing much of the population to disperse. Then Aryans from the northwest moved in. These weren’t the blond-haired, blue-eyed soldiers of Nazi lore but black-haired barbarians from Iran. The Aryans took the Indus-Sarasvati culture and codified, condensed, and rewrote it in their native language of Sanskrit. It’s from these Sanskrit translations that we get the Vedas, religious and mystical texts that contain the earliest known documentation of the word “yoga.”

Over the next few thousand years, the ancient breathing methods spread throughout India, China, and beyond. By around 500 BCE, the techniques would be filtered and synthesized into the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Slow breathing, breathholding, deep breathing into the diaphragm, and extending exhalations all first appear in this ancient text.

The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing.

Yôga practices were never designed to cure problems, he tells me. They were created for healthy people to climb the next rung of potential: to give them the conscious power to heat themselves on command, expand their consciousness, control their nervous systems and hearts, and live longer and more vibrant lives.

The kriya I’d experienced was developed in the 1980s by a man named Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and is now practiced by tens of millions of people around the world through The Art of Living Foundation. It does much of what Tummo does because, DeRose says, both were designed from the same ancient practices.*

The central method, called Purifying Breath, requires more than 40 minutes of intensive breathing, from huffing and at a rate of more than a hundred breaths per minute, to several minutes of slow breathing, and then hardly breathing at all. Rinse and repeat. I tell DeRose about the extreme sweating, complete loss of time, and lightness I felt for days afterward.

It’s energy; it’s prana. What had happened was simple and common. I’d built up too much prana breathing so heavily for so long, but I hadn’t yet adapted to it. This explained the waterworks and shift of consciousness. Sudarshan is derived from two words: su, meaning “good,” and darshan, meaning “vision.” In my case, I’d had a very good vision.