breathwork

Increased breathing rate by itself activates an undesirable sympathetic nervous system response, that anyone can notice immediately with deliberate breathwork.

I experienced holotropic breathwork recently with a trained coach who was also a very old and trusted friend.

Doing breathwork has increased my HRV by ~10ms and lowered my respiratory rate when I sleep.

For things like breathwork, I usually do carefully and broadly look at things like personal reports from regular people, on e.g.

If mushrooms, ayahuasca or similars are very hard to get(in my country it's hard) holotropic breathwork is reported to have similar effect, although can't reinforce that.

I have tried a lot of breathwork techniques lately and Buteyko is very good.

I believe practices like holotropic breathwork are somewhat more forceful than typical pranayama.

BioMythic Breathwork is traditionally done in a group setting.

Personally I've moved on to other breathwork systems that I think accomplish the same things, but I like better- I practive several of Wim Hof's breathwork methods, as well as the breathwork training that freedivers use.

I started doing breathwork about 9 years ago and kept bouncing between apps that were either $15/month subscription walls or bloated with guided meditation content I didn't want.

There is however actually a lot of medical research on breathwork like this, they just will use the technical terms for what you are actually doing instead of a name like Buteyko.

> the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the profound subjective effects of high ventilation breathwork (HVB) remain largely unknown and unexplored It's kind of amazing there is minimal science behind something so fundamental.

We live in an age where “spirituality” often means yoga, breathwork, or Stoic quotes.

Thanks for the extended description of what "breathwork" entails, the disambiguation was very helpful.

I love the conversations it has about bodily sensations and breathwork and about having a "stance" coming from something that never one felt anything or drew a breath!

For example, I'm a person that tends to be pretty uptight and overstressed, what you might assume in scientific terms is "sympathetic activation"- and there is a lot of breathwork research showing that almost anything that has an extended exhale can shift you into parasympathetic activation, where you calm down and relax.

If interested, I believe he's talking about something like Holotropic Breathwork, pioneered by Stan Grof.