When Brendan Leier lay down for his first guided breathwork session over Zoom, he settled into a breathing rhythm, keeping a fast pace with the music the instructor was playing. As the session progressed over the next hour, he felt energy building up in his body, which the instructor invited him to release through a series of “om” chants. 

Still, the pressure kept rising until one moment Leier jolted up to holler at the top of his lungs — exerting so much force that he burst the blood vessels in his nose, staining his white beard red with blood.

“Then, I just flopped back down on my back and experienced this overwhelming feeling of absolute bliss,” Leier, an ethicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told Salon in a phone interview. “That experience was quite interesting because I had never had a physiological feeling like that before.”

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During the session, Leier was practicing a form of high-intensity breathing called holotropic breathwork, he said. This technique was created in the 1970s by Stansislav and Christina Grof, former psychedelic researchers who specialized in the drug LSD. After the U.S. government banned the substance, with many other countries following their lead, the Grofs pivoted to studying breathwork. Although it’s been around for decades, holotropic breathing is one of dozens of forms of high-ventilation breathwork recently surging in popularity. 

“On average what happens is that you basically go into an altered state of consciousness,” explained Dr. Martha Havenith, a breathwork practitioner and neuroscientist at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Germany. She emphasized that the experience doesn’t manifest for everyone the same way and each session is very different. Nonetheless, “a lot of the aspects are quite similar to psychedelics,” Havenith said.

"For me, the foundation of the psychedelic experience is a gestalt experience, so you leave seeing things a different way than you went in."

Interest in psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin “magic” mushrooms has exploded in recent years thanks to a wealth of research pointing to their potential treatment for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and chronic pain. But these drugs remain highly illegal in most places, despite research showing relatively low risks compared to drugs like fentanyl or methamphetamine. Many cities have decriminalized psychedelics while Oregon, Colorado and, as of this month, New Mexico are beginning to roll out the country’s first pathways for patients to access them. But in Oregon, where these clinics are already operational, psychedelic therapy typically costs thousands of dollars per session. 

High-ventilation breathwork techniques may produce transcendent experiences similar to those experienced with psychedelics in a way that is more accessible. However, research on this technique is limited, and sources say it puts stress on the body that may not be suitable for everyone.

“Holotropic breathwork provides access to biographical, perinatal and........

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