7 minute read
Free Your Mind
Breathwork is the latest trend to get people o pharmaceuticals and in touch with their bodies.
TEXT JAKE BROWNE
FREE YOUR MIND
“Since age six I had horrible chronic migraines,” Lindsay Balgooyen tells me. “I pretty much lived my entire life with a migraine.” Admittedly, I’m not expecting this. My interest in the idea of breathwork started when I interviewed comedian and psychedelics expert Shane Mauss last year. He described an intense, mind-altering experience, one that seemed more of a consciousness expansion than healing. Considering the impressive resume of substances he’s experimented with, I took stock in his words, but never considered the curative properties of my own breathing.
“I grew up in Michigan in not exactly a progressive town and when
I was 17 I had been on 50 diff erent drugs,” Balgooyen says. “So I decided I was done with that.”
Working with medical cannabis patients for years, I’m used to hearing about chronic pain, but there’s something beneath her words that belies how much of a struggle it was for her, how defi ning the experience was. Balgooyen’s journey overcoming the constant illness led her to seek a number of treatment options outside of traditional
Western medicine, from acupuncture to physical therapy to massage.
It wasn’t until a 2015 trip to Southeast Asia that it all clicked, though.
While assisting at a yoga retreat in India, Balgooyen had made plans to head to Thailand toward the end of her trip for a new type of modality she was previously unfamiliar with. “I did my fi rst session and it absolutely blew me away,” she says. “My entire body felt like it was paralyzed, I couldn’t move anything and just felt like my body was fi lled with cement.”
Balgooyen notes that this isn’t uncommon, but one of the reasons guided sessions are recommended for beginners before branching out on their own. “My whole body was in pain,” she says.
The process of circular breathing, she tells me, can lead to cramps and tightness, but she describes it as “energy moving” through your body and hitting “blockages” along the way. I’m a skeptic at heart, but it reminds me of a Tai Chi teacher I once had who would have us tense our muscles to lead the way to relaxation. Balogooyen says that once she worked through the pain in her fi rst session, she experienced a release like nothing else she had felt before and was hooked.
“That day I found a monthlong training and signed up for it. Within a week, my headaches went away completely.”
Returning home to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the transition was natural. “There’s a ton of diff erent healers up there and it’s a pretty spiritual town,” she says. Once a week, she’d bring together friends and people who had heard the buzz for three hour sessions as part of a longer course, and soon students became apostles. “It just takes one session because it’s such a crazy, profound experience,” she says “It kind of becomes addicting.”
After another year of building through word of mouth in Steamboat, Balgooyen decided it was time to take the next big leap and work in Boulder, Colorado, a liberal bastion of alternative medicine and a town where collaborators would be bountiful. Soon, she was incorporating other modalities into her practice, particularly sound healing. Having some experience with the chanting and music of kirtan vis-a-vis Deb Browne, my spiritually woke mom, I can start picturing us in a session together. “The sound
simply helping and friendly!
alone is so powerful,” Balgooyen says, as I nod.
At festivals, it started with Nibumbu, a Neotribal band that has spent the last two-and-a-half years incorporating shamanic drumming into breathwork, creating an immersive experience. Now, she’s teaming up with Brian Dickinson, founder of Sonic Alchemy, to bring similar concepts to smaller settings, with gongs, singing bowls, fl utes, and “other trinkets” adding to the journey. “It starts off really relaxed, then it builds and gets pretty intense, then it starts to calm down and it gets very meditative,” she says.
I’m curious about what science has to say on the matter, though. We take tens of thousands of breaths each day, so there has to be some study on how such a simple act can have such a profound eff ect. Instead, Balgooyen directs me north, to the brain. “The beta brain state is similar to hypnosis, which allows you to pretty quickly drop into that deep meditative state right above sleep, that usually we’re just passing through really quickly while falling asleep. [Scientists] know that we have to be in that beta state to access our subconscious mind, where we hold so many thoughts, and the beliefs that are running our lives, a lot of times not to our advantage.”
When I fi nally get the nerve to steer the conversation toward Mauss’ hallucinatory experience, it doesn’t come as a surprise to her. “It’s defi nitely common,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of people who have had a lot of experience with psychedelics who have said it’s much more profound.” How can that be possible, though? I’ve been conditioned to think of substances such as psilocybin and LSD as incredibly powerful. Balgooyen believes that, unlike an outside substance, your body is designed to do the work and can readily integrate that experience into its own framework. “If you have a cut, it naturally heals,” she says, sagely. “We don’t have to think about it.”
That’s the breakthrough moment, the “Aha!” that ties it all together for me. Practices like yoga have incorporated an intense focus on breathing for millenia, using the body to do the heavy lifting that substances couldn’t. Not everyone had access to the hallucinogens that scientists are now increasingly focused on as alternative treatments for PTSD and addiction.
Balgooyen is busy, leaving for Bali the next morning, but she tells me about a busy summer that includes rafting and water therapy. “You wear a snorkel and face down while somebody holds you and it allows you to get even deeper,” she says. “Water is one of the highest vibrations we have access to and it also brings up a lot of stuff from the womb so it’s pretty cool.” Don’t be surprised if you see me there.
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