I Had a Psychedelic Experience With Nothing But My Lungs and a Playlist

[waking_up_fast]

Three months ago I coded in the ER. Heart stopped for two minutes. Came back, and everything changed — fast. That's a different post though. What I need to talk about right now is what happened to me last night on my living room floor.

No substances. Just breath.

I've been doing this intense circular breathing pattern — inhale deep, no pause, exhale short, repeat — for about three weeks now. Last night I put on this specific drone playlist and after about 25 minutes my entire body started vibrating. Not metaphorically. My hands were cramping up, I was crying, and I was somewhere else entirely.

Here's what actually got me: I found out this isn't just "woo woo" stuff. There's a 2023 study published in Scientific Reports by researchers at Imperial College London — Imperial College London — where they put people through a breathwork protocol and measured their experiences against psychedelics. The altered states were nearly identical. Same pattern of ego dissolution, mystical experiences, emotional release. Your brain on sustained hyperventilation is apparently doing something very similar to what psilocybin does.

I believe what's happening is you're intentionally triggering a controlled stress response. The body interprets the alkalosis from overbreathing as a threat, and somewhere in that alarm state, the normal filters come down.

What hit me during the experience was the Tower card — just crashed through my awareness completely. Not a reading, not a spread, just the image and the meaning of it hitting me viscerally. Everything I'd built my identity around before the NDE, all that structure, it's rubble now. The Tower doesn't ask permission. And I think that's what the breathwork was doing — forcing me to stop running from the demolition.

From a Jungian perspective, I think what I experienced was a direct confrontation with the unconscious that usually only becomes accessible through active imagination or psychedelics. The breathing bypasses the ego's defenses mechanically. You can't think your way out of it because your body is already there.

I'm not saying this is for everyone. Honestly, it was terrifying. But I need to know — has anyone else here accessed these states through breathwork specifically? I feel like I cracked something open and I don't want to go back to pretending it's closed.

[chakra_chaos]

I think what I experienced was a direct confrontation with the unconscious that usually only becomes accessible through active imagination or psychedelics. The breathing bypasses the ego's defenses mechanically. You can't think your way out of it because your body is already there.

This is the part I want to push back on, because "bypasses the ego's defenses mechanically" sounds clean in a way the actual experience isn't. I get why it frames nicely — I said similar things when my kundalini activation turned into two years of sleep paralysis and electrical sensations that wouldn't stop. But the ego doesn't just get bypassed. It gets flooded, and then it scrambles.

The Tower showing up uninvited makes complete sense to me. But here's what nobody warned me about: the demolition doesn't stop when you open your eyes. I had the same "I can't go back to pretending" moment, and I held onto that feeling like it was proof I'd arrived somewhere real. In my experience, that feeling became its own kind of identity — the person who'd seen through the illusion. Which is still a structure. Still something the Tower can take out.

I'm not saying don't do the breathwork. I'm saying be careful about romanticizing the rubble. The study you referenced is legit — I've read it — but a controlled setting with researchers monitoring you isn't the same as your living room floor at midnight after a near-death experience three months ago. That's a lot of upheaval in a short window. Whatever cracked open, give yourself permission to not have to integrate it all right now.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Kundalini Awakening: Symptoms, Science, and Safety | Mystic Wiki.)

[boring_sunday_19]

"The breathing bypasses the ego's defenses mechanically. You can't think your way out of it because your body is already there."

I think this is exactly right — and also exactly the problem.

What you're describing tracks with what Stanislav Grof called "holotropic" states, and the Imperial study you cited seems to be catching up with what he was arguing in the 1970s. The mechanism is real. Hyperventilation, alkalosis, the dampening of the default mode network — something is genuinely happening that isn't just suggestion.

But you called it "controlled," and I'd push on that word. In my two years at the monastery, we did breathwork too — but it was always embedded in a very specific relational context. You had a teacher watching. There was a sitting practice underneath it. The breath wasn't the point; it was a door, and someone who'd been through the door stood nearby.

What you did alone on your living room floor with a playlist is mechanically similar. I don't doubt the Tower hit you. But the ego doesn't just dissolve — it reorganizes. And without a container, the story you build about why it dissolved fills the gap fast. You went from "my body did something" to "the Tower doesn't ask permission" in about three sentences. That's a narrative being laid down over an experience, not the experience itself.

I'm not saying it wasn't real. I'm saying be careful about which part you treat as the signal and which part is the commentary your mind wrote afterward. The experience was genuine. The meaning you attached to it came later, and it came alone.