Altered States of Consciousness Induced by Breathwork Accompanied by Music

My relevant experience is here: http://earthpilot.ai/cv

That said, I agree that finding trusted people is a process and I’ve seen people really get messed up from bad practitioners in the psychedelic / transformational space.

Anyhow, thanks for allowing the sharing of this.

As an aside, and in all seriousness, how well would this works for a self-medicated functional alcoholic who thinks breathing exercises involve rolling a cigarette first? Does one have to be one of the self-congratulatory "healthy" and swear off vices to benefit from this, or is it something you can do before you head off to the bar?

I guess this page converts extremely well and yet, from a distance, this looks no less woo than what you get from your more esoteric leaning snake oil vendor.

Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I know it feels important to protect vulnerable people from being harmed by frauds, and related concerns. But we can safely assume that HN readers are reasonably competent and discerning adults, who can make up their own mind about these things.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

2. I can understand that re confusing terms and will have my team update that - this is a newer CV that was compiled for a talk I’m giving with Paul Stamets and Rick Doblin and am happy for the feedback. I ran an underground clinic specifically because you couldn’t be licensed at that time.

I don’t say or intend to imply I’m licensed by anyone.

In fact, my personal healing came from well outside the mainstream which I found to be counter productive to the growth I was looking for.

I regularly consult and work with licensed folks, MDs, etc. either advising or who would refer people to me to support outside of what they could provide.

I no longer run the clinic and now advise, coach or help folks integrate experiences.

Also note to mods, this feels like a valid question — I wish people would question practitioners and approaches more in any healing field.

I recall reading every primary research paper I could find over a period of 90 days and then questioning my psychiatrist on their approaches and sort of getting no real answers.

The majority of our work has been a group of individuals who have opted in.

In the case of teams, some founders have asked if we could offer this during Covid or during the war starting in Ukraine and offered it as an interesting free activity. Not everyone came and the vibe felt fine.

But I can also see your concern about that and it’s valid. We have had a couple people that initially came and said they weren’t comfortable and it was totally fine for them to leave. It’s also been outside of work time so people choose to come on their own time.

BioMythic is something we’ve always gifted to the community as a way for folks to gain group access to some of the same tools that our 1:1 coaching clients get access to in our Alchemy program (which is also waitlisted / full as of now).

We work with all sorts of folks, including founders who both seem to be a large part of the YC community and who often face incredibly challenging mental and emotional obstacles that are unique.

I’ve personally overcome and healed using these tools and would like to help prevent other people from the time and pain I went through, and to prevent us losing any more creative visionaries.

I hope that clarifies things.

Unless I'm missing something, this seems like a legitimate scientific paper.

For example; Mel Robin was a research scientist who got interested in Hatha Yoga and in true researcher fashion set about collecting/studying research papers and trying to map them to his practice of traditional Hatha Yoga. He wrote an excellent book A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers: The Incorporation of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Anatomy into the Practice (the 1st edition was called A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana) with a huge reference section of research papers from various journals.

Another example; the neuroscientist James Austin wrote a mammoth book Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness where he tried to map his knowledge of neuroscience to his experiences from Zen meditation practice.

Empirical practices which have survived for centuries and across civilizations are usually "scientifically" valid and it is up to us to map them to modern scientific concepts.

The most surprising thing is that despite the initial discomfort, I often find myself waking up on the thing an hour or more after laying down on it. I always set a stopwatch timer on my phone when I use it since 20 full minutes on it is the baseline recommendation, but very often I'll blow right past that.

The sensation induced by binaural beats are based on brain waves synchronisation, basically we get control of the stick shifter of the brain, and we perceive the changes strongly, as they are much faster than usual.

TLDR: you definitely feel them, and it feels a bit like getting high.

Chemical induced states of altered consciousness are of a fundamentally different nature. Keeping the car centric metaphor it would be like switching the type of fuel you are giving to the engine. It feels different, for different reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nidwz3BzFCM

Been there, done that

This isn’t well known because his name was (deservedly) mud at the time, but Timothy Leary did a lot of work with sound and lights. He did his light shows when he was a pop guru, but he was even doing this work before he got fired from Harvard.

At the time, he considered it following the history of altered states. In the nineties when he had mellowed out, Leary started talking about lights, sound and technology. Here’s one example:

https://www.sidjacobson.com/Portals/23/articles/Tim%20Leary%...

I’ve had a few experiences with non chemically induced altered states. They’re psychedelic-ish, but not really comparable to a substance like psilocybin. They’re definitely altered states, just while I could draw a picture to describe mild effects of psilocybin to a non user, I couldn’t with music and light.

They’re both altered but very different.

Can't claim it would produce the same results for everyone, but I provided a free, low friction option for anyone curious.

That said, I was still shocked at how quickly and effectively it worked the first I used it and how reliably it worked despite whatever state I was in. No amount of meditation or breathing techniques have gotten me close, and I've never had a natural flashback.

AFA a headset being able to induce the effect, the main requirement is a high lumen output, that's why LEDs are used.

It gives me some discomfort - almost makes me wonder if it could induce some sort of epileptic episode in me if I tried to push through the discomfort.

But on the whole Liminal is a neat app with other useful experiences.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_FLASHER_1.51

It's a bit of a misnomer in this case as light helps induce it but the effect is similar.

Yes; one of the first things my therapist showed me after just talking about stuff was a breathing exercise, with the first thing being assuming a position that allows for easier breathing (lying down flat, relaxed, but feet propped up / knees in the air). "Relaxed" breathing is deep and slow breathing through the stomach, but you can't do that well if your posture is off and I can imagine this has long-term effects. Subtle, of course, and it's never one thing that causes anxiety etc.

Bad posture causes muscle tension making it hard to relax. A massage gun to the neck, shoulders, and/or back has calmed my panic attacks very effectively before. I discovered this on a long road trip years ago.

For gut health it really depends on what your forms of indigestion are. Common ones are lactose intolerance, not enough fiber, acid reflux, etc. Even just overeating can trigger anxiety since heart rate goes up and it causes weird sensations. Dehydration has a strong effect on your heart rate and blood pressure, and alcohol can also cause nutritional deficiencies in unintuitive ways.

These all sound silly until they happen along with some other external form of stress and it all piles up at once. I think just about anyone would spiral into a panic attack if the list of discomforts becomes severe enough and for long enough. Everyone has a breaking point.

Anyway I think the more interesting topic is stress management. Living deliberately and being organized is probably far more effective than trying to "control" your fight or flight instincts. Of all the things I've ever tried, performing breathing techniques while freaking out makes anxiety so much worse. I'm better off avoiding things that fuck with my breathing enough to cause me to think I need to manually intervene in the first place.

https://claude.ai/share/bf2a9d7a-bedf-4fbc-af2f-3a6b72f66753

Edit: actually, the timings are completely off. Total should be a maximum of just over an hour, but the child comment playlist is 2.5 hours. I think it might be using an average track time - 23 tracks total should mean just under 3 minutes per track, which is much more like punk timings than transcendent stuff!

The fact that the two playlists are so close does make me feel like results from these kinds of prompts are going to reinforce local minima in choices. Slightly different context, but one of my favourite party memories was a friend playing a bit of downtempo to start with, then techno for quite a while until pretty much everyone was dancing, then threw in Highway To Hell by AC/DC and the place went absolutely wild.

Edit 2: Actually, listening to the playlist, while the tracks in the sections are sort-of coherent, the ordering is really off - the tempo varies quite a bit within the high tempo section for example, which I can imagine being quite off-putting if you're trying to maintain focus. I wonder if there will ever be a system that could replicate the feel that really good DJs have for the vibe in a room, and when slipping in something like Highway To Hell will really work rather than kill the mood.

On that note, you might find the Medlife Crisis' video where he investigates the genre of "people roleplaying as doctors giving you a check-up using an ASMR voice" entertaining, and also enlightening on why some people do like it[0]. Don't worry, it doesn't feature too many actual clips of that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33QoTKgYKDI

Is it just me or is this commonly discomfort-inducing? Hyperventilation is so associated with anxiety and panic that I don’t see how anything remotely pleasant can come of this. Assuming one’s acid-base balance and oxygenation are normal, I don’t quite see the point here.

[1] https://www.inventorypress.com/product/milford-graves-a-mind...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milford_Graves