#28: The Wisdom Within: Accessing Expanded Consciousness for Healing
MARCH 20, 2025
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In this powerful episode of "Courage to Heal," host Anna welcomes Jonathan Schechter, founder of Blue Magic Alchemy. Jonathan shares his remarkable personal journey from a challenging marriage to discovering the transformative power of breathwork, somatic experiencing, and psychedelic integration.
Jonathan candidly discusses how recreational psychedelic use evolved into intentional healing work, revealing how these expanded states of consciousness repeatedly guided him toward important life changes. Listeners will learn about:
The difference between active and passive psychedelic integration
How breathwork serves as a gentle, self-controlled alternative to plant medicine
Why somatic experiencing creates powerful pathways for processing trauma
The importance of creating safety in the nervous system for true healing to occur
Whether you're curious about alternative healing modalities or searching for tools to process your own trauma, this episode offers practical insights into combining ancient wisdom with modern neuroscience for genuine transformation. Jonathan's story demonstrates how facing our discomfort with compassion can lead to profound healing and personal growth.
[00:48] Jonathan's Journey into Breathwork
[04:45] The Role of Psychedelics in Healing
[12:17] The Concept of Psychedelic Integration
[25:40] Exploring Somatic Experiencing
[31:46] The Power of Breathwork
[45:36] Resources and Recommendations
Episode Links:
Books:
Holotropic Breathwork by Stanislav Grof
Transcript
Anna: Hello friends and welcome to Courage to Heal. Today, I'm joined by Jonathan Schechter, the founder of Blue Magic Alchemy. Jonathan is a breathwork, somatics, and mindfulness teacher who helps people reconnect with their bodies, release stored trauma, and cultivate inner peace. Through his work, he combines ancient wisdom with modern neuroscience to guide others on their healing journeys.
With a deep passion for self-discovery and psychedelic integration work, Jonathan empowers individuals to use breath and movement as powerful tools for emotional regulation and transformation. I'm so excited to dive into his story and explore the ways breathwork can support trauma healing. Welcome, Jonathan.
Jonathan: Thanks so much for having me, Anna.
Anna: So, Jonathan, I want to get started by asking you what actually led you to this world of breathwork, was there a personal experience that sparked your journey?
Jonathan: Yeah, there were a few of them. You know, I, I have a long history of working with psychedelics, but only in a recreational setting.
Like, you know, I knew about Terrence McKenna, but I didn't know anything about integration. I didn't really understand about using psychedelics for intentional, like, growth and healing. But what started to happen to me was well, let me just even paint you a bigger picture. I was married for almost 11 years and when I got married, I was completely sober and in the middle.
Of the marriage, my ex-wife, we're now not married but my wife at the time started to uncover some sexual trauma from her childhood. In other words, it started to come up to the surface, and it had been repressed pretty much for her whole life. And it was extremely challenging for her to deal with in fact, before the trauma itself started to come out, she started to have seizures, and we didn't know what was happening.
We were going to all these different doctors and specialists. She would just randomly have these seizures. She couldn't drive. So I had to drive her everywhere. It was this big impact on both of our lives. And whenever we would go to the doctor, the doctors would say, do you have any, you know, sexual trauma or trauma from your, you know, from your childhood?
And she would say no, which at the time was the truth to her. But I always suspected that there was something there. There was just something like where there was like a piece of the puzzle that was missing. So when the, when she started to remember the trauma, this was the missing piece to me. I was like, aha, and I believed her right off the bat.
I knew that this was what was going on. But for her she wanted more, like she wanted a validation from her family and she wanted validation from the abuser who was no longer living. And it was really hard for her to deal with, and long story short, she ended up trying to commit suicide. And so, as all this is happening, I had no idea about how to deal with it.
I really didn't know how to support her, because I was saying, I believe you, I want you to get help, like, let's, what can we do? That wasn't good enough for her. And I really had no idea how to process my own feelings and my own experience. And so, you know, I ended up breaking my sobriety and of course, like, it wasn't one of those things where, you know, you just break your sobriety and you like grab a handle of vodka and just go to town with it.
It was, you know, one drop at a time, basically, you know, I started smoking a little pot and like I said, okay, I think I can, you know, have a drink here and there. Really, it became the way that I was processing my emotional situation, and even worse, it became the way that she was handling her emotional situation.
We ended up moving back from where we were living back to Arizona, where I live now, and she started doing EMDR. And I don't think she had a very good EMDR practitioner because she started drinking even more and was like even more unstable. And, you know, I kept saying like, maybe, you know, maybe like tell your practitioner to take a break or like, you guys need to do something else.
But all of this is to say that I was really lost. And in the midst of this a friend of mine that, you know, we would get together and play music and both had like a, you know, long history of being in the rave scene, even though we, we hadn't raved together at this point he invited me to go to Detroit for a music festival and at the music festival, he said, hey, I brought some mushroom chocolates.
Do you want some? And so after seven years of like being completely sober, even though I was getting back into a little bit of drinking a little bit of, you know, pot this was the first time I had like worked with psychedelics again and my wife was not supportive of any of this and I had sort of made the decision like, I'm not going to lie to anybody, but I'm also not going to volunteer any information that's going to cause like a rift.
So the next year we went back to Detroit again, and this time when I took the mushrooms, I got this very clear message that I needed to stop drinking because like a whole year had passed and I had kept drinking and like I still wasn't dealing with any of my emotional stuff.
So that was like the first time that psychedelics really gave me a message about changing something, but I had no idea how to like actually do anything with that. And over the next couple of years, I kept kind of doing psychedelics in secret. Like I wasn't telling my wife. And so once a year or so I would have this opportunity to housesit for that same friend that took me to Detroit with them.
And so I would like, I would do the Terrence McKenna thing. I would take like five grams of mushrooms in the dark by myself. And, you know, I started to get more messages and especially the message of you got to stop drinking, keep coming up. But again, I had no idea how to deal with that. So I'm getting to the end of my story.
I promise. Things kept deteriorating with my wife, her condition kept kind of going downhill. I kept coping with my own situation through drugs and alcohol. And every time I would take mushrooms, it would be like, hey, you need to stop drinking. And oh, by the way, this relationship is just really not good for you.
Like you got to figure out what's going on. But I felt so scared of actually leaving. I didn't know what to do. You know, I thought I had made this marriage vow, this is just going to be my life. Also there's like even more complications. Like you know, I was, I was going to school at the time, my job that I was working at the time was paying for that school.
My boss at that job was my wife's best friend. So I felt super scared, not only to like leave because what was going to happen to my financial security. I wasn't sure what was going to happen with my job or with my college that was getting paid for, so I felt really trapped, even though there was a part of me that just knew I didn't want to be there anymore.
So we tried going to couples therapy. That didn't work out so well, mostly because the therapist started pointing out things to her and taking my side of it. And so she said, well, I don't want to, I don't want to keep doing this, but because of that experience, I made two decisions.
One was I said, I'm going to start going back to therapy myself, and the other one was, I decided that I was going to start meditating again, because I had initially gotten sober the first time, a long, long time ago, with the help of meditation, and somewhere along the way, I had stopped, and I thought, this changed my life before sober.
Why did I ever stop? So I made this goal that the January 1st, 2018, I was going to meditate every day for a year, and I started going back to therapy. And by December of 2018, I was out of the marriage.
Anna: Wow. Wow. What a story. I love how you kept getting these messages from psychedelics, and you just didn't know what to do about it, and it took you some integration, it sounds like, to, to really get to a place where you could take action.
Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, at the time, I didn't really know what integration was, but I was getting these messages, and when I did end up leaving, I took this moment, even though there were things I could have sat there. I totally realized that I could have sat there because there was emotional abuse from her. There was some mental abuse, and I could have played the victim.
I could have just said, well, I was a victim and now I'm out of it and I don't need to be dealing with any of this anymore. But I took the opportunity to pause and say, you know what? You stayed in this relationship a lot longer than you should have. And that's telling me something about myself. And even though there were things that were, I was wronged, I think I need to like do some soul searching and some introspection and fix my backyard up because I don't want to end up in the same type of a relationship again.
Also you know, just to, to even get the message clearer. Like a week before I ended up leaving, I had this really, very powerful experience with, with mushrooms where I probably for the first time in my life that I can remember experience, like what they describe in the literature as like an ego death.
Like, I thought I was dying for real. I fully had resigned the fact that I was going to die out in the mountains in Tucson and someone was going to come and find my body and. You know, when I sort of came to everything was beautiful and I had this just amazing spiritual experience, but the next day I journaled about it and when I went back a couple of years later and I read the journal, it was so clear to me that I was just done with that marriage, even though that wasn't like the, the, that wasn't like the clear message that I got, like I didn't walk off the mountain going, well, I got to leave, you know, I got to leave this marriage.
But it was so clear that it, that there were things that like needed to happen. One of them was the marriage. One of them was fixing my relationship with my dad that I had been kind of estranged from for a long time. And there were a few other things, but it was only, you know, it's only like in hindsight, going back and reading those journals where I was like, oh my God, this is, this is so, so clear.
So anyway, I took that time to start working on myself and working on myself did include a lot of intentional psychedelics and starting to learn about what integration was. It also involved me basically hibernating in my apartment, journaling every day, and starting to get curious about self-development and self-healing, and that led me to doing cold showers and then ice baths and breath work.
It led me to somatic experiencing. It led me to ayahuasca. It led me to a lot of the things that I work around or with now directly. But at that point, it was just me fixing my own life,
Anna: So many fascinating things you mentioned that I want to ask about. But I want to start by maybe saying, can you explain just the concept of psychedelic integration a little bit for my listeners who might not be familiar with it?
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. So psychedelic integration is really the, the intentional act of bringing the things that you are learning in your psychedelic work or the insights that you're having, you know, sometimes in the psychedelic world, we call them downloads, right? You get this download of like, everything seems so clear.
In that moment when you're in the journey, the next step or maybe the next 10 steps seems so clear to you and you're like, aha, of course, this is the answer. And then the next day, it's a little bit harder to actually implement those in your life. And then maybe a week goes by, and that clarity starts to fade.
And then a month goes by and mate, man, you don't even remember half of the stuff that happened. And so oftentimes what happens to people that aren't practicing integration is they end up repeating the same sort of cycle of tripping for the same reason, right? Like I've sat in ayahuasca ceremonies with people and we're like sharing about our experience before the ceremony starts.
And you know, somebody is sitting next to me going, well, you know, I'm, I'm still trying to quit drinking. I'm back here again, you know, for the sixth time or whatever, or you know, this, I know like I'm going to be able to do it this time, whatever it is, whatever that, that issue or challenge or thing that they want to do, they, it seems so clear in the medicine space.
But it's not so clear afterwards. And so integration is like how we actually join the, the, the, the regular life with this, this clarity and this, this vision that we get in the medicine space. And so for me, I usually break down integration into sort of two different categories. One is active and one is more passive, right?
So active integration is more like the things that you might do as the result of a big experience. The, the, the few days after you have this big experience you know, going out into nature and spending quiet time, you know, journaling doing art maybe, you know, doing some intentional yoga or just taking some space, right?
Like I used to go sit in an ayahuasca ceremony and then go back to work on Monday and not have any space between what you know is this incredibly powerful transformative experience and the rest of my life and now when I have these experiences, I usually take at least one day, if not two or three days afterwards, just so I can be quiet and not distracted and process my thoughts and write and, you know, go outside, be, be, you know, in a quiet space where it's just the birds and the trees and nature.
So that's, that's the more of the active integration and then passive integration is more just like, how am I living that's helping me to bring those two parts of my life together? So, that might be having a daily meditation practice, doing regular breath work changing my diet. Right? And not just what I'm eating, but what am I drinking, what am I consuming as far as my news and my media and the music that I'm listening to and the people that I'm around.
You know, a lot of people that end up doing intentional psychedelic work end up maybe not right off the bat because it's hard, but they end up leaving the job that they're at and finding something that's a little bit more aligned to their soul or like what they feel called to do in life. You know, you might call that a purpose.
Like I did that. So, you know, if you look at my Spotify, the year that I started really working with psychedelics, like, you know how the Spotify does like the year and review at the end of the year, like it was like two different people. The first six months are like gangster rap and like, it was just like really like kind of what I would consider now to be like junk food, you know?
And then like the second half is like all like mantras and spiritual music and you know, stuff that's a lot more healthy. You know, and it's not that you can't enjoy those things. But it's like, you know, yeah, the junk food analogy I think works, right? Like it's okay for me to have a cookie. It's okay for me to have some dessert, but if that's my whole meal and I'm eating that every day, like how healthy am I going to be, you know?
So that's, that's really like the passive integration is like, how, what are the things that I'm doing? What are the habits that I have? That are creating the life that I want to create and that I have this clarity of when I'm in and I'm connected to that highest state of myself.
Anna: Thank you very much for defining that.
I think that's a great way to break it down into active and passive. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so, so on your journey, so there you are, you're taking cold showers, you're meditating, you are doing breathwork what are you noticing as far as your mental health goes as you changing your habits and implementing all of these things?
Jonathan: Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So the way I describe it is like I started to thaw out, you know, like if you have the, you have the, the ground that's sticking out, right, that you can see the snow, you can see maybe the ice on top, but there's, there's something underneath. And so as I started to change my own habits, The things that were frozen underneath started to come to the surface.
So initially it was actually very challenging because I didn't have the resources that I have now for emotional regulation, for regulating my nervous system, somatic tools. I just had meditation and meditation is great. And I recommend it to all my clients and just about anyone in life, but thinking my way through things.
Was not really helping the somatic experiences that started to come up in my body, like the trauma that was stored in there that I had been suppressing through alcohol, through food, through sex. Definitely through cannabis. So all that stuff started to come to the surface and then it was like, okay, now what?
You know, certainly I, I was, I think I was up to the challenge of, okay, now I've got all this stuff to deal with, what do I do with it? But initially it was really scary cause I was like, this feels worse than when I started, you know?
So that, that led me to somatic experiencing and it also led me to start asking more questions in the psychedelic community and like with the people that I was doing psychedelics with because I was looking at the people next to me in those ceremonies, like I, like I mentioned before, and going away, I'm, I'm relating to this, like, I'm coming to this for healing and for growth, but I don't feel like I'm getting the healing and growth that I'm coming for, like I'm having these amazing experiences.
Not all of them, sometimes ayahuasca is kind of challenging, but it's also very, you know, transformative and it can be very beautiful. So, I'm like, if I'm having this problem, and this person next to me is also having the same challenge. And the person on the other side of me is also having the same challenge.
What needs to change here? What do I need to do differently? And so that's where the integration started to become more important. Like, I started to pay more attention to that integration piece of like, oh, maybe the answer isn't that I need to like, come to another ceremony, maybe it's that I need to practice more integration and like, what, what here is out of alignment with this vision that I'm having, you know, and, and the way that I want my life to go in.
So, yeah, that's where, that's where things started to take a turn as far as the integration went.
Anna: Oh, that's interesting that you say that basically sometimes it gets worse before it gets better.
Jonathan: Yeah. I mean, I think it's with, it's like that with a lot of things, right? Like I feel like that with a lot of the people I work with that start doing meditation you know, mindfulness-based meditation, like the number one thing that I think I hear, and I've asked other meditation teachers this on my podcast.
Is, you know, what's the number one question you hear? Right. And they all said the same thing. Like, I, I can't do this because it's too hard. Like, is this for me? You know, and as if the expectation is you start meditating and like, all of a sudden you start floating up in the sky and rainbows and clouds appear and you know, your mind is completely clear.
No. The first thing that happens when you start meditating is you like, you clearly see what a mess you are. And it's not just you. We're all a mess. Right? But you're clearly seeing it. There's nothing distracting you from that, which is what you've been doing your entire life, right? You've been distracting yourself with one of a million things.
You know, being on your phone all day or, you know, watching TV or whatever it is. And all of a sudden you're just faced with like, oh, this is me. This is me when I don't have anything to distract myself with. And it was kind of the same thing from a somatic perspective too. It was like, whoa, here's all this trauma that's coming up to the surface.
Like that I've never tried to deal with in its like raw form. I've just gone and gotten drunk or like had a pint of Ben and Jerry's or you know, whatever it is, right? And like, if I don't want to keep doing that thing, then what am I going to do? And this is why I really like somatic work because from that somatic lens, everything that you're doing to distract yourself or to make yourself feel better is not something that you should feel ashamed about.
It's just the, it's the natural process of, you don't, like, you're the same as everybody else, and we all don't want to feel pain. We all don't want to be unhappy. And if our body and our nervous system and our mind doesn't know how to do that naturally, because let's face it, how many of us have been taught how to do that in a healthy way, eventually, you're going to turn to something that, you know, actually works, right?
Like the first time I got drunk, it felt really great. Not, not in a long term. It didn't last, but like my nervous system, you know, when the body keeps the score of our trauma, it also keeps the score of like what helped me feel better. And so, like. When I start to feel like, oh shit, like I need a drink or, you know, now maybe it's not a drink cause I haven't drank in several years, but like, it might be like, God, I just want to sit on my phone and like scroll all day.
Or like, I started thinking about like really you know, like meals that I want to eat, you know, like, you know, something that's just really greasy and like, got lots of bacon and, you know, lots of good stuff or a dessert, right? Like, oh, I should go to the ice cream place, you know, get a double cone, something like that.
When I start to have those impulses now, instead of shaming myself, I just go, okay, what's really going on here? Like, can I slow down and pause? And notice, like, what's stressing me out and creating this urge to get away. And if I can be with that, then I can work with it in a much healthier way, rather than like suppressing it or tuning it out or, you know, covering it up with something else.
But that's just, that's just a natural process. Like we're all going to do that in whatever way we know how.
Anna: I love this approach that takes the shame out of it. That says that, look just because you have these urges, these impulses, doesn't mean there's anything shameful about it. You can just find out what it is for you, what's happening and act accordingly. And maybe find some healing in that.
Jonathan: Yeah. 100%. I mean, we all have shame, and we all have guilt and especially people that, you know, are maybe using substances to manage their problems. There isn't, you know, I work a few days a week in residential treatment and there's, there isn't one person that I met that's there for substance abuse disorders that doesn't tell me that they have some amount of shame and guilt about their experience.
But is that shame like actually helping you? Like with your day-to-day life, you know, shame has a purpose, but usually it's like running rampant over our lives. And when I look at it from that somatic frame of like, well, the nervous system is trying to keep you safe. It's trying to do its job to the best of its ability.
And what you're doing makes sense from that lens. It just takes all that shame away and that just like, I've just watched people just kind of go like their shoulders drop and like, Oh, okay. Like, you know, it's, it's a really powerful feeling to, to, to feel like you make sense instead of there's something wrong with you.
Anna: And you know, you mentioned somatic experiencing several times now, so I, I want to ask, how was that helpful for you? How, like what, any particular applications you found? In your personal journey or with clients.
Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, initially it was mainly for psychedelic integration. Just a way of, like, processing the things that had come up in these big, powerful experiences.
But over time, and I've, I've worked with a really great practitioner now for, gee, I think we're going on our fifth year. But. You know, it became a way of, like, going deeper and getting into childhood trauma processing the things from the marriage that I hadn't had a chance to process. There were some other traumas in there that you know, having a somatic experiencing approach has been really helpful.
And then my practitioner's a little tricky. She sort of like backdoored us into IFS as well without like telling me. So, when I figured it out, I was like, oh, not only do I really like IFS (internal family systems), but this, this is really synergistic with the somatic experiencing, because for me, I went from, you know if you, if you've, if you've never experienced somatic experiencing, you know, it's, it might go along the lines of something like this, you know, like you start to talk about something That's upsetting or activating.
And then the practitioner kind of pauses you and says like, Hey, where do you, what are you noticing in your body right now? Right. So like, I'm not, I'm very, I'm very basic. So it's like, I feel something in my stomach. Right. Which is where a lot of people feel a lot of their emotions.
Okay. So normal, like sort of SE questions are like, how big is it? Maybe it like might be like, is there a color to it? Is there a shape? Is it moving? Is it still like what other descriptors can you find around this emotion? And then by focusing on that and also like pausing and focusing on like what feels better in your body, you can like work with the emotion in a way that's not overwhelming or retraumatizing.
Well, over time, I realized that the, when we were talking about things say that happened when I was four and my parents got divorced, there was a different like somatic flavor to the things that when we were talking about things that happened in my marriage, which you know, happened in my thirties, or to a trauma that happened to me when I was in my teen years, like that each of these, like, yeah, they, they wouldn't be exactly the same every time, but I could start to tell the difference semantically how they felt in my body.
And that kind of led me to like, oh, there are different parts here. And these different parts have different, like, somatic experiences as well. And so that's where the IFS started to get like overlaid with the SE and so I think that like, yeah, for, for trauma, SE is a terrific modality to work with, but also over time, it was like, oh, this is not just for processing… Let's just call it negative, right?
Like, like, like we could argue the nuances of calling these experiences negative or not, but for the most part, when we're talking about trauma, they're like challenging things that you prefer not to be living with.
Right? So not exactly positive. But. It's not just for dealing with these challenging things and these things that I want to get rid of and like not be living with or not be ruled by, it's also helping me to experience life in a different way. It's helping me to appreciate the good things in life.
It's helping me to feel more positive emotions feel more gratitude, feel more love, feel more joy. And especially when you're talking about like integrating psychedelic experiences. Having access to those emotions is super, super important.
So that's how I end up using SE as a practitioner a lot now is, you know, like, for instance, we were talking about the podcast I just did where we sat down and I wasn't sure if it was going to work as a podcast, but I said, Hey, what if instead of we just doing an interview?
We like basically pretended to do an integration session. And so my friend, my, in air quotes, client was like talking about their experiences from the ayahuasca ceremony they had and how you know, they were feeling this gratitude. So we use the SE to slow down and really like, hey, where do you feel that gratitude in your body?
And what happens when you, we slow down and we like breathe into it and we focus on it. And the neat thing was, is that initially right on the heels of that gratitude and sort of good feeling came this, like, I can't actually be with us, like, it's not okay for me to slow down, just feel this. I've got lots of things to do.
I got to get back to work. Like I don't deserve to feel this. And so because we were, we were able to slow down with the SE, we were able to like work through that and sort of resolve it. So, yeah, it's all about slowing down, I think, and, like, living life in a more rich and vibrant way.
Anna: No, I love that. I think so much of therapy is really slowing, slowing down the client and letting them experience. Cause like you said, yes, we can call these things negative, right? Letting them experience both the negative and the positive aspects of, of just their being their life. And Jonathan, I wonder, so we talked about psychedelics and integration.
We talked about meditation and somatic experiencing. How does breathwork fit into all of this, into this big puzzle of trauma healing?
Jonathan: Yeah, my favorite thing to talk about. Well, initially breathwork was a way for me to kind of continue exploring in that, like, not let's not call it psychedelic space.
Let's call it expanded states of consciousness. So, you know, like, yeah, the, the plant medicines and the psychedelics are great, but you can't take them every day. I mean, I guess you could, but that probably wouldn't be a good idea. So initially it was like, oh, I can get to very similar states in breathwork.
So I wanted to continue to do that for my own integration, for exploring things that had come up you know, in my journeys, in my ceremonies and to, to have more access to those expanded states of consciousness. Over time I started to realize that like, they were just as profound.
And so it started to become more important to me to access them through breathing, where I'm not giving my, my sovereignty, I'm not giving my power away to a shaman or to a medicine, as opposed to, no, this is coming from inside of me, and it led me to really get interested in the work of Dr. Stanislav Grof who created holotropic breathwork because he spent his entire career, you know, he started out as a psychoanalyst working with LSD in the 60s. And then when LSD became illegal, he started doing breathwork as a replacement.
And so like, okay, this is already very aligned with like my own interests. But then as I started to learn more about Dr. Stanislav Grof's work. You know, he's really spent years and years and years cataloging and exploring transpersonal psychology and the, you know, what he calls the cartography of the psyche about what happens when we are accessing these non-ordinary or expanded states of consciousness, whatever you want to, however you want to refer to them.
And one of the basis of his work is that our modern Western culture is one of the only cultures in all of history that does not accept the use of expanded states of consciousness for healing, for personal growth, for rites of passage, for wisdom. And that almost every culture throughout history has used these expanded states of consciousness for those purposes.
Whether it's breathing, whether it's psychedelics and plant medicines, whether it's going into sweat lodges, whether it's fasting, vision quests, dancing, you know, praying singing all of these different modalities that take us into these bigger and more expanded states. And that when we're in those expanded states, we can connect with a deeper part of ourselves.
That is oriented to healing and leads us to that growth leads us to that healing. And so to me, the breathwork has become more integrated with that pursuit in my own work and in working with, with clients as well. You know, some, some of, some people are really interested in the psychedelic work.
Other people are like, this isn't for me, for whatever reason, it might be because it's illegal. It might be because they're in recovery. It might be because they're afraid or they're just not ready right now to work with the psychedelics.
So even the people that come to me that are like, hey, I'm really interested in doing plant medicine and psychedelic work, if they haven't already, I'm like, let's start with breathwork because, you know, before you strap a rocket ship to your back and like blast off to Mars, like maybe let's like go into orbit and go to the moon first. Like, let's, let's get you used to being in that expanded state so that when you're in it, it's not so dysregulating to your nervous system.
Because these states are inherently dysregulating, and the more dysregulated we are, the less healing and therapeutic the experience tends to be. And then, as I've de as I've developed as a breathwork facilitator, I all started to learn about, like, oh, not only can I use the breath to access these expanded states, but I can work with it in different ways to help regulate my nervous system or to meditate deeper.
And all of that is just feeding into that integrative experience working with non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Anna: So breathwork can be a gentler introduction to these expanded states of consciousness. And, you know, like you said, psychedelics more like strapping a rocket to your back and going to outer space, whereas breathwork, you have a lot more control. You can stop breathing a certain way if you need to, and go back to your natural breathing. So I think it is for a lot of people, they can stomach that idea if they can't stomach the idea of plant medicine.
Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, the, the, the healing and transformative potential of being in an expanded state of consciousness.
In a lot of ways it comes down to your own willingness and permission to let go and get out of the way of your thinking mind, get out of the way of the ego and like let this inner wisdom take you in the direction where you need to heal or where you need to orient for that next transformation. Now that's a practice.
And you get better at it at that permission and that surrender, if you want to call it that, the more that you do it. Also, when you're learning to do it on your own, it's a lot different than, say, taking mushrooms, and I love taking mushrooms. I still work with mushrooms.
But you're giving away that power to the, to the medicine and you, you don't, like you said, you don't have the choice to say, you know, I think I'm done for today.
I'm going to stop. Like you, you're, you're on the ride. And the, the way I often describe it, this is what makes sense to me is. I relate it to that feeling of being a kid and being on the high dive and you like go up the ladder and your stomach starts to get a little, you know, like, oh, I don't know if this is a good idea.
And then you're standing on the edge of the high dive going, oh my God, I have to jump off and like. Should I do this? Is this a good idea? I don't know. Like, and it's, it's scary, right? Like we all feel a little bit of anxiousness with breath work, you're making the choice to jump off and you know what, hey, if you decided today is not the day for me.
You could go back to the ladder and climb down the ladder and, you know, no, no harm, no foul, but when you take ayahuasca or other psychedelics, it's like, somebody's pushing you right off the edge. You don't have a choice. And whether, whether that's a good idea or not you know, who's to say, right? It's not, it doesn't, doesn't, doesn't always end up the way that you'd like.
Psychedelics have an incredible transformative potential, but it's not, it doesn't always turn out like that. And the nervous system can get overwhelmed. And I think, especially with my own, like, I don't know, I think I have more experience with these, with these medicines than the average person.
And what I found in that experience is that like more isn't always better. And there is a lot of wisdom to slowing down to moving in a more you know, therapeutic kind of zone rather than like what I started off doing, like taking five grams in the dark and, like, you know, being like, I'm going to find the answer to life, you know I've, I've gotten much more value from those lower therapeutic experiences that are more conscious, that are more where I'm more present, and I'm focusing more on the integration than on those big macro experiences where I just like blasted off into some other dimension.
Anna: Yeah, that's really interesting because I think a lot of people. Especially the ones who may be inexperienced with psychedelic work would assume that the more you take, the better it is, but you're absolutely right that it really depends. It really depends on what the person is trying to do, where they're at, and breathwork can be that gentle bridge between the two worlds that once again, you have control over it.
I really love your analogy of standing on the edge and. Choosing to jump rather than having somebody push you. So the kind of breath work we're talking about that can get you to those expanded states of consciousness can bring up intense emotions, especially in trauma survivors. So, yeah, I'm curious, how do you create that safe space for, for your clients, for people you work with, who are navigating that deep emotional healing with breath work.
Jonathan: Yeah, this comes up a lot in my work. This is again a place where titration, like starting really slow, and letting the wisdom of the nervous system and the body guide the experience. An ideal experience for me is where we're starting to work with just resourcing breath and getting in touch with the felt experience and being able to notice what it feels like when my body is relaxed and regulated.
Because when I'm regulated, what my nervous system is saying internally is “I'm safe.” And I firmly believe that healing doesn't happen when we don't feel safe. Healing happens when we feel safe. Like, we have to feel safe enough.
To feel unsafe right in order to heal so the more that I can help somebody like with the tools and the methods so that they know what that feeling of safety feels like in their body and they're starting to cultivate that within themselves I think the better and then as we start to develop that then we can start to introduce a little bit of stress and a little bit of activation as far as the breathing goes and start to dip our toe into that realm of the non-ordinary and just and then again, let's just pause and see what was that like?
Does that feel good? Because, you know, there's, there's folks where they have their first breathwork experience and they kind of get blasted out of their body and some people that's really great. They're like, oh yeah, I want more of that. That's awesome. Other people are like, Nope, that's, that's not for me or even worse, they start to lose that control and they like clamp down.
They're like, no, no, like, I don't want to blast off what's happening here. And they're like fighting it instead of, you know, giving themselves permission to feel whatever's coming up. So once we kind of get that baseline of like, hey, is this something that you'd like to do then we can kind of go into the deeper end of the pool, so to and start to really focus on the work that is going to induce a non-ordinary state of consciousness.
But as you well know from, you know, doing breathwork with me you know, we sort of have two main offerings. One of them is just that deeper journey, right, where it's all focused on that non-ordinary state. And then the other one is much slower and more integrative, and hey, let's start off with slower breathing, let's start off with regulating the nervous system, let's start off with, like, getting present before we move into that more expanded state.
And we're not going to go quite as deep, even though personally you can go almost as deep, but like, we're not going to do it as long or as rigorously as we are in the deeper journey. And then on the other end of it, we're also going to spend more time just like, hey, what does this feel like to be in this?
You know, more expanded state let's, let's, let's have a gentle landing to come back to, you know, quote unquote, normal. So yeah, to me, that's, that's the ideal you know, kind of progression is, is that titrated approach. And then the other piece of it, like for me on the back end is a screening.
You know, like with, with, with online breathwork I think that screening is incredibly important. I don't just let anyone into my breathwork sessions. I'm having them fill out a medical questionnaire. I'm talking with them in advance. And there have been people where I'm like, look, I think that like maybe starting here instead of like what you signed up for would be a better idea or let's do something in person.
Before we're online and I can't help you directly because I can help people online, but obviously there's some limitations, right? Versus like being in person with somebody. So to me, the screening process is incredibly important as well.
Anna: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for answering that. And I wonder, do you have any go to resources like books or maybe specific teachers? Anything like that for people who want to dive deeper into this kind of work?
Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, for the, you know, for the more expanded states of consciousness and the, you know, the orienting towards wholeness, like I mentioned earlier, I mean, definitely the work of Stan Grof.
There's a book called “Holotropic Breathwork.” He has a ton of books, but the “Holotropic Breathwork” book is, is pretty good. And it's on Spotify, I think as an audio book. So that's, it's very accessible. There's another book that's really great. That was written by Stan's protege called “The Power Within” that goes into more of the, the holotropic paradigm and, and like what the whole concept is about, as well as introduces this really neat idea called the awareness positioning system that starts to bring more attention to how we're projecting.
And like the, and being able to take that experience, a projection and like this person's doing this to me and start to like, bring that more inside and like, look at like, Hey, what does this remind me of, or have I felt this way before and start to work with it in a more introspective and like healthy way.
And then like from more of like a functional breathing perspective. I really liked this book called “The Language of Breath” by Jesse Coomer. It’s really fantastic. For not exactly breathwork, but I'm a big fan of, you know, Peter Levine's books which goes more into somatic experiencing. Yeah, but “The Language of Breath” is, is a really great book as well.
And that goes into like the, you know, that connection between the mind and the, and the somatic aspects and how to work with the breath as the bridge between the nervous system and the mind and like what the body is telling us. And, and, you know, how to decipher those signals, that language and use the breath to work with it in different ways.
Anna: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you for those recommendations. And Jonathan, I will make sure to link all of those in the show notes. I know you have your wonderful website where you link to your podcast, you link to your Breathwork membership that, full disclosure, I'm a part of and a very happy participant in that membership. So I'll make sure to include all of that in the show notes, too. Yeah, Jonathan, thank you so much for stopping by today, sharing this fascinating world of somatic experiencing with me and my listeners.
Jonathan: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.
Anna: And for all of you listening, I hope you leave feeling a little lighter and more empowered. Remember, healing takes time, and you're exactly where you need to be. Take care of yourselves, and until we meet again Be kind to your heart.
