eigenschwarz

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Comment · 1 year ago

In a medical setting, where I am more familiar with it, tetany is never good. Personally it is also wildly uncomfortable. Perhaps it's fine and somehow pushing through it is part of the "experience", but if I want an altered consciousness I'll stick to a psilocybin-based retreat every 5-10 years and my meditation practice in between :D.

Comment · 1 year ago

Being a non-expert I can't attempt to speculate on your questions in good faith! All I was suggesting to the parent is that perhaps these articles offer as evidence of damage being done without pushing to the point of unconsciousness? Feedback is definitely welcome by an expert.

Comment · 1 year ago

Does this help? I am a physicist with interest in these subjects and have always been wary of breathwork because of tetany and the following studies. What do experts closer to this field make of these?

[1] "Brain Damage in Commercial Breath-Hold Divers" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[2] "Do elite breath-hold divers suffer from mild short-term memory impairments?" https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/apnm-2017-0245

Ref. [2] is especially concerning to me in pushing in any sort of static apnea training or breathwork: "The time to complete the interference card test was positively correlated with maximal static apnea duration (r = 0.73, p < 0.05) and the number of years of breath-hold diving training (r = 0.79, p < 0.001)."

Comment · 2 years ago

Talk about a sweeping conclusion based on n=1! Very unscientific ;)

Comment · 2 years ago

In response to this there is vasoconstriction of the cerebral vasculature. No one knows if mild damage is being done to the brain from this.

Somewhat related (not exact same mechanism, but similar), there is evidence elite free-divers are harming their brains [1]. It is easy enough to find literature about the appearance of SB100 protein with too long apnea training (eg. [2]).

However, breath-holding/apnea is not the same as breathwork. The fact of the matter is, there will be no definitive proof one way or the other until someone directly probes cerebral O2 levels for an acute and chronic intervention of breathwork. Again, as someone who has indeed done psychedelics and meditates, I am open to alternative modalities, but I will personally wait for the science over anecdotes.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29053942 [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19574501/

Comment · 2 years ago

This sounds great but I just can't get by the oxygen deprivation and potential harm to your brain. Not to mention the hypercapnia induced tetany is very uncomfortable and seems a clear signal from the body that "this isn't good!".

[As part of a psychedelic retreat we did breathwork the day before the trip to "open the mind". I faked it because I was worried about the above unanswered questions I had. I still had a great trip and feel no need for another one or similar (ie. via breathwork) to this day. :) ]

Penguin Huddling: A Continuum Model arxiv.org

1 eigenschwarz 3 years ago 0 comments

Comment · 4 years ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/provably

Edit: Sorry, missed your point on first reading, which perhaps reinforces your point. I read papers like this for a living so the language is unambiguous but I see how it might not be for others, even if English is their first language.

Comment · 4 years ago