🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. Take a deeeep breath because this newsletter is about to send you on a journey. 🌬️ 

Jonathan Schecter turned to psychedelics after a painful divorce revealed the parts of himself he wanted to heal. But with plant medicine, his transformation was just getting started. Psychedelics were gateway drugs for Jonathan to a more sustainable practice that has become his calling and purpose.

We talked to Jonathan about the fundamentals of Neurodynamic Breathwork, similarities and differences from psychedelic experiences, and how psychedelics and breathwork can be paired for powerful, transformative effects.

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When and why did you move to Tibet? What did you take away from your experience living there?

I moved to Tibet in 2005 with the intention of becoming a translator for Buddhist lamas in the lineage I study. What I took away from my time living there is that the world is a lot bigger than what we experience in our little corner of it. I had some incredible experiences that were completely off the normal tourist path, like visiting remote villages and crossing rickety bridges that felt like they were right out of Indiana Jones.

Just from being in a place so far removed from civilization, the energy was different. I didn't even have to try to meditate. It happened naturally. For most of my time there, I was living at an elevation of somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 feet with no running water or electricity in a monastery. It was pretty intense, but in a beautiful way.

Why do you practice breathwork? What type of breathwork do you teach?

I started practicing breathwork around three and a half years ago when I got divorced after a long-term marriage that was abusive. There was a lot of dysfunction coming out of that relationship, and there were things within myself I knew I needed to heal and transform.

I discovered breathwork through the ice baths I was taking as a way to integrate my plant medicine experiences and ceremonies. Then I audited different teachers and methods until I found Neurodynamic Breathwork, which is the main modality that I'm certified in and practice today.

This method allows you to enter an expanded state of consciousness, supported by evocative music and your breath. It's similar to Holotropic Breathwork, based on the work of Stan Grof. When you trust the process and surrender to what comes up, you’re able to connect with your inner guiding intelligence, which helps you release emotional and somatic blocks, connect to purpose, create new neural connections, and enter visionary states.

What do breathwork and psychedelics have in common? How are they different?

From a scientific perspective, both breathwork and psychedelics operate on similar parts of the brain. They quiet down the default mode network, which governs our sense of self, autobiographical memories, and future projections. This allows new neural connections and pathways to form and gives us the ability to see things in a different way that our default mode keeps us from experiencing.

In terms of differences, with psychedelics, there's the spirit of the medicine that's helping you enter that expanded state. With breathwork, you have to allow yourself to fully surrender to enter that state without assistance. Breathwork also gives you more control since you have the option of coming back to your normal breath at any point. With plant medicine, once you ingest it, you're on the ride for hours, unable to turn it off.

The breathwork space is similar to the medicine space in terms of the feeling and what you can experience, but there's a clarity from working with breathwork that isn't always there with psychedelics. You can self-direct the breathwork experience, whereas with psychedelics, you can set strong intentions, but the medicine might decide to work on something else.

Newcomers to expanded states of consciousness sometimes have resistance at the beginning of the breathwork process, while people who have worked with plant medicine tend to surrender more easily. However, breathwork can be a helpful method for someone interested in working with medicine but wants to get a taste of it in a manageable way before committing to a major psychedelic experience.

You’ve had some personal experience with repressed emotion and trauma. Can you share how these tools have been helpful to you?

Some of it is just release. We're not like any other animal in terms of just being able to complete our trauma cycles. An animal might have a traumatic experience, shake it off, and go about their day. But we humans are all walking around with these uncompleted cycles. I'm extremely grateful to my medicine and breathwork experiences for helping me to complete those cycles and shift the perception and the narratives that I've assigned to those experiences.

Both psychedelics and breathwork provide methods for release in active and passive ways. I'm grateful for the medicine experiences that I've had in terms of its almost psychic work to let things go. With breathwork, I've been able to actively work on things, especially rage and anger, that I haven't felt safe to express when they were coming up, whether that was when I was a kid after my parents divorced or things that happened in my own marriage. It's an actual physiological somatic release, like catharsis. For instance, there was a whole period of time where I would have a bunch of pillows on either side of me, so that I could physically discharge and scream and yell and say the things that had gone unsaid at the moment. The amount of energy that we store within us is pretty wild.

According to the work of Dr. Grof, as we do our own healing and go through our own process, we get to a place where we're able to process the trauma and pain of the collective, society, and our family line. So these things start to work on a higher level as we do our own healing, and it's not always easy to understand from a logical, thinking mind. But when you're experiencing it, it's like, alright, well, this is what's happening.

How can people combine breathwork with psychedelics to transform pain into purpose?

I like to categorize breathwork into three types, all of which have a purpose in the context of psychedelics. The first is awareness practices, which help you attune to your breath, mind, and body before, during, and after a medicine experience. It’s important to check in with your internal environment because you’re able to recognize if it's a good day for a macro dose or if your nervous system isn't feeling great.

The second type is state-shifting breathwork, which helps regulate your nervous system before and after intentionally dysregulating it with psychedelics. The ability to down-regulate back into a more grounded, parasympathetic state is key. On the other hand, there are times during a medicine ceremony when you might choose to extend or deepen the experience by activating a sympathetic state with your breath.

The third type is transformational or expanded state breathwork, which can be used as a companion or substitute for medicine work. It’s not always healthy to be taking psychedelics every single weekend, but breathwork offers a safe alternative to revisit those non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Want to see where your breath can take you? Connect with Jonathan to learn more and get his free Breathwork Guide for Integration.

That’s all for today. Before you head off, don’t forget to share, rate, and review Tricycle Day below. Catch ya next time, Cyclists! ✌️

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.