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Near-Death Experience, Breathwork, and Exploring Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness w/ Kyle Buller - Connecting Minds Podcast Ep08
119 Plays5 years ago
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tG_qsCV3zwk
Episode shownotes: https://christianyordanov.com/08-kyle-buller
Today on Connecting Minds we have Kyle Buller. He is one of the co-founders of Psychedelics Today, alongside Joe Moore. We discuss Kyle’s near-death experience and how it shaped his pursuit of exploring Transpersonal Psychology, Breathwork, and other non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Kyle's interest in exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness began at the age of 16 when he suffered a traumatic snowboarding accident. After this near-death experience, Kyle’s life changed dramatically. Kyle subsequently earned his B.A. in Transpersonal Psychology from Burlington College, where he focused on studying the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness by exploring shamanism, Reiki, local medicinal plants and plant medicine, Holotropic Breathwork. Kyle has been studying breathwork since October 2010.
Kyle earned his M.S. in clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis in somatic psychology from Prescott College. Kyle’s clinical background in mental health consists of working with at-risk teenagers in crisis and with individuals experiencing an early-episode of psychosis and providing counseling to undergraduate/graduate students in a university setting. Kyle also facilitates Transpersonal Breathwork workshops around the New Jersey area.
Links to Kyle's websites and social media:
Kyle's website: http://www.settingsunwellness.com/
Psychedelics Today: https://psychedelicstoday.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/settingsunwellness/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SettingSunWell
Topics discussed on this episode:
- Kyle’s background, his near-death experience (NDE) and how it changed the trajectory of his life.
- His explorations with non-ordinary states of consciousness.
- Breathwork and its healing potential.
- What is Spiritual Emergence?
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Connecting Minds
00:00:10
Speaker
Connecting Minds is a space dedicated to honoring the amazing authors, researchers, clinicians, artists, and entrepreneurs who are contributing to our collective evolution or simply making the world a better place. These thought-provoking conversations are intended to expand our horizons, so come with an open mind and let us grow together. Here is your host, Christian Yordanov.
Who is Kyle Buller?
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Connected Minds podcast. My name is Christian Jardinoff and thank you so much for joining me today on this eighth episode of the podcast. Today I have for you a great conversation I had with Kyle Buller, who is one of the two guys along with Joe Moore that run Psychedelics today, which is one of the best resources out there on all things psychedelics. They have a
00:01:06
Speaker
great website and top-notch podcast that I would highly recommend you checking out if you are at all interested in the space.
Kyle's Near-Death Experience and Transpersonal Psychology
00:01:15
Speaker
On the conversation with Kyle today, we discussed his near-death experience
00:01:22
Speaker
And basically how that shaped who he is today, how it shaped his interests into exploring transpersonal psychology, other non-ordinary states of consciousness.
00:01:37
Speaker
Of course, psychedelics, breathwork, and things like that. So he has a lot of great insights. He's been in the space for a long time. And I'm just glad to be able to sit down with such interesting individuals that are contributing so much to the betterment of humanity, really, because at the end of the day, that's what the podcast is about.
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm very thankful that Kyle joined me for this conversation. So a little bit about Kyle. Kyle's interest in exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness began at the age of 16 when he suffered a traumatic snowboarding accident. After this near-death experience, Kyle's life changed dramatically. Kyle subsequently earned his BA in Transpersonal Psychology from Burlington College, where he focused on studying the healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness
00:02:30
Speaker
By exploring shamanism, Reiki, local medicinal plants and plant medicine, holotropic breathwork and other modalities. Kyle has been studying breathwork since October 2010. He also has an MS in clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis in somatic psychology from Prescott College.
00:02:50
Speaker
Kyle's clinical background in mental health consists of working with at-risk teenagers in crisis and with individuals experiencing an early episode of psychosis and providing counseling to undergraduate and graduate students in a university setting. Kyle also facilitates transpersonal breathwork workshops around the New Jersey area.
From Snowboarding to Breathwork
00:03:11
Speaker
Yeah, so he's very knowledgeable in this area of non-ordinary states of consciousness, really a wealth of knowledge, and I'm so glad that Kyle came on the podcast. I'm, of course, glad to share our conversation with you. Let me know how you like it. Show notes will be on christianjordanov.com.
00:03:30
Speaker
where I have links to Kyle's resources, his podcasts, website, and so on, social media. So without further ado, here's our guest, Kyle Buller. All right, so today on the Connecting Minds podcast, we have Kyle Buller. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
00:03:53
Speaker
So I'm going to read your bio at the start in the intro, but do you want to give folks an idea of what your background is and how you got into the stuff that you're into today?
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Um, try to give you the short version. Uh, yeah. So my background is I have a bachelor's in transpersonal psychology and a master's in clinical mental health counseling with a focus on, um, in somatic psychology. I really started to get into a lot of this work, I guess at like an early age, I had a pretty traumatic snowboarding accident, um, had like a near death experience. And that just kind of opened me up to like a, a
00:04:31
Speaker
a new world, I guess, a new way of seeing the world. And so I guess my journey has been really a process of trying to ground that experience, integrate it and really try to figure out, I guess, like what happened there. And so I've been on a healing path for quite a while and just exploring lots of different transpersonal realms, which led me to
Psychedelics Today: Co-Creation and Goals
00:04:54
Speaker
um, co-create this project psychedelics today, along with Joe Moore, um, almost over four years ago, we launched in 2016, um, our, our first episode. And so, yeah, do a lot of education in the psychedelic world, uh, which has been fun. And, um, a big portion of our background is in the breath work world, been training with, uh, transpersonal breath work for about 10 years or so. Awesome.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, so these are all topics that I'd like to touch on a little bit. Let's start with your near-death experience. What was that like? And kind of on the tail end of it, what were you thinking? What was going on in your head around that time? You mean actually during the experience? Yeah, so during the experience, then after, and any revelations or insights that you had, this kind of stuff.
00:05:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess I'll give a little context of what happened there. I was a sophomore in high school and I decided to go snowboarding one night out in the Poconos. I grew up in New Jersey and I was doing some night snowboarding and it was kind of warm during the day and there was a lot of mounds kind of kicked up and I was going around a pretty sharp turn
00:06:10
Speaker
And there just happened to be a mound of snow in a blind spot. The way the lighting was kind of hitting everything, I didn't see it until I was up on top of it. And as I started to go around this turn, yeah, there is this mound and I said, oh, shit, if I hit this, I'm going to die. I need to either try to stop or turn. And everything really started to go in slow motion. And I remember just kind of processing like a million thoughts a second of like, what am I going to do here? What am I going to do here?
00:06:36
Speaker
And it just felt like no matter how much I tried to stop or turn, you know, I was just going too fast and I hit this amount of snow and
Near-Death Insights and Consciousness Exploration
00:06:45
Speaker
kind of time sped up flew through the air about 30 feet or so and nose of my snowboard hit my shoulder hit and I heard a loud pop and I immediately thought, you know, I
00:06:56
Speaker
either snapped a rib or something in my shoulder. It just immense pain right away. I slid down the hill a little bit. And I remember just feeling this pain. I couldn't breathe, felt like I got the wind knocked out of me. And I was just laying face down in the snow grunting, kind of like these death grunts.
00:07:17
Speaker
And my brother and his friend came up behind me, and they saw that was pretty hurt, so they went to go get ski patrol. And so I was just laying on the mountain by myself, and I just kept watching all these people whiz by me, parents, kids, and nobody stopped to really say, hey, are you okay, besides these two punk-ass snowboarders? And they stopped to ask me if I was okay, if I had a light, and they were smoking cigarettes. But I'm really thankful that they stopped by.
00:07:46
Speaker
And these are the people that I would probably be judgmental about and be like, oh, they're the ones that hang out in the terrain park and throw snowballs at you while you try to do tricks and call you really nasty names. But those were the ones that stopped and they put a snowboard in front of me. So when people were coming around the turn, they didn't just run right into me.
00:08:06
Speaker
So, my brother came back about like 30, 40 minutes later and said, you know, nobody's coming. And I was like, what do you mean nobody's coming? He's like, I don't know. I just, I told the lifty, but they didn't really do too much. So, luckily, it's a small mountain and there's patrol that comes by every so often. So, luckily, you know, a random ski patroller stops all that I was injured.
00:08:29
Speaker
and try to take some vitals and brought me down. They got a toboggan, brought me down to the first aid. So when I was in the first aid station, the responders were kind of freaking out saying, your ribs are fine. There's no bruising. There's no swelling. But you have really low vitals. Your pulse is low. You look really pale. We think you have internal injuries.
00:08:56
Speaker
And at that moment, the first thought that popped in my head was, oh, shit, I'm going to die tonight. And I grew up, and I wasn't very religious. But at that point, I started praying to God. And I said, God, I never really talked to you or anything like that. And I don't even know if I believe in you, but I just don't really want to die tonight. Please, please help me.
00:09:18
Speaker
So thankfully, they called for a helicopter and medevaced me out. And I just learned this a few years ago, talking to my dad, I guess. After they got me in the ambulance to take me to the helipad, I guess one of the first responders just looked at my dad and said, your son's in his golden hours. He may not make it. Because I guess they knew I had massive, probably, internal bleeding or injury, and it was pretty serious.
00:09:49
Speaker
So, yeah, luckily they medevaced me out. And, you know, it was New Year's Eve. I was supposed to go to some of my friend's house and my phone's just blowing up. And, you know, I just kept ringing and ringing while I was getting medevaced to the hospital and found out later a lot of my friends were pretty pissed. They thought I was ignoring them, but they didn't know what was actually going on. So by the time I got to the hospital, my uncle was actually a first responder.
00:10:17
Speaker
for that county and town. And so my dad called him and he met me there. And I remember as they took me out of the helicopter to bring me to the ER, I started to, you know, start to like fade in and out of consciousness. I knew something was really wrong. But death kind of started to leave my mind. It didn't feel as scary as it did when I was in the first aid station when, you know, it's like, okay,
00:10:44
Speaker
you might have internal injury and the only thing i think of i'm gonna die but by the time i got to the the er i started to have a feeling of euphoria and my uncle was standing beside me reassuring me that i was gonna be okay that he knew a lot of the doctors and nurses and they were good people.
Recovery and Existential Reflection
00:11:01
Speaker
I had this really interesting thought while he was standing beside me thinking like, here's somebody that's family, like blood related. And where I'm about to go, I can't take anybody with me. This is my own personal journey and we all are on our own personal journey.
00:11:17
Speaker
And it's just interesting that here's somebody that is so close in blood lineage that I can't take anybody where I'm about to go. And so at that moment, the nurses are trying to take off my clothes, take off my ski boots, or snowboard boots. And I could hear a lot of different things.
00:11:39
Speaker
I could hear one nurse say, like, I can't get a pulse on him. His veins and his upper body are collapsing. They're sitting there jabbing me with needles, trying to get an IV in my arm. I guess, you know, I heard them say, yeah, veins are collapsing. His veins and his upper body are collapsing. I remember they had to, I guess, get an IV tapped in my femoral artery. I just remember them getting this huge needle. And my uncle looking at me and being like,
00:12:06
Speaker
I feel sorry for you. It's going to hurt. Yeah. And at that point, it felt like it's always so hard to put into words, but it felt like a part of me entered into this oceanic feeling. It was like consciousness is everywhere. And I started to tap into this like ocean of knowledge, of emotion. It was like I could feel everything in the room at that point.
00:12:32
Speaker
And I could feel the anxiety of the nurses rushing around because they knew I was in pretty bad shape. But there was a part of me internally that just was really content with everything. As I'm watching all this chaos unfold, I'm just kind of sitting there or laying there being a little blissed out. And so they told me, you know, they needed to figure out what was going on. So they did a sonogram on me.
00:12:56
Speaker
and found that I had massive internal bleeding. They're like, this is why you feel sick. This is why you're in a lot of pain. You have massive internal bleeding. You have blood all on your abdomen. We need to get you to a CAT scan to see where the bleeding's coming from. So when they got me a CAT scan, I remember sitting in the machine, and this is when things, I guess, really started to take off, was
00:13:22
Speaker
The pain was just so unbearable. Every time I took a breath in, it hurt so bad. I felt like I was submerged in a tub of ice water and because there's no blood circulating, you know, through my body. And it was just so cold. And, you know, I could just hear the doctors on the other side of the room could be instruction, like, you know, breathe in, breathe out.
00:13:45
Speaker
And I really started to close my eyes and started to go inward. And I could just hear the doctor say, don't fall asleep, Kyle. Don't fall asleep. Stay with us. Stay with us. And the only thing that I could think of was like, well, that's the only thing I can do. It's just I can't deal with this pain anymore.
00:14:03
Speaker
And as I started to really fade away, I felt like I was on the other side of the room with the doctors. I was having like this inner and outer body experience. It's so hard to kind of put into words and explain, but it was like I was really in my internal experience, but I was also everywhere at once.
00:14:21
Speaker
And there's this, I say it's like a voice or it felt like this, I don't know, white light that was kind of coming over me, like a ball of light. And I don't think it was necessarily an external voice. It felt like maybe it was internalized. But something came over me and said, you're going home. Relax into this experience. You're going back to the stars where we all come from.
00:14:48
Speaker
And this physical life is gonna cease to exist, but you're gonna continue onward. And the more you struggle with it, the harder it's gonna be. So the more that you can relax, the easier this transition will be for you. And so at that point I really started to relax into it. I started to kind of go inward. It was like this going inward meant kind of going outward too, in a sense.
00:15:10
Speaker
And it felt really blissful and beautiful, filled with a lot of love. And the doctors ripped me out, didn't rip me out, but they took me out of the CAT scan machine and then brought me to the operating room. And they told me that I ruptured my spleen and I had massive internal bleeding and they needed to do emergency surgery.
00:15:30
Speaker
And so the last things that I remember, the last words I heard was they're telling me something about anesthesia and they're going to start counting backwards. And then the last two words I heard was, should we use an electric razor or a straight razor? And then I completely blacked out. And I woke up as they were wheeling me back to the ICU after the surgery. And I remember as they were wheeling me,
00:15:57
Speaker
I just like shot back in my body. It felt like my soul just like woke up. I came back and I shot up out of the stretcher and I just violently was shaking. And I could just hear the nurses say, he's awake and he's cold. And then I passed out and finally woke up in ICU with my family all around me. Really kind of worried and also really relieved that I was okay.
00:16:23
Speaker
That is such a, I sometimes bang on about how badly we're dealing with the chronic disease crisis. But that's one thing about our medical system is in these, it's just miraculous what they can do to bring someone back from the brink.
00:16:39
Speaker
Oh, yeah, I mean, I always say Western medicine is wonderful for emergencies. You know, without it, I wouldn't be here. Yeah, but chronic, we don't do too well, I think, in preventative care. Yeah, but for emergency medicine, I mean, it's it's life saving. Yeah, yeah. So what can you discuss with us the recovery process? What was that like for you kind of integrating back into normal life after that experience?
Educational Journey and Spiritual Emergence
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, it was definitely a process. You know, the first few days in the hospital were super hazy, but as I started to really kind of regain consciousness in a sense of like trying to understand what just happened,
00:17:24
Speaker
started to become really difficult. You know, the analogy that I make is it felt like I woke up with a map on my chest. And the map really kind of showed me how the world worked in some regard. And, you know, whether that's ultimate truth or not, I don't know. But that's how I felt at that moment was like, I saw something how how some of this
00:17:47
Speaker
works. And it felt true to me in that moment. And so coming back from that, I really was trying to figure out what happened to me? Where did I go? Who did I speak to? And I didn't have this traditional near-death experience that people talk about of going down the tunnel of light, meeting maybe angels, or they go into some sort of city, and maybe they meet some of their ancestors.
00:18:15
Speaker
It was like I just had this felt knowing this felt sense of knowing deep in my bones that part of my spirit soul something went somewhere and it was like I couldn't really Remember everything and it felt like it had some sort of it felt like it haunted me like what the hell just happened because now the way I'm viewing life is just so radically different and
00:18:39
Speaker
being 16 with this new way of seeing the world is really difficult. I mean, most people at that age, I was a sophomore in high school, so most people are either worried about like, you know, relationships and, you know, teenage things, maybe trying to get drunk and doing drugs and experimenting, finding out who you are. And I'm grappling with this deeply existential crisis of
00:19:04
Speaker
what the hell just happened to me? And why am I here? So coming back was very difficult. I was on a high for about like,
00:19:14
Speaker
you know, three to six months, like, oh my God, I'm so thankful to be alive. But then a lot of the existential dreads started to seep in. And I think I was just grappling with a lot of philosophical questions of like, you know, why did I come back? I felt like I was really kind of accepting my fate there. And, you know, why did the doctor save me? Like, I was about to go on this journey. And I don't think I really should like,
00:19:41
Speaker
I don't think I really should be here. Now I'm so thankful that that happened. But these are some of the really deep emotions that I was grappling with during that time. So I had to sink into a pretty deep depression at times, a lot of suicidal thinking. And the suicidal thinking was more along the lines of wanting to bask in that sense of love. Because as I said when I was laying in the CAT scan machine,
00:20:10
Speaker
something told me I was going home. And that sense of home just felt so nourishing, so real and so exciting. Like, oh, wow, this is what we all wait for. This one moment to go take this journey. And so I just spent a lot of time, I guess, like either just thinking about that state and wanting to go back there because it just felt so blissful and homey.
00:20:34
Speaker
And being here in the world is sometimes really difficult. There's a lot of suffering that happens here and a lot of pain to hold on to. And I think I was just really open and really sensitive to that coming back, where I really just spent a lot of time trying to escape and just, I guess, do a lot of daydreaming and had a lot of ideation about what would that be like if I could go back there right now.
00:20:56
Speaker
So it was it was a struggle for sure. And, you know, I didn't really have the supports around me to really help me process and understand this experience. Like, you know, I remember the principal at my high school, I got into some trouble and she was like,
00:21:11
Speaker
you know, you had this near-death experience, like you should be thankful you're alive, like just be thankful for it.
Working with At-Risk Teens and Future Goals
00:21:16
Speaker
And in the back of my mind, it was like, but I don't think you understand psychospiritually what's going on with me. Like this is a very bittersweet experience for me. Yes, I'm thankful to be alive, but like this psychospiritual crisis that I'm in, I just don't think you really understand. And so that was really hard to sit with. I didn't have, you know, any sort of elder teacher that could see that. I recently came across a note
00:21:41
Speaker
from a high school teacher, they sent it to my mom and was like, I don't know if you know, Kyle's like new philosophy on life, but like it's really bad and like you should give him another near death experience to wake him up. Um, and it was just cause like I came back to school and I was just like, I'm not doing any of this stuff. This is all bullshit. You guys are like just factory producing kids. Like none of this, like most of this is irrelevant to actually what I want to be doing in my life. Um, and.
00:22:10
Speaker
I just felt like I was wasting a lot of my time there, but I stuck it out, thankfully. And I think some of the teachers could see that potential and probably thought I was just pissing it away with this attitude. But I was also challenging their belief system of public education and how people learn and be like,
00:22:30
Speaker
Well, there's other ways of knowing and being and this just is bunch of bullshit. And so I really stopped doing all my work. I stopped really doing a lot of stuff in high school, but somehow passed with flying colors too. So I think everybody saw actually how smart I was at the same time, but yeah, it was just like. What was your BA and then you moved on to, oh, sorry, transpersonal psychology, right? So you went straight into finding answers, right?
00:23:00
Speaker
I took four years off after high school, actually. It really took some time to figure out what I wanted to do. This is when I started to stumble across psychedelics and had some pretty profound experiences that opened me up. After those experiences,
00:23:17
Speaker
I really wanted to dedicate my life to studying these different states of consciousness and the healing aspect. After some bigger experiences, after that near-death experience, I just became so fascinated that I needed to find a program where I could continue my education and really study these states of consciousness. This is where I found a lot of great teachers to help guide me through what I was going through.
00:23:45
Speaker
So did you find relief then in the psychedelics with some questions answered that you could, you know, step back into the physical reality after those.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah, the first experience I had was with psilocybin. I had some experience with cannabis beforehand, but I found it to be interesting, but it wasn't until I had this psilocybin experience where it really helped me to relive my near-death experience in a sense. And that experience really, I guess, like recontextualized some of the trauma that I went through and provided some sort of visual aid to possibly what I went through. So with the psilocybin experience,
00:24:28
Speaker
I think I was 19. And my friend of mine just had it. We went out into the woods and it came on really strong. I started watching my body dissolve and it started becoming really scary. And so I remember I watched my friend puke his up and I'm thinking like, oh my God, like maybe we're dying. Are you supposed to puke on these things? Like I'm very uneducated. And I went into it with kind of a,
00:24:57
Speaker
an escapist mindset, like I just wanted to try to escape my reality. Probably not the best mindset to go into a trip with, but I was so naive, didn't really think about anything and, you know, ended up thankfully being a very, very positive experience, terrifying, but positive. But I remember as it really started to hit,
00:25:17
Speaker
were walking down this little trail and there was a little rock in the middle of the trail and said, I think I need to sit here on this rock and die. And when I had that feeling, it felt like all of a sudden I started to die and I said, this feeling is very familiar. So at that moment, I thought I was overdosing and I didn't really know the psilocybin is
00:25:41
Speaker
pretty safe and chances of that happening are pretty low. But the psychological effect, it really reminded me of dying. And as I started to slip into that, it got really scary. I entered into a void of nothingness, but it turned into a mystical experience and I had some sort of interaction with
00:26:04
Speaker
these entities. And I didn't know about Terrence McKenna or Rick Strassman's DMT research and talking about these entities that, you know, maybe inhabit this tryptamine space. But, you know, the way that, like, I guess I was viewing it was when I found myself in this space, I said, wow, this feels really familiar. This I feel like I've been here before. So I asked these these entities, I was like, you know, have I been here before? And so thousands of times.
00:26:34
Speaker
And I said, oh shit, okay, well, if I've been here thousands of times, and if this feels like death, then this must be some sort of death bardo. Is this the death bardo? Is this where you go when you die? And they just looked at me and said, more or less so. So I'm like trying to put two and two together. I go, okay, if I've been here thousands of times, if this is a death bardo, then you must be God, or you must be the things that I talked to that one night that gave me all this information. So I asked him, I said, you know, are you God?
00:27:04
Speaker
Are you the entities or beings that gave me this information about life? And they just looked at me and said, more or less so. So it was this total trickster archetype, not really giving me much information, but having that visual experience, I think helped me kind of put
00:27:21
Speaker
put my near-death experience into context a little bit. You know, maybe it provided me with some sort of visual aid to be like, maybe this is what happened. Maybe this is the thing that I talked to. And it gave me a sense of comfort because as I said before, there was just this felt sense of my bones and I went somewhere and something gave me information and I just didn't have the visual aid for it. And we live in a very visually oriented culture, right? Like seeing is believing. We need to see things to actually believe it.
00:27:52
Speaker
And I think there's so many different ways of knowing. And I think in the West, we kind of disregard those, maybe intuition, right? How do you explain intuition? It's a feeling, right? And people are, that may not be so valid. But for me, like that was, it was like, I just felt sense of knowing, I know something happened. So yeah, the psilocybin experience, I think just helped me kind of reprocess that trauma and gave me maybe a narrative to work with.
00:28:21
Speaker
And that was just so fascinating. And the eerie thing was like, how the hell could I eat this thing that grows out of the earth that's natural, that produced a near-death experience all over again for me? So just that experience alone just fascinated me so much. And it really kind of got me on track. It got me fascinated about life again. I was so thankful to be alive after that point. And I was like, I think I need to
00:28:50
Speaker
dedicate my life to studying this. I'm just too fascinated by it. It's just too interesting not to explore. And why do you think the entities told you you've been here thousands of times? What do you reckon that means?
00:29:06
Speaker
I don't know, like I said, in that experience, it felt like it was a realm, some sort of death barter realm. And it's like, if we believe in reincarnation, could this be some sort of realm where we go to? Could it be some sort of spirit world where we go to? So in that moment, that's what it felt like. My spirit, my soul has been to wherever this place is.
00:29:31
Speaker
And I guess like when I think about it and when I think about like the near-death experience and just life and death in general, like I kind of always say like,
00:29:42
Speaker
especially thinking about these really far-out psychedelic experiences where you kind of leave your body and you start looking at your hand and you go, what is all this? It's like when we die, we go into this cosmic womb, this cosmic void. So that's where we're born from and that's where we go to. And maybe there is something so familiar about wherever we do go if you believe that your life continues on, if your soul continues on.
00:30:12
Speaker
You know does it have to go somewhere and maybe there's this this realm that we go to For me as I was dying. Like I said, it felt like I was going home So maybe you know, I've been to this place before on a soul level and maybe it felt like home to me so I don't know it's so hard to actually like Know sometimes right? It's life is such a mystery. I
00:30:36
Speaker
Absolutely. And, you know, this kind of reminds me a few days I was talking a few days ago, I was talking with my sister and I just, I was actually talking about Christopher Bache's work and about Ian Stevens's work with kids that remember past lives and about, I asked, you know, do you believe in reincarnation, this kind of stuff. And she's like, I'm on the fence, this kind of stuff. And I started telling her about Ian Stevens's work and
00:31:04
Speaker
Chris Bache's book, Life Cycles, and at one point she stopped me and said, you know, my nephew, he has told her at least two or three times, he's like five, you know, but before he's told her, at least two or three times, something along the lines of, you know, mommy, when you die,
00:31:22
Speaker
You you you then go into a new body something like that. So, you know, it's kind of It's it's and she's like did you hear hear that on TV? Did you hear that in school? No, no, I just know I just know and it's just kind of
00:31:38
Speaker
when we're young and we don't have all these psychological layers on top, maybe we can tap into that space more. You had some psychedelic experiences. What was then your journey like through doing the BA, doing the MA? How did your
00:31:59
Speaker
understanding of basically the world, life, the universe, existence, how did that kind of transform or develop? Yeah, thanks.
00:32:13
Speaker
You know, when I started my BA, it was such an interesting program. It felt like, I was just chatting with an old advisor from there. It kind of felt like Hogwarts. It was such experiential learning where like, you know, I just had classes in like,
00:32:30
Speaker
shamanic practices. I got trained in Reiki. I had a dream retreat where I'd go to my teacher's house and we'd spend the week camping in his yard and doing dream analysis. I was able to do holotropic breathwork and get school credit for it and ended up studying with teachers there.
00:32:53
Speaker
Something that really stands out was when I was taking, I think it was an eco-psychology course and the teacher that was teaching it is a shamanic practitioner, part Cherokee and Lakota and European roots. And I told him about my story and he said, that's a shame. If you lived in a traditional culture, the elders would have stepped in to teach you this new way of being and seeing the world.
00:33:20
Speaker
And unfortunately, you know, you grew up in your culture and you didn't have that. And so you had to really kind of figure it out on your own. So, you know, the way that I really see the work that I was doing during my undergrad there was really trying to explore all these different frameworks for trying to understand my experience. And really it was a time for a lot of self exploration. Like I was doing a lot of deep inner work in that program.
00:33:49
Speaker
And just so thankful that it was around. I mean, I think about that and go, that was a very, very unique experience. But it really kind of provided the framework for me to explore these states of consciousness, helped me to develop some theoretical orientations around it and think about it on different levels from different traditions. And yeah, so I think that was probably the thing that really stuck out about this whole process is,
00:34:17
Speaker
really just developing more insight and frameworks around these experiences. And it's interesting to kind of see my evolution here. I was just thinking about this other day during a course that we teach. I had this really big experience and then there weren't a lot of transpersonal psychology programs out there. Most of them are master level programs.
00:34:42
Speaker
And, you know, you think you have to really learn the foundations of psychology before kind of jumping into the mystical and spiritual traditions and techniques. But I was just so blown open that I needed to find a place where I could really focus on that.
00:34:59
Speaker
And I really spent a lot of time there kind of in these non-ordinary states by doing so much inner work. And then with my masters, it was almost trying to ground that experience by really focusing on the body and really how do we take these experiences and process them through our body. And that was one of the reasons why I focused on a lot of the somatic research was
00:35:23
Speaker
how do we deal with trauma when it's like, I spent so much time, I guess, like in these ethereal realms and it was really ungrounding. And sometimes I felt like I was just like kind of way far out there and in La La Land most days just kind of thinking about this stuff. And that was, I think the one thing that breath work taught me was how do we really embody these experiences and how can we work with the body to process it?
00:35:52
Speaker
especially with the early psychedelic use was like very cognitive, very spiritual, very out there, but it left me really, really ungrounded. And I think I needed to come back to my body. So just kind of also thinking about that evolution of being completely blown open and spending time in that space and then really trying to take an approach really with like trauma informed approaches, the somatic to really ground and start to be here in the moment.
00:36:22
Speaker
This is actually a perfect segue. I was going to ask you, because you seem, just looking over your website and who you've studied with, you seem like your breath work very well. So can you give us, I'm actually, three weeks from now, I've scheduled our first breath work workshop. So I myself am,
00:36:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's not gruffian, it's some other, I forgot the person that runs that, but fairly prominent person. But I am actually fairly uninitiated to, you know, this modality. Could you give myself and the listeners a little bit of a crash course? What is breath work? And what does it do to the body and the mind when one, you know, engages with this modality?
00:37:15
Speaker
Yeah, so breath work is an umbrella term, really just a lot of different breathing modalities out there, right? If we look at different cultures and traditions, they use the breath in all sorts of ways. But you know, if you look cross culturally, breath and life force and spirit
00:37:32
Speaker
We're all words, you know, used together. And so I think in a lot of traditional cultures, they really kind of honor the breath and the power of breathing and just really connected to the life force. I mean, you know, I think about this in general.
00:37:49
Speaker
you know, we come into the world with our first breath and, you know, as I was laying in that CAT scan machine, you know, my breathing slowing down is like, you know, when is my last breath going to be there? So, you know, breath has always been tied to this life force, this spiritual essence of who we are. It's what keeps us going. So, you know, there's a lot of different traditions. The tradition that I come out of is in the lineage of holotropic breath work. And so,
00:38:15
Speaker
Yeah, I studied holotropic breathwork at Burlington College. My teachers are holotropic breathwork certified and they've been running workshops for 25 years and just a disclaimer for like trademark sense. So like I have experience participating in holotropic breathwork workshops, but that's actually not what my training is in and I don't facilitate holotropic breathwork. My teachers are passing their work on as dream shadow transpersonal breathwork.
00:38:43
Speaker
And so, in this lineage, it comes out of the work of Stan and Christina Groff. And Stan Groff is a Czechoslovakian-American psychiatrist, and he did a lot of research in the realm of psychedelics. I mean, he's probably, as Albert Hoffman, the father of LSD, so if I'm the father of
00:39:06
Speaker
of LSD than Stan Groff is the godfather. He's had so many different experiences. I think he's had over maybe like 4,500 to maybe 5,000 experiences sitting with people in clinical situations.
00:39:22
Speaker
He was experimenting with psychedelics early on in the 50s and 60s, left Czechoslovakia, came over to America and was still continuing research down in Maryland and using psilocybin. And then the counterculture hit and all this research started to dry up.
00:39:44
Speaker
And so he found himself over at Esalen, a little hotspot over in Big Sur, California. And he was a scholar residence over there, writing his books up and kind of maybe looking over some of his clinical notes. And he was just invited to lead some workshops. And there was a lot of stuff going on in that time. A lot of experiential therapies came out of Esalen. And the one thing,
00:40:10
Speaker
In some of Groff's work, he wrote in LSD Psychotherapy that for helping to resolve people's like maybe unprocessed psychedelic trip, sometimes breathing heavily would then activate their experience and help to resolve whatever process. So, you know, he had a little bit of this knowledge and then coming over to Esalen, you know, with all these different traditions that possibly use breath from the yogic traditions, meditation traditions,
00:40:37
Speaker
And so him and his wife Christina ended up developing this breathing technique that involves deep, intensified breathing. Wearing eye shades, I guess you don't have to, but, you know, being in a low-lit room, something that possibly covering the eyes just to really help the internal process with loud, evocative music. And by engaging in this practice, it can really
00:41:02
Speaker
kind of elicit and foster these non-ordinary states of consciousness could be really similar to a psychedelic experience. And so, you know, he really kind of took his framework and his work with psychedelics and applied it to this whole Trippic Breathwork modality. And
00:41:19
Speaker
It's very fascinating, the amount of just the variety of experiences that people can have. And so there's a lot of different breath work techniques out there. And I see a rise in all sorts of modalities that people are offering right now, which is really wonderful to just see people get out there. It's a very powerful tool. Kind of cliche at times, right? Like take a deep breath, be able to control your emotions. But there's also a lot of science behind that as well.
00:41:48
Speaker
As for the non-ordinary state experience with breathing, I mean, I don't think we necessarily know from neuroscience and whatnot actually what's going on there. I guess you could correlate it to a change in blood alkalinity. It does change the pH of the blood a little bit by deeply breathing. But as for some of these really big transpersonal experiences,
00:42:15
Speaker
I don't really know what's happening there. And that's what's the fascinating thing about the technique. You know, from my experience of studying a lot of different like traditions and studying the psychedelic world, is that
00:42:28
Speaker
There's all these different vehicles to get to these non-ordinary states, whether it's chanting, singing, drumming, isolation in a cave traditionally, to breathing and to plant medicines and psychedelics. And all the experiences that we experience with these techniques, they're all side of us.
00:42:50
Speaker
You can access it always. It's all inside. And these are just different vehicles and different just tools to get to that similar state. There might be different flavors, right? Like psychedelics obviously foster a very profound experience at times and a little bit different than breathwork, but also it can be very similar to breathwork. And so I really kind of focus on this internal experience. And these are just different pathways to get there.
00:43:18
Speaker
And what kind of before and after work, in terms of integrating the experiences, do you, I know you, I think you facilitate the workshops, the breadth work workshops, correct? Do you do actual kind of like talk, work with people to help them integrate experiences? Is that necessary, do you think or?
00:43:44
Speaker
It really depends. You know, sometimes people have some really big experiences that they want to process. You know, if they're working with a therapist that is open to kind of exploring non-ordinary states, I definitely encourage people to reach out to do therapy with somebody.
00:44:02
Speaker
You know, the integration process after breath work, we really focus on art. And so after you have a breath work session, like right after you get up off the mat and you go into another room and you do some artwork. And so that's really part of your integration process. And then for more post workshop, you know, sometimes people want to reach out and just like chat about their experience.
00:44:24
Speaker
But also really encourage people to you know if they have a therapist to bring some of that work there but you know i think the important part of integration is being able to embody some of the insights that like you experienced. You know this is a really important part of psychedelic work.
00:44:43
Speaker
I had a student in the past that was from Brazil and part of some of the ayahuasca traditions down there and she was saying, the real work begins after the ceremony ends. We can have these big experiences, but they only offer some
00:45:01
Speaker
a glimpse into what is possible. And a lot of the work is actually in the 3D reality. And that's sometimes really challenging. How do we take what we experience and translate it to the day to day and really embody it too, right? And I think this is like, you know, when I was so caught up in a lot of it, just hanging out in the ethereal realms, it's like, well, I'm not really doing anything with it.
00:45:25
Speaker
how do I bring that down and try to give back to the community in a sense, instead of holding on to it all the time. So you know, that's definitely psychedelics today has been a huge integration project for me to be able to, I guess, like work with the experience and pass on some of the some of my own experiences and information to get out there. So and a huge focus has been on integration with that project.
00:45:53
Speaker
Yeah, I can see you guys really talk about integration and I think that's where the work really lies in because you might be able to unearth some trauma but unearthing it, you have to still process it somehow and it's good to have multiple tools to do the job. Some people won't be doing
00:46:17
Speaker
Psychedelics, they have kids, they have whatever, or they're just scared. So I'm actually really, really looking forward to see what this breathwork, you know, what comes out of this. I'm very excited for it. Is it an online breathwork session?
00:46:34
Speaker
No, no, it's in person. It's in person. Three hours long, I believe it's an hour and a half. And then some, you know, before and after stuff. So yeah, looking forward to that. But I just wanted to ask, you know, you talk about, you do spiritual emergence coaching. What is spiritual emergence, just for the listeners?
00:46:59
Speaker
Yeah, so spiritual emergence is a term that was coined again by Stan and Christina Groff. And it's kind of like a play on words, meaning that there's a deep psycho-spiritual crisis that's unfolding, but it also provides an opportunity to emerge from that experience and maybe into a higher level of functioning, a higher level of consciousness, and really being able to kind of step into a new way of being.
00:47:28
Speaker
And so it really just talks about these experience, when transformative experiences with non-ordinary states, holotropic experiences, spontaneous experiences can really start to create crisis in our life. So, you know, a perfect example would be that near-death experience, right? Had this really profound experience. It really cracked me open. There was a lot of like spiritual, mystical, philosophical undertones to it. But I mean, it left me feeling pretty depressed and in a crisis.
00:47:57
Speaker
And so we talk about it as a spectrum. Spiritual emergence on the one side is just, you know, it's a process and it may not be that extreme. I was functioning. I mean, even though I was depressed and was going through a lot of this existential
00:48:13
Speaker
like angst and despair. I was able to go to school. I was able to keep relationships. I was functional. On the other extreme is when it starts to move into spiritual emergency. And that's when it could look like, quote unquote, schizophrenia, psychosis, mania, when it's not being contained very well and somebody needs either probably like a higher level of care. They need people
00:48:41
Speaker
possibly looking after them for a bit because their process is either so heightened, like kind of, you know, just really out of control and maybe they do need someplace safe that they can sit and process whatever they're going through.
00:48:56
Speaker
Because these experiences can get really, really intense, right? And then you get into some of the thinking of like, am I real? What's going on? If nothing's real, then how do I live in the world? Or, wow, I found out that I'm God and Jesus, so I can do whatever I want now. And so, I mean, it's all possible when we start tapping into these non-ordinary states. And so, yeah, how do we help people move through that or just help contain it? So nothing dangerous happens. No harm is done.
00:49:27
Speaker
So from your bio, I'm seeing that you work with at-risk teenagers in crisis like this. So you actually work with folks to kind of...
00:49:43
Speaker
Yeah, that was an old job that I had right out of college. I worked in a residential home with at-risk teens for about three years. So really dealing with them either, you know, they sometimes go to the hospital and get assessed and they come down to our program. And usually we were dealing with a lot of suicidal thinking.
00:50:01
Speaker
suicide attempts and just risky and harmful behavior where they needed to get stabilized. And the other place that I worked at was another residential home that was for people going through early episode psychosis.
00:50:19
Speaker
Some of those people probably would have fit into that spiritual emergence realm where they had an experience that they were really kind of cracked open. And other times, you know, people didn't really resonate with that and that didn't really fit into that framework. But we didn't really focus there on spiritual emergence.
00:50:36
Speaker
We were trying to create a space for people to make sense of their own experience without needing to label it as spiritual emergence, as schizophrenia, as psychosis. So yeah, I've definitely spent a lot of time in crisis management, that's for sure. It seems like any type of this spiritual emergence in the Western model would just be labeled as psychosis, wouldn't it?
00:51:03
Speaker
Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, usually when somebody has those types of breaks, it looks very much like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia. And so there's a really great quote that I like by Stan. And I think it highlights the importance of this nuanced conversation is that, you know, kind of like coming from the spiritual traditions and thinking that
00:51:28
Speaker
all, you know, these, every experience is spiritual in a sense. But sometimes that's not the case, right? And I think sometimes we want to romanticize these different states. And maybe, you know, that's actually possibly doing harm to a person because we're not providing a level of care to them that they may need. There's an example, a teacher of mine told me this story of a
00:51:53
Speaker
some people on an African safari and they they stopped by this tribe and there's somebody that came up to the
00:52:02
Speaker
the vehicle, and they're acting all out of line and whatnot. And somebody on the safari was like, oh, that must be the village shaman. From an anthropological point of view, the shaman very much sometimes will look schizophrenic or psychosis, maybe working in trans states, talking about spirit encounters, talking about interacting with nature and whatnot. And from the Western psychological world,
00:52:28
Speaker
All right, you're hearing auditory hallucinations, seeing things that aren't there. I mean, that is, you know, the definition of psychosis and schizophrenia. You know, so one of the villagers came up and said, Oh, no, he's just crazy. And I think it's just it's an important story to share that, you know, we really need to be careful.
00:52:49
Speaker
when approaching it and you know I don't always like that pathologizing language of you know this person's crazy this person has this disease or whatnot you know because sometimes people are going through those experiences and they necessarily don't feel that way you know there's lots of people that I worked with that you know wouldn't really
00:53:11
Speaker
attached to that label as having psychosis, even though they were having very extreme experiences. For some reason, it gave me more hope to say, you're going through something very deep and profound and if you're willing to work with it and if we can create that container for it,
00:53:31
Speaker
I feel like you can get on the other side versus creating kind of this more pathologizing language that maybe gives somebody a life sentence of a disease that may or may not exist.
00:53:45
Speaker
I love what you guys with Joe are doing at Psychedelics today. I love the podcast and I've listened to dozens of episodes, some of them multiple times. Thank you. I want to thank you for the work you're doing. What's on the horizons for you, not just with Psychedelics today, but any other projects coming down the pipeline?
00:54:12
Speaker
Oh, man, there's so many different things. And it's so hard to keep track of everything, especially as the psychedelic space is continuing to grow. But yeah, the psychedelics today, and we're really focusing on a lot of education, we have a course for clinicians and therapists, just to kind of get some psychedelic literacy, just to maybe understand
00:54:31
Speaker
These states and you know if you have clients coming and disclosing you know these conversations and you know their use how to support them in that and without trying to say this is terrible you know how can we really support people.
00:54:47
Speaker
And so, yeah, just working on a lot of different education. I was just working on a young and psychedelics course, wrapped up a course a few months ago that was really fun to put together with Dr. Edo Cohen about psychedelics in the shadow and got a philosophy course, an introduction to philosophy and psychedelics course in the pipeline. So really just working on the education and then personally moving more into therapy. So just
00:55:16
Speaker
trying to move into that. Some of all that got paused once COVID hit and dealing with just the state boards and stuff like that. So yeah, I'm hoping to move more into that world pretty soon. So being able to offer support to people. So you'll be working with one-to-one clients, this kind of thing, online and
00:55:37
Speaker
Yeah. One-to-one clients online, um, in person when that feels safe. Uh, and you know, hopefully, uh, in the future, psychedelic medicines. Um, I was hoping to do a little bit of ketamine and psycho assisted therapy. Some of that got put on pause, but, um, you know, I think it's, it's definitely in the pipeline in the future. So I'm going to start working towards that, that path, which I'm excited for. You mean, you mean to become a therapist, uh, to help folks with ketamine assisted therapy? Is it?
00:56:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So being a therapist and the client would get a dose of ketamine to help them process whatever's going on and then do the therapy aspect. So helping them integrate their experience and make sense of it and work through it. So that's part of my goal. It's always been my goal ever since I got into a lot of this stuff at 19. I always wanted to be a psychedelic therapist. And when I started to go to school for all this stuff,
00:56:35
Speaker
Um, you know, I really thought it was really, really far off, but, um, you know, now it seems to be more of a reality than ever. And, you know, there's lots of different avenues to go down nowadays and we have legal tools now.
00:56:49
Speaker
Ketamine is legal and does have some psychedelic effects, transpersonal, even though it falls outside the scope of traditional psychedelic. But some of the clinical research suggests that it can be really effective with some forms of depression and suicidal ideation. So really thinking of these as tools and how can we best serve clients if they're appropriate for that type of therapy.
00:57:19
Speaker
So yeah, I'm excited to see how the field unfolds in the next few years. I mean, everything's happening so quickly. It's a lot to keep track of, but exciting. It is, it is, it is. Well, Kyle, I suppose unless you have anything else to add to the conversation, I know I may have omitted something you want to talk about. Maybe you could tell folks where they can find you, your work, your blogs and everything.
00:57:49
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, if you want to follow us at Psychedelics Today, that's psychedelicstoday.com. And then we're on most podcast platforms, Google Podcasts, Apple, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you listen to podcasts. So check that out. And if you're interested in learning about the psychedelic field, we have
00:58:09
Speaker
Two episodes a week usually one an interview and one kind of like a dialogue between Joe and I just kind of processing what's happening in the space and kind of Yeah, doing an analysis of what's going on. And then if you want to follow some of my personal journey That's over at setting Sun wellness calm and then same on Instagram and all the social handles. So that's setting Sun wellness so
00:58:32
Speaker
Awesome. We're going to have all those links in there. Yeah. Listen, once again, Kyle, it was, first of all, it was great to hear your story. The, you know, I had heard a little bit of your story with the near death experience on some of the podcasts, but you know, you don't talk much about that. So it was actually a pretty powerful kind of the way you described. It was pretty, pretty damn powerful. So.
00:58:58
Speaker
Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for opening up with the listeners. Once again, thank you so much for the work you're doing with Joe at Psychedelics today. I highly encourage anyone listening if you're interested in this field. It's one of the best resources out there to educate yourself. Thank you, Kyle, for spending the time with us today and best of luck with your projects in the future. Thanks so much for having me on, Christian. Appreciate it.
00:59:38
Speaker
for listening to Connecting Minds. We hope you enjoyed this conversation and found it interesting, illuminating, or inspiring. For episode show notes, links, and further information on our guests, please visit christianjordanov.com. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with someone who might also enjoy it. Thank you for being here.