On average, humans take around 20,000 breaths a day, with many being automatic. Becoming more mindful of the breath, such as by practicing breathwork can offer many benefits, including for your plant medicine ceremony preparation, experience, and integration. So, how can you combine breathwork and plant medicine?
The origins of breathwork span back to the origins of yoga in India with pranayama, and in more recent decades, different breathwork practices have emerged, with breathwork now being a beneficial practice for people around the world. Plant medicine preparation includes following dieta guidelines and being mindful of what you’re consuming mentally, such as limiting screen time. However, something that is often overlooked, is how you can work with your breath.
Vanessa, our retreat yoga instructor, has over 1500 hours of study, from YTTs to a Pranayama master program and beyond (learn more about her here). So, we sat down with her to discuss the healing benefits of pranayama for plant medicine preparation, ceremony, and integration.
Breathwork and Pranayama: Is There a Difference?
I would describe breathwork in a broad sense. There are many benefits to breathwork, as you can see with Wim Hof and these other techniques. I would say one of the main differences between pranayama and breathwork is that breathwork has general benefits, which are not as specific as pranayama.
For example, breathwork can offer benefits such as increased lung capacity and benefits for general organs. Whereas with pranayama it is the concentration of prana, also known as life force. So, pranayama work is generally a lot more specific.
I have more experience with the specifics of pranayama, so I can say the main difference with pranayama is the whole goal is to reach meditation, which is why we practice it.
What Is Pranayama and Its Benefits?
We break the pranayama breath into five main components, with each component having a different benefit. These are:
- General life force, which brings more vibrancy
- Illumination, helping with anything you want to let go
- Regulating the system, which helps reconnect all your systems
- Working the network system, which reconnects all pathways in the body
- And then you can elevate the consciousness with pranayama.
So pranayama is another form of healing. You can have a specific objective with your pranayama breathwork, and there is a general script that we follow to help you prepare for the next stage of your yoga practice: meditation.
So, like in a plant medicine ceremony, we start with purification. We first clear out, before working on components such as reconnecting the system. So, you start with breathwork for purification, then you can work on opening up, with active pranayama exercises. You then eventually reach calming and slowing pranayama exercises, in preparation for meditation.
Practising Pranayama for Plant Medicine Preparation
It is important to prepare for a plant medicine ceremony by focusing on your physical body, so you can sit comfortably. Yoga asanas help ensure our body is ready for a plant medicine ceremony, so we can sit in the ceremony space. However, it is also important to prepare emotionally and energetically for a plant medicine ceremony.
We need to think of the body as a whole system, so along with the outer structure; the physical, we also have the interior. If we haven’t worked with pranayama or we don’t understand that we can work on different parts of our internal body consciously, it can be overwhelming.
We can work on parts of the body consciously with the breath and this is similar to what can happen with a master plant such as Ayahuasca. The master plant can start to go through the body and find the areas that need more alignment and areas where you need to let go. So, if you haven’t had any work with breathwork before the ceremony, it can feel overwhelming as you begin to recognize the body has different areas.
A Deep Breath Changes Everything
When we come into a plant medicine ceremony with a bit of pranayama practice, it is not so overwhelming when we navigate the plant medicine. It doesn’t have to be years of breathwork or pranayama practice. It is more about having a conscious awareness of the breath and its ability, which we work on during Ayllu Medicina retreats with our daily yoga classes.
We often say to come back to your breath when navigating difficult parts of a plant medicine ceremony. Sometimes a deep breath can completely change your experience and make it okay. How do we teach kids to start to regulate? How we teach kids to regulate is through the breath. Once we learn we can take a full deep breath into the belly we can begin to fully regulate in everyday life and in a plant medicine ceremony.
Breathwork and Ayahuasca Connection
We do not work on breathwork during ceremonies, but the preparation in our morning yoga classes and workshops helps significantly. We can begin to see how working through the parts of the body helps us find alignment and harmony. In Ayahuasca, we often speak of surrender – just surrender to the experience.
When we have done breathwork exercises, it can make this letting go easier because you have worked your interior body consciously as part of your daily practice.
Breathwork and San Pedro Connection
With San Pedro, the breath work helps with alignment because we are aware and have the ability to navigate the experience as we do with breathwork. However, the nervous system is firing, so it can also be easier to get dysregulated. This is similar to our modern daily lives when we are exposed to stress and conflict, which can lead to deregulation.
Having breathwork techniques helps you consciously calm your nervous system and take control. Over time, this practice can also help raise your nervous system’s resting point.
This means you no longer get triggered, say for example when someone says something in passing. It will take a lot more for you to become deregulated.
This is one of the benefits of breathwork and the sacred master plants such as San Pedro. They are helping us develop skills to navigate daily life from our center, which lasts not only in ceremony but forever in our lives.
When we speak about the connection between plant medicine and pranayama, we do not mean we will be doing both at once, although the mindfulness of the breath is great in ceremony! On our plant medicine retreats in Ecuador they are powerful complementary modalities that support each other.
Breathwork Exercises to Prepare for a Plant Medicine Ceremony
Along with preparing your diet to help clear out the body, and help processing systems, the digestion, and your brain, it is important to start having moments of stillness or quiet time.
If you do not have a pranayama practice or you do not have a teacher, start by working with the abdominal breath, which is one of the most powerful and simple beginner pranayama exercises. This pranayama exercise can help insomnia, chronic stress, and all the autonomic systems in the body.
Pranayama Tips
For this exercise, you can lie on the ground:
- Place your hands on your belly.
- When you inhale, feel your stomach rise
- On the exhale, feel the pause and release.
You can do ten minutes of abdominal breathing every day first thing in the morning or in the evening before bed.
Often we think of simple breathing exercises as not so efficient. However, if this is your capacity it is better to have this consistency, instead of occasionally doing a different pranayama exercise. It is important to have a point in our day to recap through our breath, allowing everything to come back into place to go forward in presence.
We think of yoga as a complicated or long practice. Ancient yogis spoke of as little amount of investment for the most amount of gain. So, if you are practicing fully present and consciously, with the breath too, a 20-minute morning practice means you are good for the whole day. I think it goes back to being present and aware, which ceremony also shows- after all, you can’t multitask in a ceremony.
If you want to go deeper, you can then find teachers or contact Ayllu Medicina and attend one of our retreats.
Breathwork for Plant Medicine Integration
Plant medicine integration is essential because everything is getting moved in a ceremony. Everything is energy and often in plant medicine ceremonies stagnant energy is getting moved, sometimes this includes past generational stagnation that has been passed on.
Pranayama can be an important integration tool to help consciously direct the breath and manage integration. With a pranayama practice, you are taking the energy that is moving and helping release what is no longer serving you. You do not need to consciously do this by going through stories or trauma, it is naturally being released through the purification breathwork exercises.
Pranayama and Plant Medicine: The Long-Term Benefits
You can then work on vitality, once you have made more space with the first pranayama exercises. What the breathwork exercises are doing is healing the internal body. They regulate the autonomic systems, the samskaras- our behavioral patterns. The exercises also help with pranasyedam vashe sarvam, which means releasing the filters over our eyes, to see with clarity.
We can have stories in our minds about how things happen in life. With plant medicine integration these stories often do not serve us anymore and our perspective begins to change. Pranayama can help us gain the full potential of healing with plant medicine experiences.
It makes it not just about the experience of the ceremony. It is also taking the experience and integrating it, moving it fully through the whole self, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
And then, the breathwork also helps you stay clutter-free. We do not need to just have the clear out from the plant medicine ceremony and wait for it to build up again, wait for it to fill. Instead, using breathwork and other practices, we can start to go deeper, continue to grow, and maintain clarity.
Women’s Retreat Breathwork and Yoga
As women, we are brought into this way of defragmenting ourselves. For example, we’ve separated from our cycles, from our feminine part of ourselves, to function in the male-dominated energy, which can serve us at some points. However, more and more we are realizing we are missing out and there are more parts of ourselves to explore.
The beautiful thing about the Ayllu Medicina Women’s Power Plant Medicine and Yoga Retreat is we are coming back to the basis of who we are, coming back to the empowerment of our moons, the fluctuations in our hormones, understanding our cycles, our energy, and learning how to compliment our breathwork and yoga practice for this.
Yoga and Breathwork for Our Cyclical Nature
The strong Ashtanga practice was meant for men, as they have a consistent flow of hormones. As women, we have to realize it is okay to change our practice throughout our month to reflect where we are in our cycles, with our changing energy levels and our moon. This is what I’ve been learning- how to shift the practice, which I will be sharing at the Women’s retreat.
Our moon cycle underlines everything. We do not want to go against the flow of our moon, including with our breathwork. For example, during our moon time, we do not want to do strong, active, cleansing breathwork, as this process is already happening internally within us with our moon. So it is too much to also do this breathwork, similar to how it would be to enter the sweat lodge on our first days of our moon with the heat.
During the Women’s retreat, we will be understanding how the external and internal environments reflect and how to bring both into harmony. This way we can stop being so rigid, instead recognizing fluctuations and allowing flow to happen, which means there’s also more flow in life.
Breathwork at Ayllu Medicina Plant Medicine Retreats in Ecuador
There are many tools that can help with plant medicine preparation, integration, and during the ceremony. Many of these tools are also important for the ceremony of life, which continues after you leave a plant medicine retreat or ceremony.
Learning more about breathwork and becoming conscious of your breath is one of the tools that can help you physically, spiritually, and emotionally. We are fortunate to have Vanessa on our Ayllu Medicina team to learn more about the practice of pranayama.
Get started with your breathwork on the Otra Ola Youtube channel, with this video by Vanessa. You can also visit Vanessa in Ayampe at Otra Ola, with their Prana Health Food Store, surf classes, yoga, Spanish classes, and other events.
During our Ayllu Medicina transformational retreats, there is daily yoga, meditation, and breathwork. During our Women’s retreat, there will also be a focus on the complementary healing modalities of yoga and pranayama. There are several spaces available, so if you feel called to join us reach out!
One of our team will be happy to answer any questions you have or schedule a call. You can learn more about all our Ayllu Medicina retreats here.
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