Psychedelics vs Breathwork: Two Paths, One Inner Exploration

Many people seeking personal growth, emotional healing, or deeper states of consciousness find themselves choosing between different modalities: psychedelics, breathwork, meditation, somatic practices, and more. In a candid and grounded conversation, host Sam Believ talks with Kyle Buller, a somatic therapist and guide, about how psychedelics and breathwork compare — not as competitors, but as complementary tools that access the inner world in powerful yet distinct ways.

Their discussion doesn’t simplify the topic or pit one method against the other. Instead, it explores how each approach can open different doors in the landscape of human experience, offering insight into how we heal, expand, and integrate.

Two Approaches — Same Destination?

At first glance, psychedelics and breathwork may seem like very different disciplines. Psychedelics involve ingesting a substance that alters consciousness. Breathwork uses intentional breathing patterns to shift physiology and mental states. But Kyle suggests that both approaches alter states of consciousness by influencing the nervous system — each in a different language.

Psychedelics can break habitual mental loops, dissolve self-barriers, and catalyze non-ordinary experiences that feel mystical or symbolic. Breathwork, on the other hand, changes our internal chemistry through oxygenation, nervous system regulation, and embodied awareness. Both can reveal unconscious material, suppressed emotion, and somatic patterns — but they often feel different in mechanism.

Breathwork as Self-Generated Altered State

Kyle emphasizes that breathwork is a way to use your own physiology to enter expanded states. Intentional breathing — especially circular or connected breath patterns — can shift carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, stimulate the vagus nerve, and move the nervous system from fight-or-flight to parasympathetic regulation. This shift can foster emotional release, energetic opening, and non-ordinary experiences similar to those that occur under psychedelics.

One of the remarkable aspects of breathwork is its accessibility. It doesn’t require ingestion of a substance, a ceremonial container, or specialized legal contexts. A trained facilitator and a safe physical environment can be enough to guide someone through deep inner openings. The experience can surface old memory, suppressed tension, breath-held emotion, or unconscious material that has been locked away.

In many cases, breathwork encourages individuals to own the process — the altered state arises from within, not from something consumed. This can create a profound sense of agency, embodiment, and self-trust.

Psychedelics as Catalysts for New Perspectives

By contrast, psychedelics often act as catalysts — substances that temporarily shift neural pathways, quiet the default mode network, and allow unusual combinations of memory, emotion, and sensation to surface. People report symbolic vision, ego dissolution, emotional purge, and encounter with unconscious material in ways that feel profound, symbolic, and sometimes ineffable.

Kyle and Sam explore how psychedelics can create an opening where old patterns, long hidden, become visible without the usual defenses. This can lead to deep insights, relational healing, or spiritual experiences that feel transformational. However, psychedelics also require contextual support: preparation, ceremonial container, facilitation, and integration afterward, because the experiences can be intense and disorienting if not guided carefully.

In short: breathwork generates altered states from within the body; psychedelics alter states from a pharmacological shift that then interacts with body, psyche, emotion, and memory.

Somatic Experience and Emotional Release

A major area of overlap between breathwork and psychedelics is somatic release. Kyle explains that both modalities can reveal stored, unconscious emotion — not just in memory or cognitive narrative, but in the body. Long-held tension, suppressed rage, grief without outlet — these can appear in somatic form during both breathwork and psychedelic sessions.

For breathwork, the body itself becomes the gateway: breath initiates movement, shake, tremor, emotion, and release. For psychedelics, the medicine loosens internal boundaries and allows somatic layers to surface, often accompanied by emotional memory or symbolic imagery.

Both approaches, therefore, honor the idea that emotional wounds are not only in the mind, but in the body — embedded in held posture, nervous system tension, and habitual breath patterns.

Safety, Integration, and Context

Kyle stresses that neither breathwork nor psychedelics should be treated as trivial tools or quick fixes. Both can bring up intense emotion, old trauma, or deep psychological content. Without a safe container — whether a trained facilitator, proper support, or post-session integration — these experiences can be overwhelming.

Integration is a big theme in their conversation. For breathwork, integration often involves grounding practices, reflection, somatic awareness, and community support. For psychedelics, the integration phase may include therapy, journaling, lifestyle change, ritual, and emotional processing over time.

Both modalities benefit from aftercare — not simply “absorbing the experience,” but weaving it into daily life behavior, relationships, emotional awareness, and self-care.

Choosing a Path — Or Using Both

Kyle and Sam agree that breathwork and psychedelics don’t have to be exclusive options. For some people, breathwork is an ongoing, accessible practice that can be done regularly; for others, psychedelics become occasional deep dives into the unconscious. Some people use both — breathwork to build embodied awareness and nervous system regulation, psychedelics to catalyze deep insight or emotional release.

In this sense, the two approaches can complement one another: breathwork primes the nervous system, supports emotional release in daily life, and builds resilience. Psychedelics open deep doors that can be anchored through breathwork afterward.

The Nervous System as the Bridge

At the heart of their discussion is the idea that healing and transformation are fundamentally nervous-system processes. Whether through intentional breathing or plant medicine, both approaches influence the autonomic nervous system — how we respond to stress, fear, memory, attachment, and regulation.

When the nervous system is regulated, a person can experience calm, clarity, emotional presence, and embodied awareness. When it is dysregulated, the body goes into survival mode — hypervigilance, inflammation, panic, avoidance, numbness, emotional shut-down.

Both breathwork and psychedelics create opportunities for the nervous system to shift out of habitual patterns and restructure — to feel safety, rather than just think it. This, according to Kyle, is where real transformation begins: not in conceptual insight, but in somatic recalibration.

Final Reflection: Different Roads, Same Landscape

The conversation does not suggest that one method is “better” than the other. Instead, it recognizes two distinct entry points into the internal landscape:

• Breathwork — an embodied, self-generated path that harnesses physiology for altered states and emotional release.

• Psychedelics — a substance-mediated path that catalyzes unconscious material and alters neural pathways.

Both explore the same territory — inner patterns, emotional memory, somatic experience, and self-understanding. The map is the same; the roads are different.

For seekers, healers, therapists, or anyone curious about inner experience, this perspective invites respect for multiple tools. Some people may start with breathwork and later explore psychedelics; others may use breathwork as integration after psychedelic sessions. Either way, the journey is about presence, awareness, and relationship to self — in body, mind, and emotion.

In the end, transformation isn’t about choosing a single method. It’s about honoring the depth of inner experience, the complexity of human emotion, and the power of intentional practice — whether breath, medicine, or both — to bring unconscious truth into awareness.

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Based on the Ayahuasca Podcast episode “Psychedelics vs Breathwork” with Sam Believ and Kyle Buller.