Guest: Kylea Taylor
Recorded: July 2025
Every moment, without thinking about it, we breathe. But hidden inside this seemingly unconscious rhythm is a mysterious portal, an almost forgotten technology of healing and limitless transformation.
Long before we had access to talk therapy, trauma informed coaching or psychedelics, humans knew how to use breath to transition into altered states of consciousness. Shamans, monks, mystics, they all knew, how to tune into something magical, something most of us in our contemporary society ignore or simply are unable to see.
From an evolutionary perspective it’s possible that this hidden capacity played an important adaptive purpose. It helped humans cope with trauma in communal rituals or individual healing. At times when used properly it provided incredible visionary insight or symbolic resolution without needing any external substances at all. History books are full of examples of different cultures all over the world using rhythm and breath in rites of passage, different grief rituals and conflict resolutions long before modern psychology or pharmacology ever existed.
In the 1970s, a Czech psychiatrist named Stanislav Grof, banned from using LSD in therapy as the drug was shut down due to legal restrictions, turned to the breath discovering that this built in system when used in a specific manner can rival the incredible therapeutic and powerful effects of psychedelics. He called this modality Holotropic Breathwork®. Holotropic meaning moving towards wholeness. The science behind this way of inducing an altered state of consciousness is relatively simple to understand. By deliberately over-breathing in a deep and rapid manner, the patient or the subject will induce a state which mimics stress – but it will be done in a controlled way, which allows repressed material, repressed memories, all kinds of traumas and deeply hidden symbols to come to the surface. Once there on the surface this repressed material can be analysed, transformed and integrated, similar to what happens in dreams or different psychedelic states.
A lot of people who have tried Holotropic Breathwork® will attest that these altered states resemble those induced by LSD, psilocybin, DMT and will allow you to experience serious time dilation, complete ego dissolution, incredible visions, deep catharsis and rebirth as well as incredible sense of unity with the universe and connection to the divine. Truly magical tool of the unconscious to heal and reorganize itself when accessed safely. In a holotropic state, you are not just analyzing your problems. You are experiencing and resolving them through the body, psyche, and your soul.
In this episode I’ll be discussing this and other adjecent matters with wonderful Kylea Taylor. Kylea is a California based and licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She started studying with Stanislav and Christina Grof in 1984 and was certified by them as a Holotropic Breathwork® practitioner in 1990. She worked with Stanislav Grof as a Senior Trainer in the Grof Transpersonal Training throughout the 1990s, facilitating and observing 1000s of extra-ordinary state of consciousness sessions. Throughout her career she observed that traditional codes of ethics didn’t adequately address the altered states of consciousness that arise in breathwork and psychedelic-assisted therapy and this led her to develop Inner Ethics®—a self-reflective, self-compassionate, practitioner-centered approach to ethical care.
Links and interview references:
Kylea Taylor’s Books at Hanfordmead.com - https://hanfordmead.com/product-category/authors/kylea-taylor/
Kylea Taylor’s Books - Amazon
GV Freeman’s Psychedelic Safety Wheel
