Photographed by Aart Verrips
In Shamanic Breathing, you uncover worlds that exist within your spirit.
In densely packed forests, plants communicate with one another. If one plant isn’t receiving the sunlight it needs, another can send it nutrients via thread-like filaments that connect them underground. This phenomenon is called a mycorrhizal network, and it’s a smaller scale example of how Malou Araneta, an ordained shamanic minister and the founder of Sama Well-being, wants me to start perceiving the world.
“In the infinite universe, we are all connected,” she tells me in an introduction to the shamanic breathing session I was in for today. “There’s one energy that we connect with. The air we breathe is what the plant releases, and the air we release is what the plant breathes.”
We sit cross-legged across one another on floor cushions. The space between us is occupied by a spread of face-down cards and what seemed to be an altar. On top of a tapestry depicting the colors and symbols of the seven chakras, there is a neat display of spirited objects: a cluster of crystals, a single feather, a candle, and Agua de Florida, each representing one of the four elements. She later tells me that these are “medicine items” that comprise a shamanic mesa, tools activated in ceremony to support a healing journey.
On my side of the room, I had the items I was told to bring with me: an eyemask, a water bottle, a notepad, and art supplies. These will be used in an “integration” process following the breathwork. Every session is different, so Malou often encourages her clients to document what they saw, heard, and felt immediately after.
Shamanic breathwork is a powerful technique that uses connected cyclical breathing, she starts. “It consists of inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. There are no pauses between the breaths.” This is done with your back flush against the mat and the eyes covered, “so that you can go deeper into your state of consciousness.” It has been an ancient healing practice used in the rituals of groups identified as shamans throughout North Asia and South America. “They breathe, chant, dance around the fire,” Malou narrates. “They gather together so that they can go into an altered state of awareness.”
The trance-like state is achieved through controlling the breath for periods at a time. This activates the eye-shaped gland that resides at the center of the brain, called the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate rapidly and release a natural chemical called Dimethyltryptamine or DMT, the same chemical that allows us to lucid dream in REM sleep.
In this state, you can connect to source, whether you’d define that as God, Allah, Buddha, or a loved one. You may even encounter a spirit animal. “Sometimes you see them very vividly, or it’s just the eyes, or the color,” she elaborates. “But I want you to embody them. When you connect with the spirit animal, you can run with them. You can swim with them. You can fly with them if you wanted to.”
“Who you think you are is not actually what the universe thinks of who you are.”
At this point, Malou clarifies that shamanism isn’t a religion. “It’s a universal practice. This will help you to be connected with Mother Earth.” You might associate shamanic breathwork with the beliefs prana or chi, or even the indigenous Filipino concept of ginhawa: that breath is “synonymous with life,” as defined by the pioneering scholar in Filipino philosophy Leonardo H. Mercado. It is one’s life force. “When the ginhawa is cut,” he writes, “so is life.”
Before the session, she lists a few side effects that may occur throughout: lightheadedness, numbness in the jaw, hands, and feet, vibrations that travel through the body. She demonstrates my least favorite, “the lobster claw.” Malou laughs when my eyes go wide. “Please don’t be afraid. It’s part of the process,” she assures. “When you breathe normally, it’s very shallow. [During the session], you’ll be hyperoxygenating your body and your brain. Our bodies are not used to breathing like this.”
With that, I readily lie down on my mat and cover my eyes. If not for this wellness series, I would still be open to this experience; I was eager to learn, through what I know to be an unconscious, mechanical act, what aspects of my physical self or my spirit needed healing.
The next time I hear Malou’s voice, it’s deeper, and almost guttural. “Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. Connected cyclical breathing,” it rings. She pounds rhythmically on a hand-held shamanic instrument, the “mother drum,” which is attuned to a human heartbeat, to “remind us of the primal rhythm of life.”
She guides me in visualizing a glowing orb of golden light directly above me. In my mind’s eye, it moves through each of my chakras, growing larger and larger until it sputters and pours, bathing over me whole. As fast-paced, chakra-attuned music booms through the speakers, I struggle to keep up with the pace of my own suspiration. At approximately 15 minutes in, the left side of my face is numb, and my fingers have uncontrollably twitched to an inadvertent mudra. I was almost overwhelmed, but my curiosity felt larger than my fear.
Soon my acute awareness began to dissipate between the noise, and I slipped further into vivid visions of endless blue sky. Clouds rippled between my fingertips as I was carried on an unknown wind. I don’t know how long I stayed there for, falling and flying in sporadic sprints, unburdened by fear or a set destination.
Malou’s voice interrupts my long dream: “Breathe.” When I come back to my senses, I find new impressions projected on the back of my eyelids: a pulsing pinkish light with tinges of yellow and orange. Before long, I’m prompted to gently stir my body awake, and with slow movements, I push myself upright and move toward the end of my mat. Fully conscious now, I felt an unbelievable lightness. Without thinking, I rub up and down my shoulders, as a way of assuring myself I still had a body.
Malou then tells me to think of an animal that resonates with my spirit. “Probably a cat,” I keep to myself. Quiet yet curious. She asks me to pick a card from the pile in front of me, explaining that it may align with the spirit animal that accompanied me on my journey. I turn it over and it shows me the phoenix, which symbolizes the first chakra, or the root. I’m stunned because it resonated. When I tell her this, she only smiles. “Who you think you are is not actually what the universe thinks of who you are.”
To breathe is an unconscious, mechanical act. But tap into it, and it can act as a gate like any other. Malou expands, “The breath will meet you where you are and take you exactly where you need to go.”
“The breath is a bridge between the conscious and unconscious, the past and present, the Earth and Spirit realms,” she continues. “Shamanic breathwork is a sacred remembering. It’s not about learning something new, it’s about peeling back the layers that have kept us from our true selves.”
When I leave the session, I don’t feel any different. But now that I’ve met my psyche, I felt I took away a roadmap of sorts. Now, I felt sure of two new understandings: that I breathe in time with the earth, and that the way forward is in.
