Ep 36. The Cacao Cacophony: Full Episode Release

Re-released in full: my unfiltered story of breathwork gone bad, and what it says about the culture of wellness. A lot of folks told me this one really hit home, so I’m bringing it out into the world in full. 

Now, I adore cacao. I drink it often, and I respect its nourishing, heart-opening qualities. But this is the story of a breathwork retreat that unravelled from "healing" into the utterly unhinged - sensory overload, unsafe practices, a roomful of people desperate to feel something, and facilitators hell-bent on claiming the mantle of "spiritual guru."

Since first telling this story, I’ve learned more about breathwork traditions and the practices these facilitators were trying to emulate. But delivered without skill or safety, it left people overwhelmed and at risk. And I’ve since heard from so many others with similar experiences... which is why I’m re-releasing it here.

For me, this retreat was just one messy branch of a wider wellness culture that ties worthiness to suffering, restriction, or chasing intensity. The same culture that so often overlaps with disordered eating.

✨ If you’re a naturopath or natural health practitioner who wants to spot these overlaps in your own clients, grab my free guide: Disordered Eating for Naturopaths. 

LINKS:

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Casey's Instagram: @funky.forest.health

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Hello, I'm Casey and I'd just like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land from which I'm recording today, the Djinnahburra and Gubbi Gubbi people of the Sunshine Coast hinterland and pay my respects to elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded. Now, this week's episode is a little different. I've been working away on a new article and that will come out soon, but I've also promised myself I'd keep the podcast flowing at a steady rhythm of one episode every two-ish weeks. To give myself a break I've also finally put out a downloadable practitioner guide for naturopaths but any natural or holistic health practitioner interested or currently working with clients with disordered eating. So that came out yesterday and I've had some really lovely feedback about it already which is really really cool but basically I've been fucking busy so while I take a breath uh to polish off this article that I'm currently working on I thought I'd just share something from the archives so this episode was originally a Patreon only bonus way back when I released a teaser as I think it was episode 30 which would have been like three-ish years ago because I took that break um And quite a few listeners told me that it was one of their favorites, which is really cool. But not everyone signed up for the Patreon, which was like a couple of dollars, I think, and for whatever reason. So they may or may not have been able to listen to the whole episode. So I've decided to bring the full thing out into the light. And I'm there's some good stuff there and because I do a million things at once I am guessing this is not the first time this will happen so yeah anyway this episode it's a bit of a ride it's all about the desperation in some corners of the wellness world to feel something like literally anything in order to feel valid or spiritual or whatever and how that can lead to sensory overload and some pretty unsafe dynamics, kind of like the ones I experienced at a certain breathwork retreat, which is what this episode is about. Since I first released this episode a few years ago, I've actually learned more about breathwork and the practices that the facilitators were attempting to emulate. But honestly, I still believe that these guys deliver it in a really kind of unskilled and unsafe and over the top way and I've since heard from a lot of other people with similar stories which is exactly why I wanted to re-release it here so with that context in mind enjoy this wild little detour from our usual series on disordered eating in the naturopathy space which I've still got one or two episodes more to do after the last one it's a fun listen I think you will get hopefully something out of it or at least something you know to chew on and I'll mention this again at the end but in case you disappear I just want to let you know that my upcoming book course Disordered Eating for Naturopaths the wait list is open and when you sign up for it on my website you will get the free practitioner guide for working with clients with disordered eating as a natural Anyway, enjoy the episode. The cacao cacophony, deconstructing a pseudo-spiritual experience. What do you get when you combine a cacao ceremony, hypoxia-inducing breathwork, a bunch of influences from pretty disparate spiritual cultures, partner yoga with intrusive eye gazing, and really loud music? All that culturally appropriated Quote, Quote, Macbeth in Macbeth by William Shakespeare, circa 1606. I'm lying in the middle of a Nag Champa-centred earthquake. There is music playing, first a Sanskrit mantra on repeat, then Tibetan throat singing overlaid by what sounds like a woman chanting in Buddhist mantras. The music is playing at such a high volume that the floor vibrates. An enormous Chinese gong suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room is being hit intermittently by one of the two facilitators of this retreat. It is so deeply resonant that it sends shockwaves through my brain. The second facilitator walks around the room shaking an Aboriginal rainmaker instrument over the tops of the 30-odd participants' heads. I'm lying on the floor and my eyes are closed. I can't imagine adding yet another sensory input to the auditory and physical overload I'm currently experiencing. But there's more. The main instructor is repeating his initial verbiage over and over again. He's encouraging us to, quote, trust the process, push past the mind. You didn't come here just to lie down. Allow the healing cycle to complete. Find the truth. Around me are the sounds of people in multiple forms of distress. Some are openly weeping. Quite a few are breathing in and out, really hard, long after I have stopped following the breathwork instructions given to us at the beginning of the retreat. I open my eyes to get a peek of the room. The woman next to me is shaking her legs about frantically, which, to be honest, I also feel like doing, but free movement was not in included in the instructions and I'm trying to have as authentic an experience as I can by following these instructions. When Shakespeare wrote those words all those years ago, maybe he was prophetically describing the modern spiritual experience. A mishmash of intense breathwork marketed as healing, blatant cultural misappropriation, intrusive eye gazing, a shit ton of feathers and crystals, and And vegan cacao so strong that its stimulant effect is openly applauded, said the instructor I was talking about before. You won't get high like mushrooms, but you'll feel a buzz. Feeling stuff. It's what we're going for here, right? There's a desperate fury to this cacophony of sound and sensation. Such an effort to create the kind of experience where we feel enriched by something unique, such effort to feel spiritual or to feel anything at all. Forty minutes ago when this cacophony started, we were given instructions on a form of breathwork I had heard about but never practiced formally called transformational breathwork. The pitch is this. Transformational breathwork has the power to heal deep-seated conditioning and trauma. It is a form of Sounds good, if not a bit over-promising. I recognize all of these signs from one other incident in my life, the time that I had a severe panic attack. I realized pretty quickly that this time, rather than involuntarily hyperventilating, I was purposely inducing hypoxia through this poorly supervised breath work. I did push on a little bit past my comfort zone as a facilitator vehemently recommended, but I strongly felt it wasn't in my best interest to continue A panic attack or an asthma attack would probably ensue. So without fear or panic, I gently returned to a form of gentle, slow and deep pranayama that I learnt years before from my teachers and soon enough my hands unclenched and the symptoms of hypoxia subsided. But apparently by interrupting the cycle of healing, I was running away from doing my deep inner work. I've taught yoga for 15 years and luckily I did have the tools I needed to bring my nervous system back to a more regulated and relaxed state, despite the ridiculous things that were being said about this kind of work. However, someone else with a history of panic attacks, anxiety disorders or any number of high-risk health issues may not have been so lucky. Transformational breath work or rebirth breathwork, as it was also pitched, are really, I think, just wellness guru takes on holotropic breathwork. The instructions were to breathe in actively and let the exhalation happen normally. The brief demonstration struck me as fast and hard breathing, similar to bastrika or bellows breathing in yogic pranayama. I've never done that kind of breathing for more than a minute or two. And here we were, being told to do it for well over an hour. Let me backtrack and just add another layer of context to this story. It was I think maybe October of 2021 and it was my last day of work as a veterinarian. A few days earlier I had woken in the morning with crystal clear clarity that it was time to leave that field of work. Ten minutes, ten months earlier the official ending of my marriage and a need to figure out how to pay my ex out for the property had coincided with a serendipitous offer to go back to working as a vet and I said yes to the opportunity. I needed the money. Self-employment as a nutritionist, yoga teacher and occasional freelance writer is unpredictable at best. Given the amplified chaos around me and suddenly finding myself as a single mum of two small children, for the first time in my life I really craved having a stable income, a security blanket. I worked as a vet for the next eight months or so in any spare time I had, which pretty much squeezed out my yoga classes that I was teaching and I also had to drop most of my nutrition counseling clients. By the end of it, I was exhausted and I knew it had to go. I knew I had to go back to doing the things that my heart called out for. As a parting gift, one of the lovely vet nurses offered me her ticket to what was marketed as a rejuvenating retreat. Although her friends had booked for her and she didn't have many details beyond that, she couldn't attend because she was working on the day. I graciously accepted. I need this, I thought. Years of having taught classes and retreats for others and I was struggling to remember the last time I actually attended one. I was really looking forward to a day of rejuvenation, relaxation and being a student of yoga again instead of a teacher. I didn't know anyone else who was going and that anonymity felt like a cozy cloak. I could just be me. Fast forward to the day of the retreat. I'm walking into the room and the first thing I notice when I do walk in to the retreat is the huge setup of instruments in the middle of the room. surrounded by crystals. I can smell palo santo and incense so strong that it's slightly aggravating to my newly asthmatic lungs. I developed asthma again early last year after nearly 30 years without it. A combination of dust mite allergy, mold sensitivity from the unusually wet weather we had had for the whole year and grief from the breakdown of my marriage. We started the retreat with a long meditation on each chakra. Although I sit up for the first chakra, I soon lie down. The male teacher is really verbose and we're going to be at this for a while. There is a lot of talking for meditation, like the dude really likes the sound of his own voice. After quite some time, we finally start to move with some yoga. This is my favourite part. It evolves into partner yoga and I invite the young woman behind me who seems slightly nervous to be my partner. It's her first time ever doing something like this, she says. I try to put her at ease with a few I feel weird about this too looks. The partner yoga ends with us pairing up, sitting face to face, hands together and gazing into each other's eyes as if we are lovers. Intrusive eye gazing is stock standard hippie shit. I don't like prolonged eye gazing unless It is with my actual lover, with my real partner. And even then, it can be quite confronting. It makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. And the push to do it that occurs in all kinds of yoga retreats and classes and partner yoga activities, it kind of feels like feigned connection. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way. But in the spirit of pushing past our comfort zone, quote unquote, here we were. um It's the spiritual equivalent to bungee jumping, except with way less consent. When it's finally over, I assure her that this was not an easy nor a natural thing to do for me. She seemed to relax then, but I still feel a little bit gross, like I've just violated a complete stranger's internal landscape with my gaze. A vegan muffin later and we begin the transformational breath work. The Spiel alone takes, again, what feels like fucking ages. This guy is selling it. He is talking it up. He is congratulating us for being here. He really believes in this, or at least he wants us to. I am intrigued, and I've set my intention to keep an open mind. We are given the brief instructions. There are no warnings about medical conditions, no assurance that we can stop at any time or move freely if we are so compelled. Just fervent encouragement to keep the deep breaths going and to push past any discomfort and fear that arises. I may as well be in a CrossFit class. The loud music then begins and soon I'm confined to a room of 30-something people breathing heavily. Of course, and this was kind of at the height of the COVID outbreaks in Queensland, Australia, but of course at this This retreat, there are no COVID precautions taken. The day before the retreat, in fact, I'd found a video online proudly posted on the facilitator's Facebook page detailing the week that their vegan cafe was visited by the police five times because of reports that their staff were not wearing masks. The footage showed the owner explaining to the cops that masks put her staff at risks of not getting enough oxygen and of initiating anxiety and panic attacks. kind of like their breathwork is doing right now. The music is a mishmash. Amplified music of Indian and Tibetan chanting, instruments from China, Indigenous Australia, Palo Santo smudge from South America and Nag Champa from India. Iconography from everywhere surrounds the room. From their website, this is what they describe as... contributing to the vibrational medicine aspect of the retreat quartz crystal bowls didgeridoo native american flute vocal toning in sanskrit are all ancient forms of sacred vibrational medicine said to calm the mind and tune the chakras energy centers of the body so let's put them all together on top of this culturally misappropriated cacophony the facilitator are talking. One is walking the room, reminding us to keep breathing deeply. Deep breaths, deep breaths, she keeps repeating. The main facilitator of the breathwork, the dude, is talking into the microphone, continuing the stream of verbal diarrhea that he's initiated from the start of this retreat. And it's all loosely centered around a few primary concepts. Namely, this is transformational breathwork. Trust the There's a lot of talk of programming and deconditioning. This stuff isn't entirely inaccurate and admittedly it appeals to the desire to want to shed this weighty stuff we're all carrying around. There's a lot of repetition of the catchphrases, cleanse, detox, purify, heal. Pretty stocked standard wellness lexicon. there's a lot of repetition of, if you start to feel uncomfortable tingling or fear or other uncomfortable emotions come up, keep pushing through it. It's just your mind or your ego wanting to stay in control. And my favorite, you didn't come here just to lie down. Well, actually, I did. I'm a tired single mum, y'all. And of course, it all ended with a kick cacao ceremony. Some people believe that it's unethical for non-Indigenous people to serve cacao in a spiritual context. And that's what's meant when people who don't have or appear not to have cacao in their cultural heritage sometimes get called out for cultural appropriation for hosting cacao ceremonies. However, many of these kinds of experiences are brought over and practiced by people not of the original culture which arguably allows more people to feel that they're safe in exploring something new and maybe this spreads awareness of many cultures we wouldn't be exposed to otherwise. Is this a positive and constructive way to reconnect a broken world? I don't know. I don't think that it's okay to take and desecrate elements of a culture that has already suffered so much and I mean in terms of cacao ceremonies you can't deny the fact that cacao has been a sacred part of the cultures of what we now call Central and South America for at least 3,000 years. There are hard records of it being consumed in a ritualistic manner and even treated as currency. Another fact that needs to be considered is that many of those parts of the world have suffered multiple kinds of pillaging and oppression for the last 500 years, firstly at the hands of Spanish conquistadors and currently by developed nations and their corporate influences. So is it okay that we take and incorporate into Western, dare I say, white culture these kinds of ceremonies? I think we need to consider if it's okay to explore Indigenous problems practices and practices and cultural beliefs um you know as long as that exchange is happening on an even playing field and I really we need the permission and consent from um the elders of that culture but how we even that playing field I don't have the answer to that question all I know is that I don't usually go to cacao ceremonies because it feels disingenuous to me and it's not actually part of my culture, my cultural heritage. I have my own cultural heritage, I'm half Chinese and I really feel comfortable and good about celebrating that. Anyway, let's move on to another part of this retreat day that I experienced, the holotropic breathwork. Holotropic breathwork first came out in the 1970s as a more intense intense form of meditation. It's a therapeutic breathing practice that's intended to help with emotional healing and personal growth and it's said to produce an altered state of consciousness. It's thought that the practice allows you to move beyond your body and ego and to get in touch with your true self and true spirit. It involves a combination of deep and rapid breathing, evocative music and focused body work to access non-ordinary states of conscious This work is done usually in a supportive environment with the assistance of highly trained facilitators. The process itself involves breathing at a fast rate for minutes to hours, which I can't even fathom because I felt so damn uncomfortable after doing it for 10 minutes. But I think that's maybe because it was so poorly facilitated. But this kind of breathing is apparently changes the balance between carbon dioxide and oxygen in your body you are guided through the exercise by ideally as i said someone who's trained in this emotional release modality holotropic breathwork may bring about intense emotions and painful memories that could worsen symptoms and because of this many professionals recommend that it be used in conjunction with ongoing therapy this gives you a chance to work through and overcome any issues that arise There is a bit of research that I found on HB, holotropic breathwork. A 1996 study combined the holotropic breathing technique with psychotherapy over six months and people who participated in the breathwork and the therapy significantly reduced death anxiety and increased self-esteem compared to those who only had therapy. Another report from 2013 documents the results of 11,000 people over 12 years who participated And the results of this report suggest that it can be used to treat a wide range of psychological and existential life issues. Many people reported significant benefits related to emotional catharsis and internal spiritual exploration. No adverse reactions were reported, so this makes it sound like a low-risk therapy. Finally, a 2015 study found that holotropic breathing can bring about high-risk therapy. So it seems like when it's well supervised and accompanied by professionals who are highly trained in facilitating HB, it seems like there's really good benefits to be gleaned from this practice if it's conducted in that safe and respectful manner. way. But on that day that I attended in a room of 30 plus people, was that safe and responsible? I nearly had a panic attack whilst following the teacher's instructions to a T. I was such a diligent student that I didn't even move my arms and legs around when they started getting tingly as he didn't say that we could do it in the instructions. But there came a point, as I said, about 10 minutes in where I definitely had to tap out. So 10 minutes into it was maybe a quarter of the way into it, not that far. That night I slept really terribly and the next day I was wiped out. I guess my nervous system didn't like being ramped up for no good reason. So much for a rejuvenating retreat. There are significant medical risks of this kind of breath work, which is really akin to guided hyperventilation. At least it was in my experience that day. This kind of breathwork can cause reduced carbon dioxide and other alterations in blood chemistry that can lead to dizziness, fainting, weakness, spasms of the hands and feet and even seizures. And I mean, I experienced a lot of that. A few studies have been done on either the efficacy of achieving mental health enlightenment and healing through holotropic breathwork or of the general safety of the practice. As I mentioned before, But since the process of holotropic breathwork is aimed at a deep experience, it is possible that uncomfortable feelings will arise, also known as a healing crisis. And this technique is controversial because it involves the possible amplification of symptoms in potentially problematic ways. This technique can evoke intense physical and emotional changes and that was really evident by what I saw and heard around me in the room that day. Therefore, there is a list of specific criteria that exists to advise against participation for some people. So for anyone considering trying holotropic breathwork, it is a good idea to discuss possible risks with your healthcare provider before embarking on this practice, especially if you have any of these conditions. Cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, high blood pressure and angina, glaucoma or retinal detachment, any recent injury or surgery, any condition that requires you to take medication, panic attacks or psychosis, seizures, severe mental illness, aneurysms or a family history of them or you're pregnant or breastfeeding. This practice can also cause distress in susceptible people. That's anyone with a history of psychosis or panic attacks, heart attacks, hypertension and so on. What pissed me off about my experience that day is that no medical history was taken by the facilitators. None of these warnings were given to us at the start of the breathwork or at any point in the day. I really think that if you're going to do this kind of thing, you need a trained facilitator to help you determine if a group setting is appropriate or if an individual session would be safer and more effective. The facilitator should guide and support you through the process, not give you really hard and fast kind of brash instructions and then let a whole room of 30 plus people have at it. I don't want to give up on holotropic breathwork just yet. I know of some people who derive enormous benefit out of it. It's not the form of breathwork I disagree with, it's the use of it as a fancy spiritual accelerator in combination with the fanfare of noise and other stimuli such as the cacao ceremony which were designed to create this overwhelming and overstimulating experience that hopefully leaves you feeling like something profound just happened. I just felt like I wanted to get the hell out of there and go somewhere quiet. I feel like although this was the only session of its type I had attended, I'm pretty sure this was a poorly conducted breathwork session. There were too many people, there was not enough personal supervision, no regard for medical history and the people who had increased risks and a too much of a this can only be a good thing attitude. Basically it was just irresponsible but obviously it's more profitable to charge a room of 30 people in one hit than charge 30 people for one-on-one breathwork sessions. I still want to give holotropic breathwork a go but in a quiet calm setting and maybe with just one practitioner If music is a part, surely it doesn't have to be 90 decibels. And can we scratch the cultural misappropriation, please? If you'd like to try holotropic breathing, I reckon you should seek out a trained facilitator who can guide you in the process. These facilitators are often psychologists, therapists or nurses, which means they also have really great knowledge of human physiology. Having a licensed and certified practitioner would probably be the best choice. Make sure you're aware of what you may experience during your session. So my last part of my review of this hyper stimulating experience. Does stimulation equate to meaning? Quote, something kind of sad about the way that things have come to be. Desensitized to everything. James Maynard Keenan in a song called Stink Fist by one of my favourite bands, Tool. I'm referring here not to holotropic breathing on its own, but to the combination of poorly guided and up-marketed holotropic breathwork, the tirade of usual hippie verbiage, which by itself I can handle, the cultural misappropriation and the overstimulating factors that made up the experience that I had. In many spiritual experiences that you can pay for, whether it's a cacao ceremony and women's share circle, a 50-person yoga and holotropic breathwork retreat, or a 60-minute one-on-one healing session, there's often an additional element of hyper individualism despite the group nature of some of these ceremonies and and retreats and everything is embedded with deep meaning attitude and you're 100% responsible for everything that happens to you kind of vibe. And if something goes wrong, like you have a panic attack halfway through the breath work or some past trauma is triggered in your healing session that the therapist is not trained to deal with, there's this sense that it's your fault, that you have some baggage you need to work on, some Not that the facilitation was shoddy and unprofessional or that your therapist had no idea how to deal with trauma coming up in session. Do we really need all this shit? Do we need this much input, this much intensity to be convinced that we're having some kind of spiritual, transformational, meaningful or healing experience? experience is our loss of spiritual connection so fucking urgent our feelings of boredom and need for more over stimulation so great that this kind of experience is met with wide-eyed wonder and a feeling of wow that was intense it must have been good instead of wow this is bullshit is watching a sunrise doing some gentle yoga or traditional pranayama just too boring nowadays Too subtle? Too slow to take any kind of perceivable or transformational effect? The male facilitator who ran that retreat I attended appealed to the impatient, results-orientated Wessner in everyone when he praised us for being clever enough to be there that day."'You aren't here to muck around,' he said."'This is the direct route, the shortcut."'You didn't come here just to lie down.' Oh, but I did. But do we really need to deprive ourselves of oxygen for extended periods of time and face dangerous health risks just to feel something? Do we need spiritual sounding things, spiritual sounding smells, culturally appropriated phrasing like a hoe, stolen gods and goddesses referred to as if they were long lost family members, stolen rituals borrowed from a cultures to supplement the already intense breathwork, all in order to feel like we're doing something unique and special? Are we in the colonised West so damn deplete of our own meaningful rituals that we've had to steal others, taking them out of their traditional context and mish-mashing them as we please until the desired effect is reached? The desired effect of feeling far away enough from our boring mainstream culture culture to feel spiritual or like we're doing something radical it seems so adolescent in desperately trying to cram meaning taken from many different cultures presumably to fill up the void of meaning we feel in the vacuum of organized religion more traditional forms of spirituality or maybe a personal carefully developed system the experience or the typical kind of manufactured paid for spiritual experience that we can access these days often becomes a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing to quote Shakespeare. At the end of the day I can only speak to my personal experience and to me this particular cacao yoga transformational breathwork retreat was one of the most meaningless things I have ever witnessed. Okay, thanks for listening to that blast from the past. I hope it gave you a little food for thought or maybe just a chuckle at the sheer absurdity of it all. Sometimes we need that, don't we? I'll be back in two weeks with a brand new episode continuing our deep dive into disordered eating in the naturopathy and natural health space. In the meantime, if you enjoyed that episode, I will We'd love it if you shared it, all that good stuff. Leave a review. It helps more people find the show, blah, blah, blah. And if you want to go deeper, please make sure that you're on the wait list for my upcoming course, Disordered Eating for Naturopaths. And now when you sign up, you will also get the free download for practitioners, the working with clients with disordered eating for naturopaths and other natural health practitioners. If you don't want to stay on the wait list, that's fine. Just sign up and then download the guide and then you can unsubscribe I don't care it doesn't bother me but I just want you to be getting something good out of this work that I'm doing if of course you are interested in the program and in diving deeper into disordered eating work then of course please stay subscribed all right that was a very long-winded say way to say all that you'll find the link in the show notes for that stuff anywho take care stay grounded I'm going to chase away this ruses outside my house I you can hear he does not belong to me I need to talk to the neighbours I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and I will see you next time bye