Breathing in Culture: How to Turn Insight into Outsight

A new collaboration with Inspirational Breathing

Announcing ‘Breathing in Culture’, a new process combining breathwork and cultural sensemaking. Develop a daily breathwork practice with Inspirational Breathing, alongside tuition from thought leaders like Peter Boghossian, Katherine Dee and Peter Limberg. Find out more here.

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Inhale. Exhale. My mouth is wide open, my torso expands and contracts as I fill my lungs with oxygen. After ten minutes I feel like I’m floating. Emotion bursts from my belly, compact and knotted and alive but I keep breathing and it dissipates in my chest. My limbs are buzzing, my mind clear and awake and beyond thought. Inhale. Exhale. Over and over until the tension releases from my shoulders and I’m crying with joy.

An hour later, I’m making a smoothie and checking my emails. It’s a normal Tuesday morning.  

Over the last year, I’ve developed a regular breathwork practice as part of my facilitator training with a school called Inspirational Breathing, founded by Nicola Price. Breathwork has become increasingly popular in recent years, and it can refer to any practice in which we intentionally use the breath to elicit an altered state of consciousness. It’s been used in yogic traditions for thousands of years, and today people use it for insight, cold exposure, free diving, creativity enhancement, trauma release and consciousness exploration.

Inspirational Breathing uses a technique called ‘Conscious Connected’ breathing, which involves deep, continuous breathing through the mouth in a particular rhythm to elicit a powerful altered state. 

While consciousness exploration and insight are important aspects of the practice, so are embodiment and physiology. You take 20,000 breaths a day, and each of those breaths fuels your body. But most of us have a dysfunctional breath, not using our diaphragm properly and so not drawing in as much air as we could be.

If we were doing anything else wrong 20,000 times a day, we’d probably sit up and take notice. But our breath is unique; it’s one of the few functions of our autonomic nervous system which can be both conscious and unconscious. Most of the time, unless we change our relationship to it, it remains unconscious. However, a growing body of research suggests that retraining our breath pattern can have a significant impact on our wellbeing. 

No two breathwork sessions are alike. We might come into contact with our unconscious thoughts and feelings, or gain new insights into our deepest desires. We may release physical tension and notice how our whole torso suddenly fills breath in a way we've never experienced. Or, we might have a creative ‘eureka’ moment and find a solution to a problem we’ve been wrestling with. We might purge emotional pain and physical tension, or experience a deep sense of bliss and relaxation. Sometimes, all of this happens in a single session. 

I’ve been blown away by the power of this practice, and I’m now collaborating with Inspirational Breathing to offer a new online process, Breathing in Culture. A unique experience combining breathwork and sensemaking, it will take you on a collective journey into the deep code of culture as you explore the deepest parts of yourself. You’ll find new ways to make sense of society, technology, media and politics as you expand your relationship to your mind and body. 

The process begins on November 13 and runs for six weeks. It involves two kinds of practice: weekly breathwork sessions in small groups led by Inspirational Breathing practitioners, and whole group sessions with thought leaders. Academic and philosopher Peter Boghossian will give a session on politics, free speech and polarisation. Internet historian Katherine Dee will help us explore the changing landscape of sex and gender in 2024. Peter Limberg will illuminate the vibe shifts we’re living through today, and I’m giving a session on AI, ethical tech and new religions. 

This is a process of self discovery that doesn’t ignore culture, but breathes it in. So why combine these different ways of knowing?

Altered States

The peak experiences we access during breathwork can give us powerful insights into our hearts and minds. When we alter our state of consciousness, we radically reframe who we think we are, how we solve problems, and what we dream is possible.

​But insight is only half of the story. We also need to translate our insights into meaningful outsight. Outsight is the act of looking out into the world so that we can gain a meaningful understanding and make an impact. It involves harnessing our unique experiences and perspectives, and applying them to how we make sense of culture and politics, how we solve collective problems and imagine new futures. This is the subject of my book The Bigger Picture, where I explore how our internal altered-state experiences can be ‘exapted’ and applied to how we make sense of the world, solve problems and navigate complex systems. 

The relationship between insight and outsight was also a key question at a gathering I hosted recently with the Center for MINDS, a non-profit founded by Bruce Damer focused on psychedelic-assisted problem solving for humanity’s greatest challenges. We gathered twenty scientists and artists at the beautiful Broughton Sanctuary for two days inquiring into how to bridge this gap. 

What excited me most was realising that none of us have an answer yet. This is a genuine frontier of human understanding. 

We know it’s possible, because scientists and artists regularly report having insights in peak experiences that have real-world application. In fact, it was a breathwork journey that helped Bruce Damer solve the last piece in a chemistry problem that completely changed our understanding of the origins of life.

The insights of that breathwork session turned into outsights in the form of a peer-reviewed paper that made the cover of Scientific American, as well as real-world experiments in hot springs confirming the thesis, which in turn influenced where NASA sent the Mars rover to find signs of extraterrestrial life. A breathwork session might end up changing our understanding of whether or not we’re alone in the universe. Far out.

Bruce Damer and Alexander Beiner at Broughton Sanctuary

Reflecting on the MINDS gathering, I realised that this fascinating link between insight and outsight speaks to a larger cultural movement right now. Many people I’ve spoken to who care about systems change are tired of the way powerful practices have been framed primarily as a way to explore our inner psychology.

A growing number of us are exhausted by therapy speak, trauma talk and the endless cultural quest for ‘healing’. I’m not knocking healing; it’s vital and altered states play an important role in changing our approach to mental health. But we should also be applying our transformative experiences toward creativity, problem solving and collective action. We can focus not just on transforming ourselves, but on transforming systems.

When we have a peak experience, it can change our lives and fill us with potential. But if that potential stays just inside us, we miss an opportunity to apply it, and to positively impact the people and systems around us. Likewise, focusing too much on trying to understand the world without first understanding ourselves leaves us prone to self-deception.

That’s because insight and outsight are mutually arising. They need each other, but the wellness industry and the late-stage capitalist obsession with individual healing means that if you want to engage in a state-changing practice, chances are it’s framed primarily as a form of self-discovery. And it is that. But it isn’t only that. Once we discover ourselves, then what? And what exactly are we being ‘well’ for?  

Our intention with Breathing in Culture is to pioneer a new kind of process that seamlessly combines insight and outsight. We want to keep the breathwork groups relatively small, so space is limited, and we also have a handful of early bird places available which you can book below.

Embodied Cognition

There is a quality to breathwork that makes it ideal for this kind of exploration. It provides an antidote to the Western mind’s penchant for confusing outsight with abstraction, selecting for ethereal theories and concepts that never make it into the body. 

Breathwork is embodied and present. It reminds us that all of our sensemaking, all of our insight, all of our best ideas ultimately come from the body.

As you read this, tune into your breath. Does it feel like your diaphragm is working effortlessly to help you fill your lungs with air? For most of us, the answer is no. Throughout life we develop unhelpful breathing patterns in response to our experiences. We all have breathing dysfunctions; we might be breathing up into our shoulders, with our secondary shoulder muscles taking the role of the diaphragm. Or, we might breathe too far into our bellies and not be taking full breaths into the chest. Changing these changes how we understand the world. 

Identifying and correcting unhelpful breathing patterns in our day to day lives is a big part of Inspirational Breathing. One of the reasons I chose to train with Nicola, after trying a variety of breathwork modalities, is because Inspirational Breathing combines physiology and consciousness exploration so seamlessly. It also incorporates movement, music, physiology and personal inquiry. Nicola and those trained in Inspirational Breathing teach with a vibrancy, positivity and nuance that made me want to learn from them.

I think that vibrancy comes from the heightened embodiment the practice brings. It’s certainly changed my own sense of embodiment as I’ve incorporated it into my life. The more we practice, the more we start to tune into our unique breath pattern and improve it. We notice where our breath is stuck and work through those tensions to breathe more fully, which can have profound effects on our lives. 

My practice has helped me regulate my nervous system, improved my creativity and given me more energy throughout the day. I also managed to beat my very athletic 15 year old nephew in an underwater swimming contest earlier this year, which was the first time I noticed my lung capacity had significantly improved as well. It was, I should note, the only physical activity where I bested him, and I’m embarrassingly proud of it. 

What I’ve found most helpful is how breathwork helps me express emotions as they’re arising so that they don’t build up. What I love is that this process isn’t overly cognitive. When an emotion comes up while I’m breathing, I may be only dimly aware of the narrative component of it. Instead I’m feeling it fully without over-analysing it, connecting to it through my body and letting it flow. Afterwards, I often feel it’s been resolved for good. In many ways, I prefer it to psychedelic journeying for this reason.

You can read more about Breathing in Culture and sign up here. We have just 10 Early Bird tickets available and limited space overall, so if you think it’s for you it’s worth booking soon. As always, paid subscribers get 10% off (you can find the code in the latest paid subscriber piece). We also have a limited number of scholarship places available for those who can’t afford the full price right now. 

Having run personal development and sensemaking courses for thousands of people, we believe Breathing in Culture marks a new kind of collective and individual journey, one that will take us all, as the breath often does, somewhere inspiring, creative, beautiful and unexpected. A journey that invites us to create solutions, to marry the internal and the external. To identify new opportunities, new beliefs, new behaviours, and bring them into the world to create change.