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First off, there's a LOT of different kinds of breathwork out there. They each have nuance, caveats, and some dangers associated with doing them wrong. I did dirga pranayama breathwork with breath rentention for years when I had a different schedule in the mornings, and never had the muscle thing you mentioned. The only danger was in doing it wrong.
As for holotropic - here's a study of 11,000 participants, where only 2% didn't have any sort of interesting experience.
So, based on this, evidence suggests you might have simply not done it right. Which is common with people doing breathwork on their own. YT videos don't often train you as well as a real human watching how you breathe.
As for calling it "dangerous" and you projecting that on accomplished "I'll try anything" author Michael Pollin - why? Lots of things are dangerous and we do them every day. Driving a car kills about 40,000 people in the US. If he mentions driving a car, do you also groan and think "Don't do it!"? Likely not because that's something mundane to you.
The need for a trip sitter seems (as are the effects of breathwork according to a lot of people, honestly. It's cool, but it's work, not like dropping acid) overblown. Psychedelic experiences last about as long as the breathwork lasts - it's that people keep up the breathwork for hours. Feelings of euphoria might last all day, but the need for a trip sitter seems unnecessary, IMO.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00247-0
I mean, Wikipedia seems to contradict a lot of what you're telling me. Not to say Wikipedia can't be wrong, but it's not like anything I said about holotropic breathwork came out of nowhere.
Wikipedia specifically calls out the face and hand cramping thing. It also mentions a potential risk of seizure based on a 1993 report which may well be outdated at this point. Wikipedia also says "it should not be attempted alone" which seems to contradict your take that "A trip sitter seems unnecessary, IMO". So at very least even if your take is more correct, it doesn't sound like it's uncontroversial.
I've never heard Michael Pollan called an "I'll try anything" author, but also you'll note from my comment that I didn't get from him the idea that holotropic breathwork was associated with some risks to your health. I already had that understanding before reading his book. (I read his book not knowing that holotropic breathwork would come up.) And I'm not sure what you mean by "projecting" in that context. Here's a quote from How to Change Your Mind talking about his experience with holotropic breathwork:
And a footnote:
What am I "projecting onto" Michael Pollan exactly?
Tell you what. I'll edit "seems dangerous" to "seems potentially dangerous".
If your reasoning is that the fact that I didn't have "some sort of interesting experience" means I wasn't doing it right, I basically admitted to that in my previous comment. "I might have gotten into more of that territory had I kept going longer".
If your reasoning is that the had hand and face cramping is evidence that I was doing it wrong, that's in fact the usual effect of "doing it right". I don't have any reason to think the cramping effect in particular was dangerous, nor did I say it was.
If he'd previously mentioned specific reasons why he couldn't possibly drive safely, of course I'd have had concerns with him driving. He'd mentioned previously in the book that he had a history of heart issues and so I thought it concerning that he'd do something like holotropic breathwork. (Also, I never said anything about "groaning".)
Look, I'm not trying to discount your experience as real. I am suggesting that trying things like breathwork without someone there to explain step-by-step and guide your progress makes one - anyone - more prone to errors. Those errors can lead to problems. I mentioned going breathwork with retention, which is holding one's breath. If you hold for too long, too many times, you can end up with tinnitus. Which I did, because I was also doing it wrong. It's a common beginner's error, and once corrected, it stopped being a problem for me.
Wikipedia has a known set of ideological bias, and because you're looking at the (New Age) article, the bias of "everything in here is stupid pseudoscience BS, so light it up" is easily met. I can't find the interview I saw a few years ago, because now everything is buried in some "is it wOkEipedia???" garbage slurry, but an editor says something like "Yes, I'm biased. Wikipedia should show my biases because I'm always right." Which is....just such an egotistical human thing to say. Anyway, point is that if you're looking at any Wikipedia page that can be dismissed as "woo-woo" then it's automatically becomes fairly anti-that thing page.
Which I think you recognize. You're doubtful about the relevance of a 1993 study already. And if you follow that to the citation, it's a book named "Hypocrisy and Dissent Within the Findhorn Foundation: Towards a Sociology of a New Age Community" that seems like a hit piece on a singular foundation. Which, just a guess here, means someone in Scotland was teaching holotropic breathwork wrong, and ran into some problems, and it was assumed that holotropic breathing, and not the failures of one group, were to blame. Here we are over 30 years later, and you have as many citations supporting holotropic breathing as "dangerous" as there are that say vaccines cause autism, and potentially about the same quality of study. Which isn't to say that more research isn't needed, sure. However, I would suggest that if over 30+ years where increased research into breathwork has taken place hasn't pointed to holotropic breathwork specifically as uniquely dangerous as compared to any other kind of breathwork, then maybe don't single out one narrow practice based on one experience you had while 99.999% of other people seem to be getting along just fine.
Speaking of which, you'll notice that Michael Pollin says that it's CO2 levels in the blood, not holotropic breathwork specifically, that led to his AFib. Many kinds of breathwork change the CO2 levels in the blood. Pranayama does that. And so does Ketoacidosis - the keto diet, along with medical issues like kidney disorders that acidify the blood. So maybe projecting is the wrong term. Bias-seeking would be more accurate. Any number of things that produced low CO2 levels were going to have the same effect, and so had his experiment been about the keto diet, he would have had the same results. He had something weird happen as a side effect which was negative, so it met your bias. Which is normal and human, but please see that for what it is. You didn't even have the same negative effects as Pollin, so it seems to me like the word "holotropic" is all that connects the experiences, yes? Did you do the practice right or not? I don't know. Only you can know. But if you're running into negative experiences based not on an established medical condition, then I ask what was the difference between what you did and the people that have a lovely time?
And you can't really call a guy that wrote This if Your Mind on Plants and takes mescaline and goes off caffeine as not willing to try anything. It's been a few years since I read the book, but I seem to recall he seemed like he was willing to grow opium poppies in his yard if it wasn't for the simple fact that doing so, and writing about it, would have easily incriminated him in print and made the whole section of the book unpublishable.
Call it whatever you want, but if you're trying to approach this from an evidence-based, scientific perspective, first off, you should say just "some breathwork has potential dangers." Because it does. If you jump in a pool and to pranayama and breath retention and pass out, you can drown. Which was in Scott Carney's book about Wim Hof. Not ideal, right? Yet, not holotropic, either. Second, eating a sandwich can lead to choking and death. Eating shellfish can lead to negative reactions and death. Eating too many eggs can lead to death. But we don't call eating food "potentially dangerous" regularly. We don't say "eggs are dangerous!" because eating 100 in a day will strip vitamin K from your cells.
I'm asking you to be specific and look at what you're calling dangerous and why. Take a step back and be objective and specific.
If "holotropic breathwork can be dangerous" is bias, then everyone else seems "biased" as well.
I did a DDG search for "holotropic breathwork" and looked at the first 5 (actually 6 because one wouldn't load) links for references to hand and face cramping and to any dangerous effects:
If your take is that it's always safe for everyone "if done correctly", then your take is the outlier, not mine.
I never said anything about whether other kinds of breathwork are or aren't (sometimes, comparatively) dangerous.
If I said "boxing carries a risk of concussion", would you say I was "singling it out" from among other sports that also carry a risk of concussion? (MMA, American football, etc.) I'm not singling anything out. I said nothing about whether ther other forms of breathwork carry risks or not. I'm only "singling out" doing holotropic breathwork from (all else being equal) not doing holotropic breathwork.
Read more carefully. I never said I believed holotropic breathwork to be dangerous in some cases from my own experience. I said quite the opposite. My own experience didn't harm me. Taken in isolation, my own experience supports your assertion that it's safe (though taken in isolation, it's only an anecdote, so hardly conclusive proof that it's safe for everyone). I believed holotropic breathwork to be potentially dangerous in some cases before my own experiment and before reading How to Change Your Mind. Neither of those were what convinced me. The preponderance of writings I'd found on the topic did and continue to.
Michael Pollan (whose name you keep misspelling) did specifically call the practice he'd been led in "holotropic breathwork" in the passage I quoted.
The keto diet causing ketoacidosis is not typical. The keto diet (purposefully) causes "ketosis", but that's distinct from ketoacidosis. Ketosis doesn't alter blood pH. Wikipedia: "While ketosis refers to any elevation of blood ketones, ketoacidosis is a specific pathologic condition that results in changes in blood pH and requires medical attention.".
If he had risk factors for the keto diet putting him in ketoacidosis, maybe. The keto diet can be dangerous in some cases. "Doing it right" is only safe if "doing it right" includes taking into account any risk factors one might have and being open to abstaining if the risk is too high. (And even then, the risk would never be zero.) Which is exactly what I've been saying about holotropic breathwork. Michael Pollan had exactly some of the risk factors which could make holotropic breathwork dangerous for him. Whether he has additional risk factors that would contraindicate the keto diet for him, I don't know, nor do I know if his heart condition would specifically contraindicate the keto diet absent other conditions.
Again, you're reading what I said and making up your own interpretation exactly contrary to what I said. I never said I had a negative experience beyond being "scared" and "weirded out" enough to end the experiment. (Mind you, I knew to expect the hand/face cramping as it had been mentioned in a lot of material that I had read on the topic.) I didn't have any of the sort of "theraputic" effects that are the reason why people who seek holotropic breathwork seek it. But again, nothing negative came of the experience.
Again, my best guess is "I might have gotten into more of that territory had I kept going longer".
Sure. I'll concede the point. I'm not sure what that has to do with the rest of the conversation, though.
That's exactly what I've been saying across three comments now.
Just in: things that aren't holotropic breathwork can be dangerous in some cases, ergo holotropic breathwork isn't.
I have been. You just don't seem to comprehend written English.