2021 02 Mag_S_PAcompressed

PHOTO BY YOLYA_ILYASOVA, ADOBE STOCK
thing beneath her words
that suggests how much
of a struggle it was for
her, how defining the experience
was. Balgooyen’s
journey overcoming
the constant illness led
her to seek a number
of treatment options
outside of traditional
Western medicine, from
acupuncture to physical
therapy to massage. It
wasn’t until a 2015 trip
to Southeast Asia that it
all clicked, though.
While assisting at a
yoga retreat in India, she
had made plans to head
to Thailand toward the
end of her trip to experience
a modality that was
totally new to her: circular
breathing. “I did my
first session, and it absolutely
blew me away,” she
says. “My entire body felt
like it was paralyzed; I
couldn’t move anything
and just felt like my body
was filled with cement.”
She notes that this isn’t
uncommon, but it’s one
of the reasons guided
sessions are recommended
for beginners before
branching out on their
own. “My whole body
was in pain.”
The process of circular
breathing, she tells
me, can lead to cramps
and tightness, but she
describes it as energy
moving through your
body and hitting blockages
along the way. I’m
a skeptic at heart, but it
reminds me of a tai chi
teacher I once had who
would have us tense our
muscles to lead the way
to relaxation. Balgooyen
says that once she
worked through the pain
in her first session, she
experienced a release like
nothing else she had felt
before. She was hooked.
“That day, I found a
month-long training and
signed up for it. Within
a week, my headaches
went away completely.”
Returning home to
Steamboat Springs, the
transition was natural.
“There’s a ton of different
healers up there,
and it’s a pretty spiritual
town,” she says. Once a
week, she’d bring together
friends and people
who had heard the buzz
for three hour sessions as
part of a longer course,
and soon students became
apostles. “It just
takes one session because
it’s such a crazy, profound
experience,” she
says. “It kind of becomes
addicting.”
After another year of
building her practice
through word of mouth in
Steamboat, Balgooyen decided
it was time to take
the next big leap and work
in Boulder, a liberal bastion
of alternative medicine
and a town where
collaborators would be
bountiful. Soon, she was
incorporating other modalities
into her practice,
particularly sound healing.
I have some experience
with the chanting
and music of kirtan (Deb
Browne, my spiritually
woke mom, introduced
me to it), and I start picturing
us in a session together.
“The sound alone
is so powerful,” Balgooyen
says, as I nod.
At festivals, it started
with Nibumbu, a neotribal
band that has spent
the last 2½ years incorporating
shamanic drumming
into breath work,
creating an immersive experience.
Now, Balgooyen
is teaming up with Brian
Dickinson, founder of
Sonic Alchemy, to bring
similar concepts to smaller
settings, with gongs,
singing bowls, flutes, and
“other trinkets” adding
to the journey. “It starts
off really relaxed, then
it builds and gets pretty
intense, then it starts to
calm down and gets very
meditative,” she says.
I’m curious about
what science has to say
on the matter, though.
We take tens of thousands
of breaths each
day, so there has to be
some study on how such
a simple act can have
FEBRUARY 2021 SENSIMAG.COM 17