At the heart of the Vedic tradition lies a knowledge that was waiting for modern neurology to be fully understood: the practice of pranayama — the control and deepening of the breath — releases in the human brain the same molecules found in entheogenic plants. This is not a metaphor. It is biochemistry.
Dimethyltryptamine — DMT — is a tryptamine that we naturally produce in our own brains. It is triggered, among other things, by yoga, meditation, and above all by pranayama. This is what I read in the work of Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who devoted his life to the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Grof first treated patients suffering from schizophrenia with LSD for more than ten years. Following press campaigns orchestrated by American fundamentalist circles and the administrative obstacles that followed, he developed — with the help of yogis — holotropic breathing: a technique of deep, rhythmic breathing. He obtained the same therapeutic results as with LSD. He developed this technique for more than twenty years.
What Grof rediscovered, the Rig Veda was practicing four thousand years ago. Breath holds a fundamental place in it. Vâyu — « that which blows », the deified wind — is described as the master of the intermediate world and the master of life. This is not an accident of nomenclature. In Vedic cosmology, the intermediate world is precisely the domain of transformation, the space between ordinary consciousness and illumination. Vâyu reigns there because it is through breath that one enters it.
Pranayama does not appear in the Rig Veda under this technical name — that word belongs to a later systematization. But the reality it designates is everywhere in the hymns: breath as the vehicle of the sacred, as the means of joining the gods, as the path toward the mystical ecstasy the rishis call illumination. When the hymn says that soma « achieves Illumination », and we now know that soma releases tryptamines, and that pranayama equally releases endogenous tryptamines, the coherence is striking. To go deeper into the nature of soma and its central role in Vedic practice, I invite you to read my article on the ritual preparation of soma.
What I read here as a teaching for our time: post-traumatic stress is a wound of the nervous system. Trauma — accidents, violence, grief, war — leaves deep neurobiological traces that resist purely verbal approaches. Classical psychotherapy can name what happened, but it sometimes struggles to undo what the body has locked away. This is where Grof’s holotropic breathing — a direct heir of Vedic pranayama — comes into play. By releasing endogenous DMT, it allows access to states of consciousness that approach traumatic memories differently, with a distance and depth that ordinary waking consciousness cannot provide.
The expansions of consciousness documented by researchers include precisely what traumatized patients need most: a reduction of the ego and its permanent defensive vigilance, a deeper connection to oneself and to one’s environment, a capacity for transcendence that allows the traumatic experience to be repositioned in a frame larger than suffering alone. These effects are not pleasant side effects — they are the therapeutic mechanism itself. Vedic civilization knew this. It had systematized a practice of breath as a path of healing as much as of spiritual realization. On how these ancient wisdoms speak to our modernity, I recommend my article on Sarasvatî and artificial intelligence — the flow of the divine word on my site dedicated to the 7 Rivers civilization.
What I take from this connection between pranayama and contemporary neurology is, above all, a profound sense of humility. We spent decades searching in laboratories for what anonymous rishis had discovered on the banks of the Indus rivers through the assiduous practice of their art of breath. And we also, during those same decades, demonized the substances that allow those same molecules to act in the brain — while our own physiology manufactures them, and yoga releases them.
In my view, the question is not whether pranayama can treat post-traumatic stress. Grof’s results and those of his successors show that yes, comparable states can. The question is rather: why has this knowledge been ignored so long in the West? The answer may lie in our relationship to the body, to breath, to inner experience. We prefer to heal from outside what requires transformation from within. The Rig Veda knew that the path toward healing passes through the same route as the path toward illumination: breath, mastered, deepened, offered. In the texts of Mandala IX dedicated to the deified soma, one finds this same dimension of a practice that transforms as much as it liberates.
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