How Soma Was Created

Hello, beautiful visionaries. This is Lorna Liana and I am so happy to present to you my friend, Neeraj Nayak, who I know from Barcelona. Niraj is the renegade pharmacist and he is the creator of the Soma Breathwork ritual, which I had the good fortune of being able to attend. The Soma Breathwork ritual was for me, very much like a psychedelic orgasm on dmt. And so Neeraj is here with me to take us through this process to experience what Soma Breathwork is like so that we can attain the higher expanded states of consciousness purely through the power of breath work, without any psychoactive substances. Now, the beauty of this method is that with this breath work practice, by amplifying and expanding our consciousness, we can actually catalyze our ability to.

Make the law of attraction and manifestation happen for us and happen faster. So Niraj is going to explain to us exactly how that works, because for me, it's a little bit of a mystery, but I find it amazing that you can actually stimulate the DMT experience in your body and mind without the use of any visionary plants. So, Niraj, welcome to the session and I would love for you to explain to me, well, first of all, a little bit about your background. How is it that you became involved in this kind of work? And then of course, let's go into the mechanics of how Soma breath work actually.

Functions.

Sure, yeah, happily so. I actually was a pharmacist, a community pharmacist in the uk and for many years I was working in a very busy pharmacy, seeing lots of different types of people coming in different patients with all kinds of variety of conditions. And I just felt helpless. I felt like the system was completely broken. I was very disillusioned working there in that environment. I felt like I was just a glorified pill pusher and people going away with shopping bags filled with drugs every month and didn't seem to be getting better and I wanted to do something about it. So actually what I did was I.

Started to research on different methods out there for helping people get off medication rather than onto medication. So I became like a renegade pharmacist in the pharmacy. And from that research, I found that diet and nutrition is like a very powerful way to help people with their health issues and simply by just changing people's diet through a little healthy shopping list that is right for them. I had like amazing results in the pharmacy and that actually got me fired from my first job because I was told I was mismanaging the pharmacy. But then it got Me actually promoted to the head office of one of the biggest supermarkets in the uk. And I was carrying out this project where I was going to deliver my healthy shopping list to.

The masses in the uk. It would have helped a lot of people. However, halfway through it, the project started to get watered down because the legal team and the managers, they just thought it was way too renegade. My ideas, I was telling people not to drink Coca Cola and not to eat confectionery that's full of additives and preservatives, and that would have killed like a huge chunk of their profits. So obviously they weren't too happy about that. And eventually the whole project got shelved and I became even more disillusioned, even more depressed. I felt helpless. I didn't know what to do. And that's when I started to get sick, very sick with depression and then chronic illness called colitis, ulcerative colitis, which left me housebound for like a year.

What is colitis?

Well, it's an autoimmune condition where you. You get cold ulcers in your colon and you're literally bleeding like 15, 20 times a day on your backside. And obviously it killed my social life. I was wearing a nappy at one point.

Oh, my God.

Doctors basically said that there's no cure. And the only last res, because my symptoms were getting so bad was to have my colon removed. But I, at that point, luckily, like a close friend of my family now, Swami Ambikananda, she took me in and she showed me the basic fundamentals of yoga, breathwork and Ayurveda for actually as a therapeutic approach to reversing chronic illness. And that's when I discovered that actually all disease is actually a spiritual disturbance in the body. It's an energy disturbance. And we can correct it by correcting this energy flow and our perception of the disease and our perception of stress in the environment. So literally, just by a change of perception and a few different breathing techniques I learned and meditation techniques, and going back into my real love, my first love, which was music, making music, I actually cured myself within a few months of this very, very, very embarrassing and horrible disease. And that actually got me into this whole mission that I'm in now. So I have a very popular website called the renegadepharmacist.com and it's helped a lot of people out there with chronic health issues. From doing that. I got really curious about breath and the power of breath to influence our physiology. And through that, I discovered that actually by using various techniques, we can actually reach Peak experience, the peak human experience, the ecstatic state, simply through using breath and music and certain meditation techniques, which is what you experience in Barcelona and over here as well. So I've just been refining this and it got me very close to a person who may be well known amongst your audience, a guy called Wim Hof, the superhuman Iceman. He's got like many world records to his name, like climbing up Everest in the shorts. And he's very much into breathing as well. And breath works a big part of his Wim Hof method. And I actually very close friends with him, I create all the music to the Wim Hof method. I host his events in Europe and we jam a lot together. We've got like a band together. We do a lot of fun stuff like seeing how high we can get without the use of any kind of substances. And interestingly enough, actually, if you add a little bit of additional magic into the mix, you can go even higher. So, yeah, so, yeah, we've really gone deep on breath and breathing techniques, on how to reach the peak human experience. And that's what is now the foundation of Somalia.

Wow. Okay, so what I'm the most curious about is how exactly breathing works in order to trigger higher states of consciousness. And I will just preface this by saying I've done all different kinds of breathwork, types of practices, you know, yoga, pranayama, breathing. I have experienced Christabel Zamora's Breath of Bliss. And Christabel is also. We're going to be hearing from her as well. I am intrigued also by holotropic breath work, which I personally haven't experienced, but apparently it also does a very similar thing. It brings you to kind of like a bit of a visionary state as well. So can you explain to us how it is that we can trigger these visionary experiences just by the power of our breath? What exactly is activated in our bodies and our minds?

Sure. So there was actually a guy called Stanislav Grof who invented holotropic breathwork. An amazing.

He was a psychotherapist. I think he was actually a psychiatrist, a proper medical doctor. And he was using LSD to treat his patients. He was one of the first people to do that. But then they made lsd, they banned it, so he had to find an alternative. And I think he did a lot of research on shamans and old shamanic cultures. And breath was a big core part of their ritual. And I actually was getting into these breathing tapes before I had heard of holotropic breathwork and Stanislav Grof's work. And it was interesting. It was a crossover when I discovered holotropic breathwork myself. And I also studied these shamanic tribes and cultures because I'm Indian. In our ancient past, we have this time known as the Golden Age. And the Golden Age of the Vedic philosophy was a time when there was abundance everywhere. Everyone was like living this high vibrational state. And people were hooked on this ritual involving psychedelic plant, which nobody quite understands or knows what it is. There's a few suggestions of what it might be. And it was called Soma. And this plant would give people the ability to communicate with the gods and divine all the knowledge that is in the Rig Veda, which is actually the foundations of the Buddhism of tantra, meditation, yoga and all these things. And what happened was everyone was hooked on this Soha. So they were all taking this all in these rituals.

I wonder if it was magic mushrooms. Do we know if it was magic?

Well, yeah.

It hints towards Amanita Mascarino because. Which is the Amanita Mascaria.

Yeah, yeah, but that's the one with like the. It's red with the white spot.

That's it. The classic toast. So that's one of the proposed things. There's also cannabis, there's ephedra, there's other concoctions. But it may have been a combination of all of those or it could have been something different, which is what I have discovered by going deeper into the research. And basically what happened was the Soma, according to legend, ran out and everyone went crazy because they couldn't get access to this drink that was giving them these ecstatic states. So Gaurindra, who was hooked on Soma.

He basically ordered people to go inward and find a way to reach these ecstatic states without substance because they could no longer be dependent on it.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

What if it was like coffee? Because I can imagine the only thing these days right now if you got rid of all, all the coffee, people would be like super cranky, you know.

So anyways, yeah, so something happened. So it drove people to go inward. And through that people discovered the power of pranayama, of meditation, of tantra, of all these things. And that's actually when people developed for the first time these practices that use your own internal pharmacy to reach these states. So actually they say that the foundations of yoga and these things was to reach these ecstatic states by just using our own body. And that's when the Soma tribes, who are more like. They were like tribes, tribal people.

Went inward and they discovered, using breath and music and inducing trance states, you could actually reach these higher states of consciousness.