Niraj Naik leads Soma Breath, a practice combining rhythmic breathing, music, and breath-holding. Participants report ecstatic experiences and elevated coherence levels. Naik claims the method improves mitochondrial efficiency, reverses stress, and traces its roots to ancient Vedic traditions.
Chapters
I flew across the world from Florida to this space. Every lesson I've learned, everything that has happened to me in the last eight years, absolutely 100% culminated this morning, right now. I know my mission, I know my purpose, I know my passion. I know how it's going to come together and I know how I'm going to get it done.
My hands were vibrating and I just felt like this vibration that I never felt in my life.
It's like a rocket right to the destination. You immediately get into a meditative state. It's like pushing a button and everything just starts.
A very physical, tangible sense of energy. I'm not talking about energy in the woo woo sense of the word. I'm talking about energy like electricity, like you stuck your tongue in a 9 volt battery. You can feel that something that started on the beaches and jungles of Thailand has now turned into a global movement across the world. This is the story of Somalia.
The experience I just had was ecstatic.
A miracle just has happened to me, believe me. So the legend of soma is referenced 50,000 times in the world's most ancient religious manuscript called the Rig Veda. In there tells a story of these ancient shamans and Rishis who had used psychedelic plants to reach these ecstatic states. However, they were so dependent on on the soma plant for their bliss that they all got freaked out when the soma starts to run out. So they had to find a way to create the soma within. And this becomes the origins of tantra, yoga, meditation, Buddhism that have now spread across the world and become household names in the mainstream.
I feel awake.
This is, I find like yoga for instance, quite tiring, but I find this quite energizing.
I feel amazing. Like, seriously, I feel so energized. I just have a big smile in my mouth and I don't even know why.
So I've just revived this ancient practice of Soma and combine it with modern music and technology that makes it so much more fun and accessible and also free from any religion or dogma.
It just felt like super high actually.
So I had this feeling where I could feel all kind of the particle of my body like vibrating and I could just. I don't know, it was just amazing. It's crazy to be able to feel that, you know, without taking any of the symptoms. It's just true breathing like that.
Yeah.
I didn't even know it's possible, so it's amazing.
I would actually compare this not in a bad way. It is a little bit like taking psychedelic Drugs, it's actually very close to that.
And then you don't wake.
When you come out the other side.
You don't feel horrible.
The Soma breathwork ritual was for me very much like a psychedelic orgasm on dmt.
So I started traveling, tried a bunch of different meditation techniques. I even did a vipassana, a 10 day vipassana, which was horrible. It was one of the toughest things I've ever done. And then I met Niraj and he showed me soma. He showed me what it was and it was like instantly made meditation fun. And I was addicted immediately. Like I just wanted to do it every single day. And that's what Soma is, it's making meditation fun.
I was getting into this meditative state that was almost like 20 times more the experience of what I'd been just sitting and meditating. The best way that I can say it is it's like manufacturing your own happiness.
My name is Greg, I live in Barcelona. I've lived here for the last few years and I am a Soma instructor. This meditation gives you energy, yet it keeps you focused at the same time. That's why I really like it. I mean, you can call me an addict if you want, but I don't know if I am. But I definitely need something that helps me focus.
I love the combination of breathwork and the music.
My coherence actually went up to 10, which is a level I've never reached before. Just because he added the music to it.
Music was perfect, brought everything together in the, I don't know, perfect combination. I don't even know the music. The music is just fucking, freaking amazing. It's like I can't. I can't put it in words. It's that good. It's that good.
In the ancient times, people would use rhythm, music and dance to invoke these ecstatic states. Now we use rhythmic music. And when you breathe in a rhythm, say you have a beat like this in 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, and you breathe with that rhythm. You actually create a state called coherence and actually raises the emotional energy in the body. And it also prepares you for the next phase of soma, the most magical phase of all. Intermittent hypoxia, or kumbhaka. And this is where we actually hold our breath and go into this deep state of inner peace. Because when you hold your breath, you press pause on life. It's like putting a defrag on your hard disk of your operating system. And this allows the thought files to declutter what Also happens is you lower oxygen levels for a short period of time and, and your body adapts to having less oxygen, your mitochondria gets more efficient, you produce energy more efficiently, and this can even help you become stronger, fitter, have better performance, better moods, and even in some cases, reverse chronic conditions where stress is the cause. It all actually began with the Mexican Olympics when people were winning records left, right and center, because the Mexican Olympics was up in high altitudes where oxygen levels were very low. And they realized that this high altitude training actually makes the body adapt and become stronger. But the ancient yogis knew this thousands of years ago and they developed these pranayama techniques of breath retention that actually simulates high altitude training. And this makes it accessible to anyone, regardless of your location or where you are. And this can actually lead to a much healthier and happier and stronger human.
I've been sick since I was a teenager and believe me, as a nurse I've been trying everything. So from my medical experience I would say this is like a revolutionary technique to help people to self heal. I had an injection down on stem cells in my ankle, not needing to pay for those treatments, which are very expensive, and using our own stem cells, you know, in a natural way. Now this is revolutionary.
My name is Neeraj, the founder of Soma Breath, also known as the renegade pharmacist. And I actually developed this technique because many years ago I was working as a community pharmacist. I became very disillusioned, the whole healthcare system and I was in a very, very stressful career and job and that got me sick and ended up housebound with a chronic illness for almost a year. And this was where I had to go inwards myself. I went deep within and I was trained in the ancient arts of yoga, pranayama and tantra. And this allowed me to change my physiology. And within three months I was back to full health. That put me on a lifelong journey to find out how, why these techniques work so that I can make them more accessible for others so they don't have to suffer like I did. In doing so, I discovered that actually we can even create heightened states of consciousness and go into profound states of meditation simply by using the same techniques. And I've combined this with my passion and love for music. Because the ancients used music, they used rhythmic music and they used to other sounds and melodies to actually get people into trance states. I just combined new modern forms of music, new modern styles of music and technology to make an even more heightened multi dimensional meditation and breath work. Experience. So the great thing about Soma is it brings people together. And when you breathe together, you actually increase the vibe and the strength between the tribe or the group. And actually, the ancients used to breathe together as a practice. They did together. And this was the basis of spirituality. Spirituality in Latin literally means to breathe. And I want to bring people together and get people to breathe together in a rhythm, because I know that this is going to be one of the best ways to actually strengthen the bond and the connection between people, because that's something that's missing in this world. We become nuclear families, where we become independent and individualized. And when we get together as groups and do practices like this together as a group, it's like a way of celebrating life together. And that's what I want to bring back with Soma is the community, because the community is the cure.
