Everything is a Room
Life is a fractal series of spaces.
In the summer of 2023, I paid $140 to breathe. Technically to over-breathe. I found myself on my mat in a spacious Brooklyn venue, surrounded by maybe two or three hundred others, each with his little island of pillows, blankets, and water bottles. Our teacher was Witalij Martynow, a late-twenties Eastern European who “believes that the majority of sickness both mental, physical and spiritual comes from the stuck and unprocessed energy.”
Witalij promotes his events with intense clips on Instagram that show participants moving that energy — screaming, laughing, crying, and convulsing. I had done lots of breathwork before but never seen someone go on tour with it. Witalij and his team traveled from city to city to facilitate and he told us he had worked with “more than 80,000 people.” Breath has become a respectable business.
His style was ‘spiritual bro’ — sneakers, baseball cap, prayer beads, a loose-knit kaftan, an influencer at home at both the DJ deck and drone flute. He talked about his own journey of trying to heal a basketball injury. Once he talked about traveling to Latin America and his new mission to share the tools, my inner ‘ayahuasca’ bell began to ring.
Our journey began with sharp in-breaths. An hour or two later, I was roaring.
I had done intense breathwork before, but never this long, never in such a large group, never this loud. It was a masterfully orchestrated rollercoaster that took the room through waves of energy — anger and sorrow, laughter and love, yearning and bliss. I had never been this loud in my life, ever. And then it was over.
We had run over time and the blissful peace began to fray. Some people began to pack their stuff while Witalij and his team asked people to share. The group was far too big for a sharing circle. Instead, the crew walked around with cameras and microphones. Content for future ads.
My breathwork journeys tend to be highly emotional and this one was no exception. I often ‘meet’ the energy or memory of people I’ve lost — grandparents, women I’ve loved. But this felt like the opposite of my moment in the forest. I had no interest in bearing my heart for a viral clip. Because I had been noticeably loud during the session, the mic still found me. I uttered a thank you and something about the intensity of the experience — a string of words forgotten as soon as they left my mouth.
That’s what stuck with me as I lay awake hours later. I thought about all the people dispersing into New York’s noisy neon night, about moments of catharsis that didn’t lead to connection, about going deep in a space that didn’t offer intimacy. A highly effective practice lacking a strong container. (My friend Tom Morgan discussed the issue of ‘leaky’ containers in his excellent piece Where's all the Money in Personal Transformation?)
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“Everything is a room,” a friend once told me. What she meant was that the world appeared to her as a fractal series of spaces. (We may or may not have been staring at the sky high on acid.)
There are physical rooms: the universe, the sky, the country, city, and finally the ‘room’ we are in. But relationships too are rooms: being a lover, friend, child, or parent means sharing a space with someone. Also, media: in a way, this piece is a room you enter, a space of experience and relationship.
You always either offer a room or enter one, you create or participate in space (or perhaps co-create).