Dying Breath: A Breathplay Workshop with Lana Porter

Dying Breath: A Breathplay Workshop with Lana Porter is an embodied and intellectual experience of your relationship to death.

Exploring our relationship with death is ultimately about our relationship with freedom.
When the ultimate liberation comes to claim us, how will we meet it?
Working on ourselves to live well is missing the point that one day we will need to die well, to let go in entirety, to surrender completely.In this session, you will receive an educational lecture on the neuroscience of near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, and how to use breath to play between the realms of life and death; to receive lessons from the darkness, the stillness.

We will engage in a circular breathwork practice, a breathing pattern which transiently reduces oxygen supply to the brain, in a safe and controllable fashion. Other times in our life when we experience transient oxygen deprivation are passing the birth canal, and the process of dying. How can encountering the portal that flanks this existence provide perspective on how we can let go even deeper, surrender even wilder? How can it reveal to us what entanglements are ripe for release, and what attachments will confine us when liberation is offered?
Integrating lessons from the darkness may help us walk in step with death as the contour of our life, not in resistance to it. 

This workshop is for those long to look into the dark, who fear not the taboo of finality, or are interested in perspectives from the other side.

Workshop flow:

• Neuroscience lecture on the relationship between life, breath, death, and consciousness. You’ll learn about how certain forms of breath can induces transient and controllable encounters with the portal between life & death. You’ll learn about the neuroscience of altered states of consciousness, near death experiences, and high ventilation forms of breathwork
• Embodied partner exercises: you will have the opportunity to encounter your relationship to death as you carry it within you and to deepen your relationship to your living breath
• 80-minute circular breathwork session, an embodied meditation guided by my voice and music, you’ll be invited to breathe faster and deeper than on a daily basis, and to surrender to bodies impulse.

Somatic partner exercises may include:

• physical touch to the chest or rib and diaphragm area
• intimate encounters to deeply held emotions

Contraindications: Circular breathwork is not suitable for anyone who is currently pregnant, has a history of epilepsy, or any untreated cardio vascular disease, glycoma, high blood pressure, pregnancy, thyroid condition, bipolar or schizophrenia, or aneurysm.

Duration: 2.5 hours

What to bring:

• a blanket or anything you need to feel cozy laying on a mat
• an eye mask
• a water bottle
• a notebook and a pen
• PLEASE ARRIVE ON TIME :)

Bio

Lana Porter is a neuroscientist, educator, researcher, and breath-worker based in London, England. She is currently a PhD student researching the mechanisms of altered states of consciousness accessed through high ventilation breathing practices at the Max Planck Institute and University College London (UCL). Her current research focuses on the physiological and embodied dimensions of consciousness, trauma, and resiliency, as well as psychopharmacological mechanisms of circular breathing.Her mission is the sacred marriage work of the scientist and the mystic; building the bridge between modern neuroscience research and mystical practices for the integration of the impulses of life and death.In December 2013, she had a near death experience which opened a perceptual veil between the realms of life and death; since then, the death of her partner in 2025 gashed this portal even wider open. She discovered that circular breathwork connects her to this portal, in ways that serve to teach her constantly. Her work plays with the relationship between respiration, metabolism, consciousness, life, and death.A lifelong student of systems, she has a BA in History and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and an MSc Neuroscience from Kings College London, specializing in developmental and evolutionary neurobiology. Lana trained as a breathwork facilitator with Alchemy of Breath, and Systemic Constellations with the Centre for Systemic Constellations in London. lanapower.com

This event is open to people of all genders and backgrounds. We maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, or any form of discrimination. The venue is fully accessible and includes an accessible bathroom, cloakroom, and changing room. There is a sober bar.

This event is part of Stück cultural programme curated by Lidia Ravviso (www.lidiaravvisostudio.com)

Photos by Lidia Ravviso