Expand Your Breath, Expand Your Consciousness
Kasper van der Meulen — Breathwork specialist, Science Teacher & Musician
KASPER VAN DER MEULEN (NL)
Breathwork specialist / Science Teacher / Musician
Kasper is the Netherlands' leading Breathwork facilitator and he is recognized authority in the field of Biohacking. He firmly believes that conscious breathing is the most potent and direct method to elevate our state of being.
Driven by a mission to bridge the gap between ancient spiritual practices, modern scientific insights, and practical applications for daily life, Kasper's expertise and teachings have impacted the lives of numerous individuals. He has successfully guided thousands of people, including elite performers such as top CEOs, special operations personnel, and Olympic athletes, to hack their state using breathwork.
In his innovative "Breathwork Masterclass," Kasper empowers wellness professionals to leverage the transformative power of breath as a coaching tool. One of Kasper's signature modalities is his incorporation of live handpan music during group breathwork sessions. This skillful fusion of breathwork and soundscape creates a deeply immersive and transformative experience for participants.
Kasper van der Meulen explores how simple breathing practices can expand consciousness and
The breath is the remote control of your nervous system. If you change the state of your breath, you will change the state of your mind and your body.
Summary
- Biohacking should shift from ego-centered self-optimization toward using one's improved biology to serve the world and inspire others. - Being human is already a miracle; rather than chasing a "superhuman" ideal, focus on deeply understanding and appreciating existing biological complexity. - Avoid the trap of consumerist "buy-o-hacking" by prioritizing foundational basics like sleep, movement, nature, and kindness over the constant pursuit of new products. - Many claims about breathwork are physiologically incorrect; profound experiences often stem from altered oxygen delivery and blood pressure rather than "extra oxygen." - The ultimate goal of expanded consciousness is to meet yourself where you are, using breath to address personal needs so you can better contribute to the community.
Article
Expand Your Breath, Expand Your Consciousness
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Kasper Van Der Meulen Reframed Biohacking As A Practice Of Service, Not Vanity
In a wellness culture often intoxicated by metrics, gadgets and the seductive promise of becoming somehow more than human, Kasper van der Meulen offered a quieter, sharper provocation at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam. The Netherlands-based breathwork specialist, science teacher and musician did not reject optimization. He asked what it was for.
“The whole point of optimizing yourself is to ask: what can I do with that self for the world?” he told the audience on Saturday, 14 October 2023, in Amsterdam. “If you change your own biology, it allows you to be inspiring to other people.”
It was the kind of line that cut through the glossy excesses that can cling to the biohacking world. In van der Meulen’s telling, the point was not self-mythology. It was usefulness. Not the worship of performance, but the cultivation of presence, compassion and collective coherence.
Breath As The Nervous System’s Remote Control
Van der Meulen began not with theory but with practice, guiding the room through a simple breathing exercise. Inhale for four. Exhale for four. Hold. Pause. Listen inward. The effect was immediate and democratic. Hundreds of people, in a conference setting usually dominated by stimulation and noise, were invited into a shared internal rhythm.
For van der Meulen, this was not a mystical flourish but a biological one. Breathwork, he argued, functioned as “the remote control of your nervous system”. Change the breath, and you could change the state of mind and body. Do it together, and something larger became possible.
When groups breathed in synchrony, he suggested, they did more than calm themselves. They aligned physiology. They created a rare collective state in a culture that often rewarded individual striving over communal attunement.
That distinction mattered. Biohacking, he said, too easily became “self centered” and “ego centered”. Breath, by contrast, could become a way back to each other.
A Rebuke To The Superhuman Fantasy
There was another strand running through the presentation, one aimed at the mythology of transcendence that often shadows health culture. Van der Meulen challenged the urge to chase the identity of the “superhuman”, a figure produced as much by marketing as by aspiration.
“Being human is enough,” he said. “Just the fact that you are alive is a miracle. The deeper you understand your biology as it is now, the more you start to realize that it is already spectacular.”
It was a notable inversion. Rather than treating the body as an inadequate machine in need of endless upgrading, he urged the audience to see it as an astonishing system already worthy of study, gratitude and care. The task was not to escape humanity but to inhabit it more fully.
This also meant resisting what he effectively cast as the consumer trap of modern wellness, the drift from biohacking into “buy-o-hacking”: a culture of supplements, devices and branded fixes that could distract from the oldest and least glamorous interventions. Sleep. Movement. Time outdoors. Kindness. Slow breathing. Honest self-reflection.
The Science Against The Hype
Van der Meulen’s authority in the room rested partly on his willingness to puncture cherished claims, including those made within his own field. He spoke as someone shaped by a decade in biohacking, and as someone wary of the certainty that charismatic expertise can project.
“Don’t believe anything I say, especially not because I say it,” he told the audience.
That skepticism extended to the physiology of intense breathwork itself. Many of the most popular narratives around hyperventilation protocols, he suggested, had been scientifically sloppy. Profound experiences were often described as the result of “more oxygen” in the body, or even linked to dramatic claims about endogenous DMT. But van der Meulen pointed instead toward the harder, less romantic mechanics of altered blood gases, shifts in blood pressure and reduced oxygen delivery to the brain.
The point was not to diminish the experience. It was to describe it honestly.
Such scrutiny matters in a field where spiritual language, personal testimony and commercial incentive can easily outrun evidence. Van der Meulen did not argue against wonder. He argued against false explanation.
Chasing The Low, Not The High
Perhaps the most striking turn in the talk was his refusal of the perpetual peak. In a culture that prized highs, breakthroughs and elevated states, he urged the opposite.
“Instead of chasing the high, we should start chasing the low,” he said. “We should look at the shadows within ourselves that allow us to be kinder, more compassionate, and more present with the people around us.”
This was not a call to misery, but to depth. Expanded consciousness, in his framing, was not valuable because it delivered spectacle. It was valuable if it helped people face what they habitually avoided: vulnerability, confusion, grief, ego, need. The work was not merely to feel transcendent, but to become more humane.
Van der Meulen framed this with unusual humility for a stage often populated by high-performance rhetoric. “Who is the person that knows the way on the mountain the best?” he asked. “It is the person who got lost on that mountain the most. I see myself as just another human trying to learn from his mistakes.”
The line gave the talk its moral center. The guide was not the flawless expert but the fallible practitioner, someone who had mistaken intensity for wisdom before learning that the harder task was self-honesty.
Back To First Principles
A recurring theme in the presentation was the need to move beyond branded methods and polarized camps by returning to foundational biological principles. In a crowded health landscape, van der Meulen argued, people could easily get lost in competing tribes: medical versus holistic, scientific versus spiritual, technology versus tradition.
His answer was not to pick a side but to look beneath them. Follow any technique, he suggested, down to its source and one eventually arrived at the same terrain: physiology, neurochemistry, environment, attention, behavior, meaning.
That approach allowed for discernment without cynicism. It invited practitioners to ask not whether a method belonged to a preferred ideology, but whether it cohered with how human beings actually worked.
Meeting Yourself Where You Are
The deepest promise of breath, in van der Meulen’s account, was neither ecstasy nor efficiency. It was self-attunement.
“Simply meet yourself where you are and give yourself what you need,” he said. “Connect to your breath, go inward, and ask: who am I in this moment? Acknowledge the human that you are and give yourself what you need from there.”
It was an unexpectedly tender conclusion for a biohacking summit. Yet perhaps that was precisely why it landed. In an era that had monetized optimization to the point of exhaustion, van der Meulen offered something both older and more radical: the possibility that consciousness expanded not when people conquered themselves, but when they stopped fleeing themselves.
At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Kasper van der Meulen did not merely speak about breathwork as a tool for better performance. He presented it as a discipline of truthfulness, a bridge between science and interior life, and a way of turning personal regulation into collective care.
The message lingered because it refused the easiest fantasy. The body did not need to become superhuman to matter. It needed to become understood.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam