How VICE manipulated my personal experience

How a personal therapy session became ‘The Best High of My Life’ .

Sit straight and take a deep breath for four seconds. Hold the air for seven seconds and breath out for eight. (Photo by Fabian Møller on Unsplash)

I’m writing this because of controlled breathing, but I have a hard time controlling my breath while writing this.

So let me please share a very simple technique to reduce stress and induce compassion, before I continue to tell my story about a mystical experience that was turned into a misinterpreted sensation in the hands of strangers.

This tip goes out to myself, the reader and all the editors at the international edition of VICE:

Sit straight and take a deep breath for four seconds. Hold the air for seven seconds and breath out for eight. Repeat.

Pleasant, isn’t it? I probably should’ve done this before I wrote an editor of VICE an email with a long list of all the manipulative changes and pure imaginations added to my piece on a therapeutic breathwork session I went to in Denmark.

All this just to spice and clear up something mystical in its core: A mind altering experience.

If my anger was only about my own pride, I wouldn’t be publishing this. I’m also writing this because I care about journalistic ethics, I care about the subject I’m writing about (the therapeutic and spiritual potential of mystical experiences), and no editor should ever be allowed to jeopardize this with platitudes about highs and drugs.

If I was breathing properly now, I probably wouldn’t be angry about the fact that five days after the article was published, corrections still weren’t made. According to the international version of VICE, my experience with breathwork is still ‘The Best High of My Life’. As participants in this session we are still ‘hyperventilating our way to what’s supposedly going to be the best high of our lives’ and disciples of breathwork still ‘believe it offers a much more powerful high and won’t fuck with your mind the way drugs might’.

The problem is I never wrote these words, because no one said them. Not even in Danish, because these sentences were never in the translation to English. These sentences were invented by an editor, who thereby jeopardizes the trust between me and my sources, and I’m not surprised that this is the most liked comment on their Facebook post about my breathwork experience:

It’s even better with a belt looped around your neck and your hand on your dick.

I believe that VICE is fostering comments like that with their rethoric, and I think we need a debate about their editiorial standards.

I understand the need to serve catchy and SEO friendly titles to an attention disturbed audience, but please don’t make mystical experiences more mystical than they already are. Don’t glorify them, don’t ridicule them. They are some of the reasons why I would never describe a mystical experience as a ‘high’, why I would never compare breathwork with drugs on a scale of ‘highness’, and why I would never state for how long I cry — losing your perception of time is one of the usual side effects of doing breathwork.

I’m writing this five days after an English version of my story on breathwork was translated by an editor at the Danish edition of VICE and was then manipulated and published at the majestic international version with more than 7.6 million followers on Facebook, some 1.8 on Twitter.

To a Danish writer that’s a lot, and to tell the truth I was awestruck at the prospect of having my first article reach such an audience. I was so excited to be published at VICE that I ignored the fact that I wouldn’t get paid more than the initial fee I got from the Danish publication. I was so happy that I even agreed to write a whole new paragraph for the English edition.

The editors asked for it.

They also asked for this rant. After having seen the article being posted on the international Facebook page of VICE with the invented text ‘I cried for 15 minutes straight’, I asked the editors for corrections. I personally wrote the editor from the English language version, who had asked me to write an extra paragraph, but I never got an answer.

My Danish editor from VICE Denmark got an answer. My Danish editor from VICE Denmark got an answer, but the answers he sent me was kind of surprising, because they admitted to having made the changes, but didn’t want to correct them all. And they never apologized:

- We will say that he cried, but not for 15 minutes.

- Similarly, we won’t say that the best feeling of his life was when he went full in with the laughter.

- We stand by the title because he claims in the opening paragraphs that a breath therapy trip is more powerful than any psychedelic drugs.

The problem again is, I never wrote this. In the opening paragraphs of the Danish version, I cite the facilitator of the session of saying:

‘I’ve experienced people go deeper with their breath than they’ve done with ayahuasca’.

Breathwork is a more powerful experience for your body than psychedelics are, I wrote, because you really have to put an effort in to make it work.

I guess those comments were the reason I supposedly had the best high of my life, and that disciples think breathwork offers a more powerful high and won’t fuck with my mind the way drugs might.

I know that later the international VICE editor wrote to my Danish editor that freelancers should be prepared for their text being changed, paragraphs being deleted and details getting lost in translation. Furthermore I got the message that they still wouldn’t change the title about having the best high of my life, because they claim the editorial right to keep it this way.

To me that message was just sad. I have a good relationship with my Danish editor at VICE Denmark, who always send me a preview of the edited text before it’s published — especially when it’s a personal piece like this one. But I found out — at least in my case — this is not the editorial standard, when VICE is translating an article from one of the 34 subeditions all around the world.

I was sad to learn that a publication I admire for it’s courage to cover stories no other media would cover, would manipulate a personal experience just to make a clearer message to the reader. Like sharing the article five times on Twitter accompanied with five different versions of made up comments about my experience.

Sit straight and take a deep breath for four seconds. Hold the air for seven seconds and breath out for eight. Repeat.

Ahhh. I mustn’t forget the last part. The part about VICE deleting the last section of my piece and adding their own analysis of my personal experience. In the original article I explained that even though I went through strong emotions of sorrow and laughter, I ended up with having an experience of an empty mind doing breathwork. I had no thoughts, and by citing scientific research I compared my experience to similar experiences of ‘nothing’ while going through the therapy.

I referred to the term ‘Turiya’, and I explained it like this:

Turiya is a Hindu concept of consciousness between thoughts. It is an expression of silence and a higher consciousness than the waking state.

It is the purest form of consciousness, an expression of being one with all and everything, and it serves as a backdrop for all three forms of consciousness: the awake, the dreamy and the one in deep sleep.

I think I have been to the land of Turiya and I have returned as a lighter man in both body and mind.

All my descriptions of experiencing ‘nothingness’ were removed, and I understand nothing of the fact that an editor sees himself — or herself — capable of completely changing the ending paragraphs of a very personal piece to this:

I can’t say for sure what exactly happened to me in this Holotropic Breathing session, but I feel lighter in both body and mind. I also experienced emotions I never knew I had, or knew how to get in touch with, just by flexing my lungs over a techno beat.

VICE claimed that the experience of nothingness and the explanation of Turiya weren’t adding to the story. They claimed my personal mystery of having no thoughts to be irrelevant and therefore worthy of a complete makeover.

I learned from my experience with breathwork that it feels fulfilling to express emotions that emerges in a controlled environment. I learned that with the use of your breath you can open your body to hidden feelings like anger, and you release that anger by expressing it. I’m expressing my anger now, but I do hope that this rant leads to more than an empty mind. I hope it leads to a reckoning with the editorial standards at international VICE, just as breathwork made me release some of the sorrow and anger I unwittingly carried around in me.

Maybe the editors at international VICE just can’t see the problem with editing reality into fitting a tasty Twitter text. If not, at least embrace yourself with this simple breathing technique:

Sit straight and take a deep breath for four seconds. Hold the air for seven seconds and breath out for eight. Repeat.

NOTE 1: VICE hasn’t responded to my offer to comment on this article before its publication. I will add it if I recieve a comment.

NOTE 2: After a week VICE made corrections to both the American and the British version of the article. They removed the comments that ‘I cry for 15 minutes straight’ and that about the laughter ‘which makes me feel as good as I’ve ever felt’. They made some corrections and added this text at the bottom of the article: “Correction: A previous version of this article wrongly stated that the author took part in a Holotropic Breath Therapy session.”

Link to the Danish version of the mentioned article: www.vice.com/da/article/mb7zey/jeg-hyperventilerede-mig-til-psykedelisk-ekstase-i-et-selskabslokale-i-aarhus

Link to the original version of the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20180207174847/https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/mb7zey/breath-therapy-gave-me-the-best-high-of-my-life