“Every breath is a pearl”
“Take a deep breath”,“exhale slowly”,“1-2-3-4-hold”... maybe one of these instructions
sounds familiar to you. Whether in primary school, a Yoga or Pilates class or a
management seminar – more and more people are being told how to breathe. And yet,
breathing happens on its own…or does it?
by Nicola Caroli
Early forms of breathwork
What the ancient breath teachings had in common was the knowledge that the breath was
of central importance for physical, emotional and mental health. The different practices
were part of a spiritual way of being and living in the world and were taught in the frame of
a master-student relationship.
The earliest known form of breathwork was Vedic Yoga from India in the sixth and fifth
centuries BCE. It consisted of mantras, breathing exercises and meditation. The breathing
exercises concerned awareness of the breath, the breath’s movements through different
spaces in the body, the different directions it takes, and breath as a mediator between the
material and the spiritual world.
From Vedic Yoga developed Classical Yoga, with its science of breathing called
“Pranayama” that included many different types of breath techniques. Prana means “life
force” as well as “breath”. The Pranayama exercises explore the breath’s potential as in
“Alternate Nostril Breathing”, where one inhales through one nostril and exhales through
another, in “Khumbaka”, where one holds the breath, or in the firebreath, a strong
breathing using the abdominal muscles. Furthermore there are many different types of
Yoga with their corresponding breathing exercises.
Buddhist breath practices such as Vipassana meditation or Zazen meditation focus more
on the awareness of breath, as the nature of breath is regarded as a teacher of the nature
of life itself.
Breath = energy flow
In the Taoist teachings from China in the fourth to fifth BCE, the body was also seen as a
vessel for the breath, and the living being as a vessel for divine consciousness. The breath
is synonymous with energy that flows as cosmic breath from the outside to inside where it
circulates as inner breath in the body. The Taoist breathwork known as Tuna includes
awareness of the breath – “Dantian breathing” – which can roughly be described as belly
breathing and “embryonic breathing”, which has a fine, inner quality. There is also a type of
circular breathing which is known as “microcosmic orbit breathing”.
Tuna is part of Qigong, a moving meditation which strengthens and balances the entire
organism by coordinating breath and movement. As in ancient Greek or Vedic medicine, in
Traditional Chinese Medicine all disturbance of health lies in a disturbance of “energy flow”
which is synonymous with breath. Thus breathwork is an integral part of Chinese and Far
Eastern life. This includes martial arts like Tai Qi and Aikido, which depend on the
knowledge of the nature of breath to respond efficiently and effectively to the everchanging circumstances in a combat situation.
Breath practices were part of every spiritual practice including the mystic traditions of the
monotheistic religions. The chanting of root consonants, vowels, holy names and words,
often with accompanying movements and gestures, made up the components of prayer. In
Taoism there are the “Six Healing Sounds” for certain organs. In the Sufist “Dhikr”, holy
consonants and words are sounded during the inhale as well as the exhale which, through
overbreathing (hyperventilation, namely, breathing in excess of the body’s needs) and
repetition, induces a trance-like state. Jewish mystics count the length of the exhale while
sounding a letter according to its numerical value.
The breath was and is in many traditions the key to all aspects of health, the development
of consciousness and the connection with divine powers. Since to the ancients these
central areas of life were one, they could be explored, supported and cultivated by working
with the breath.
Breath awareness
One way to explore and cultivate breath is breath awareness. By being an objective
witness of the breath’s activity, one can learn to understand the nature of life. Just as life is
given without having been earned, breath flows by itself. The way that one is able to
experience and accept life as a gift also governs how one lives – with oneself and with
others. Through being aware of the breath one connects with the rhythms of nature that
were understood by our ancestors to be divine rhythms. The breath teaches one to accept
the continual change and transience of all living entities. This acceptance creates
peacefulness and ease. When one is aware of the breath, one experiences the reality that
breathing is an exchange between outside and inside, between others and oneself. There
increasingly lost their connection to the rhythms of nature through industrialisation and the
corresponding mechanisation of living beings, and thus to their own rhythms – and the
best indicator of one’s own natural rhythm is the breath. Whether one is physically,
mentally or emotionally stimulated, challenged, balanced, etc. is mirrored in the breath. If
one doesn’t pay attention to the breath, however, one doesn’t notice or kind of “misses”
the state one is in. The idea behind natural breathwork is thus to get in touch with oneself
via breathing and in this way to re-learn natural breathing. The most important aspect is to
let the breath proceed naturally and to consciously allow it to do so, handing over the
inhaling and exhaling and simply letting it happen. This letting go was and still is the be-all
and end-all of all natural breathwork.
Allowing the breath
The gymnastics teacher Elsa Gindler taught how to allow breathing by focusing on the
interplay of release and tension in breath and movement. She was said to have healed her
tuberculosis by breathing with her healthy lung and letting the diseased lung rest. The
singer Cornelis Veening from the Netherlands found his voice again when he learned from
the speech and voice experts Clara Schlaffhorst and Hedwig Andersen to wait for and
follow the breath impulse. His conclusion was “It’s not about communicating a certain way
of breathing but to accept the breath as it shows itself.” He taught how to allow the breath
in a combination of psychotherapy, the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung and Gustav Heyer,
and Taoist breathing practices. Veening’s most famous students were Herta Grun, who
continued his teachings, and Ilse Middendorf, who was active in Berlin for many years and
developed her own method “The Perceptible Breath”. Ilse Middendorf, coming like Herta
Grun from gymnastics, realised that it was vital to enable people to re-connect with their
bodies in order to be able to perceive the breath. She taught her students to experience
the body as a space and to make it permeable to the breath, mainly through simple
movements that strengthen sensation and support breath function. One example is rolling
on the sitting bones while sitting, which grounds the pelvis while creating flexibility in the
lumbar spine, facilitating more space for the breath movement in the lower torso.
Belly breathing
The allowed breath is synonymous with natural breathing and diaphragmatic (belly)
breathing, as was already recognised by ancient cultures. Since the way one breathes
directly affects all aspects of being – and vice versa – breathwork is a necessity as well as
a great challenge. Necessary because most people suffer from a host of anxiety disorders
and unexplained symptoms which correlate with unhealthy breathing patterns and
overbreathing. And challenging because when one allows the breath, emotions and
sensations arise which previously went completely unnoticed or were perceived in a
different way. When one releases the exhale, for example, and waits until the next inhale
comes by itself, a space opens up that can be perceived as emptiness. This emptiness
can be experienced as finality or infinity and confronts one with corresponding fears. If one
finds it difficult to release the exhale one also cannot allow the inhale (and vice versa). So
an “air hunger” can ensue which motivates one to draw in breath through the nose or the
mouth in order to get more air. Both ways lead to chest- instead of belly breathing and
chronic overbreathing, which causes chaos in the homeostasis of the organism. In
traditional breathwork, natural breathing was the prerequisite for breath exercises, where
the diaphragm is trained or the breathing musculature is used to cleanse the body
internally. Natural breathing goes hand in hand with healthy breath coordination. When the
breathing musculature and the musculature connected with it are tense, belly breathing
becomes impossible. Movement and also manual therapy use gently releasing or
stimulating methods such as, for example, stretching the musculature around the shoulder
blades or swinging around one’s axis, to create more flexibility around the ribcage. But
there are also more explosive methods, as in transformative breathwork.
All types of transformational breathwork use overbreathing to different degrees to access a
non-ordinary state of consciousness and thus bring about a cathartic release of individual
or collective unconscious experience and connect with divine and/or natural forces.
Transformative breathing
Already almost 100 years ago the psychiatrist and sexual explorer Wilhelm Reich
recognised that traumatic events become trapped in the musculature – he called this
“character armor”. It not only inhibits natural breathing but creates tense breathing
patterns, such as shallow breathing in order to avoid experiencing painful emotions. To
soften the armor, he worked with intentional overbreathing among other methods. In
intentional overbreathing one breathes in and out energetically, without a pause. On the
one hand this releases emotions that are locked in the breathing musculature; on the other
hand it reduces cognitive processes by lowering CO2 levels. In this way individual or
collective traumata can be released and a connection with the inherent divine or natural
forces can be made. Wilhelm Reich was one of the pioneers of transformative breathwork
in the West but transformative breathing itself was part of many old traditions. The
rhythmic speaking without interruption and/or rhythmic movement as in Sufi dance or the
energetic inhale in shamanic trance dance were based on the effects of overbreathing.
Leonard Orr, the founder of “Rebirthing”, used it in modern times to work through the
traumata of one’s own birth experience. The psychiatrist Dr Stanislav Grof, who founded
Holotropic Breathwork, also discovered that extreme overbreathing can have similar
effects to LSD-based psychedelic therapy. When the use of LSD became illegal in the US,
he discovered that one could achieve a similar effect through breathing. Holotropic
breathing goes beyond re-experiencing of birth- related and biographical events and
touches on transpersonal phenomena.
Breath as a resource
No matter how effective transformative breathing and other types of breathing techniques
can be – from holding the breath to counting the seconds during breathing – they
voluntarily intervene in the autonomic breath regulation and are thus controversial.
Because one uses the breath without having first become acquainted with or having
consciously experienced it – in its natural, as well as in its disturbed form – this can be
harmful or even dangerous. Controlling the breath for someone who is already very
controlled is an added burden, whereas for someone who is very unstable, extreme
overbreathing can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The breath is the richest resource for physical, mental and emotional health that we have.
As Sufi wisdom says: “Every breath is a pearl of incalculable value. Be watchful and guard
every breath well.”
Thanks to Jane Egginton, Dr Christopher Gilbert and Silke Schulze for their input.
Nicola Caroli is a breath teacher and poetry facilitator in Berlin
[email protected]
www.creativebreathing.net
Recommended Reading:
Ilse Middendorf: The perceptible breath, A breathing science, Junfermann Verlag 2007
Leon Chaitow, Dinah Bradley, Christopher Gilbert: Recognizing and Treating Breathing
Disorders, Churchill Livingstone 2014
Sharon G.Mijares (Editor): The Revelation Of The Breath, Excelsior Editions, State
University of New York Press, Albany 2009
Dennis Lewis: The Tao of Natural Breathing, Rodmell Press, Berkley, California 2006
Jörg Engelsing
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