I’ve been reminding myself to breathe for more than thirty years, and I still forget! Obviously, I don’t forget to breathe completely, but I often find myself breathing shallowly, especially at times of stress or impatience.

Breathing consciously is the simplest, most immediate way to change consciousness and feel better. Try it now — take a long, slow, deep breath in — starting all the way down at your belly, and all the way up to the top of your chest. Now hold it for a few seconds. Now release the breath, and with it, anything else you need to release.

When we are stressed, or frustrated, we habitually tend to breath in shorter, shallower breaths. Noticing this, and consciously deepening and slowing the breath, can have a powerful effect. I suspect we all know this – and…it’s the consciousness of breathing incompletely, and the realization of the need to breathe more fully, that is more difficult to come by. That’s why I need the reminder, too.

Every morning, before getting out of bed, I practice a few minutes of conscious, “connected” breathing, in which the inhalation and exhalation are connected – meaning there is no “normal” pause between the two. This type of breathing brings an enormous amount of oxygen, and an corresponding amount of energy (what the yogis call “prana”, and the Chinese “chi”) into the body. This is the best way I know to wake up. Not to say I don’t want/need my tea or coffee too, but I wouldn’t miss my “huffing and puffing” (as my wife calls it) for anything except a bona fide emergency.

Connected breathing has been practiced in most “primitive” cultures for thousands of years. Its recent resurgence in western culture been called different things – Holotropic breathing, (as named by Stanislaw Grof) Rebirthing, Vivation, etc. I don’t much like naming this practice in this way, as I think it can limit us in how we see our breathing practice, and it also smacks of “branding” a widespread, free, traditional spiritual practice. I think the main reason this breathing often came to be known as rebirthing is because people who did it often noticed that their birth or extremely early buried traumas came up. My conviction is that the breath creates a healing/releasing energy which goes where it needs to go for re-activation and healing.

We do an extended version of this type of breathing in the Lifetools workshop, and it is the part of the weekend that most people say they find both the most challenging and the most rewarding. The energy created by the breath seems to go wherever it needs to to show us where we need to heal – whether that be in the physical, emotional, mental or spiritual bodies. Consequently, pain can be brought up. The interesting phenomenon here, however, is that the pain can usually be released by continuing to breathe in the same pattern with focus on the area of discomfort. In many cases, a buried negative or limiting thought may be uncovered, allowing the breather to work with releasing/healing

I would like to recommend a couple of great books on the subject — first, “Breathing” by my friend Michael Sky, and “Conscious Breathing” by Gay Hendricks, Ph.D

Happy breathing!