Breathwork: Therapy for Good Health, Healing, and Relaxation
Breathwork therapy is an unfamiliar concept for many people yet one that could be of great use to a large percentage of the population. Therapeutic practices can involve slow, deep breathing exercises to produce a relaxation response, rapid breaths associated with holotropic breathing, or a combination of inhalation and exhalation techniques for rebirthing purposes.
Breathwork therapists might find themselves working with a variety of patients. While an athlete could benefit from therapy focusing on breathwork by increasing their overall endurance, a stay-at-home mother of five young children could utilize breath therapy and her breathing cushion from prenatal classes to lower her consistently high stress level. People who are experiencing ill health, including but not limited to asthmatics, lung cancer patients, or chronic fatigue sufferers, could also potentially improve their medical condition with the aid of deep breathing exercises. Even healthy individuals can benefit from a regular routine of deep respiration exercises while lying on a therapeutic breathing cushion or pillow.
Holotropic breathwork therapy, created by Dr. Stanislav Grof, a Czech-American psychiatrist, has been described as 'intense and deep psychotherapy" that allows an individual to experience not only repressed feelings and events about their current life, but also past lives and "transpersonal" lives outside of one's realm such as an inanimate object or a mythical being. Holotropic therapists provide a safe atmosphere for these events to surface without imposing a specific framework like many other forms of therapy.
Rebirthers provide what would perhaps be best described as a less intense and less in-depth version of holotropic therapy. Rebirthing, a therapy developed over twenty years ago by Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray, uses breathing exercises, both deep and shallow, to assist a person in addressing and releasing retained traumatic memories on many levels. Through "conscious connected breathing" or the "circular breath," people can come to terms with their initial birth, which is often the most traumatic event of many people's lives, and one that prevents them from reaching their fullest potential.
Grab your breathing cushion, take a deep breath, and start your search for a breathwork therapist today. A new world awaits you and it's only a few breaths away.
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