Integration in Breathwork

What does integration mean when we talk about “integrative” breathwork?

In my “Manual of Breath Therapy” (2004, in German) I have described the meaning of “integrative” on four levels:

“In conscious breathing, the intimate engagement of body and soul/spirit occurs.

In letting the breath happen, scattered, disparate parts of the inner life find each other. As the spiritual realm encounters the physical body, the areas of experience that have become separated from each other in the course of personal development also reconnect.

From a methodological point of view, the aim is to create the best possible conditions for this reunion and finding oneself in the therapeutic process, with the breath as the center and other methods of experience as additional aids. If possible and appropriate, the experience of breathing should be placed in a larger context in order to open up a broader and more multidimensional approach to the areas of psychological problems.

Integrative Breath Therapy uses the broad spectrum of methods that come from various schools of breathwork. The method of choice is found by taking into account the personality, the inner state of development and the physical suitability of the clients and is varied according to the development of the therapeutic process.” (p. 96)

I would like to explain these levels in more detail here.

Ad 1): When we breathe consciously, we not only feel our body through the incoming and outgoing flow of air, but also ourselves in the act of breathing. We are therefore more deeply and intimately connected with ourselves when we are aware of our breathing than when our senses are directed outwards or our thoughts are focused on something. In the moment of conscious breathing, we are one with ourselves; we experience ourselves as an integral whole.

Ad 2): When we engage in a longer breathing process, as it happens, for example, in a connected breathing session, we experience more of ourselves and come into contact with parts of ourselves on different levels. Coming into contact means that something that was previously separated reunites. As I would like to explain, such separations or divisions at the soul level are the result of traumatic experiences. The re-encounter with earlier experiences, which have been stored in the subconscious, increases and broadens our wholeness, our inner togetherness. White or gray spots on the inner map become colorful again.

Ad 3a): The breathing process in a breathwork session is always embedded in the context of the therapeutic relationship between the person breathing and the person accompanying the breather. These two people are connected to each other through breathing, but also through the communicative field they have created together. We assume that an exchange between these persons also takes place on a subconscious level. This interaction can be noticed in the fact we often hear that the therapist can perceive the needs of the person breathing without a verbal exchange taking place. The reason for this intimate form of communication could be that breathing together creates a shared vibration between the two people, a field of resonance in which information flows back and forth.

Ad 3b.): In addition, this aspect of integration includes a practical part of the therapeutic work: during the breathing process, there is a space in which other helpful and effective methods can be applied. First of all, there is the whole area of physical interventions, touching, applying pressure, massage-like relaxation, etc. In addition, there are verbal messages that can be used to provide reassurance or encouragement. If the client comes to the breathing session with an issue, she can also be supported with phrases that help to resolve the issue. For example, if she is afraid of an upcoming job interview, the therapist might say, “You'll do great. Believe in yourself and your abilities.” Or: ”As you breathe in, feel the strength to take control of your life, and as you breathe out, let go of your fear.”

Ad 3c.): The presence of the companion is another influential factor that should not be underestimated. Someone who follows the unfolding inner experiences with a non-judgmental and attentive attitude, without interfering with their own intentions, represents a person that everyone would have wished for as a parent in childhood. With this attitude, it becomes possible to compensate for emotional deficiencies from childhood, especially on the communicative level, and to create the inner space for new relationship patterns. Integration here means that the experience of a new relationship model overwrites the relationship concepts adopted from childhood and incorporates them into the overall complex of the soul.

Ad 3d.): Finally, this point also includes everything that is used as a method after the end of the breathing process. The aim here is to familiarize other areas of the inner self with the new experiences so that the deeper insights into one's own soul life can be connected with what is already well-known. These areas include the mental, the visual and the symbolic level. The transfer of the new insights to different levels of the soul ensures that these experiences can have a lasting effect and that old, no longer useful patterns in these areas are weakened or overwritten. The more sensory modalities that are actively included in the healing process, the more anchors are planted in the various departments of our brain and soul. Examples for these ways to integration are drawing, painting or working with clay; creative processes that enable the right hemisphere of the brain to process and integrate the breathing experience. Writing also supports the integration process.

Ad 3e.): These integrative activations are about creating connections and links where there have been fault lines running through the landscape of the soul. Traumatic injuries cause interruptions, i.e. discontinuities within the psyche. There is a before and an after, and in between there is a gap. The before was still good, while the after is dark. The reason for the deterioration is hidden because it had to be split off due to its intensity of pain and fear. All experiences that had to be suppressed because of their intensity and could not be integrated leave white (or black) spots in the course of one’s life story. Due to trauma, the narrative flow, which normally links the events and forms the meaningful whole of a continuous life experience, disintegrates into incoherent parts. In moments of healing, it is possible to reintegrate previously excluded experiences, that is, to integrate them into the context of one’s life. In a sense, the flow of breathing, which guarantees and represents the continuity of life but which faltered and was interrupted at the moment of traumatization, is restored retrospectively.

Ad 4): Modalities of Breathing

In this context, integrative breathing means that the modalities of breathing are adapted to the client as opposed to adapting the client's breathing to a predetermined form of breathing. So initially there is no right or wrong breathing, but the breathing of the breathing person as it is. The facilitator may sense or notice that the breathing is restricted, held back or blocked in one way or another, but he does not intervene immediately. Instead, he allows the breather to have time to perceive for herself how her breathing flows or falters, and to allow the breath to unfold its effects within the breathing person. So trusting the power of the breath is at the center of integrative breathwork, and not the ideas, expectations or self-experienced notions of ideal breathing of the facilitator. Integrative breathing is about self-experienced breathing, how it works in the moment and how it changes when it gets the attention of the breathing person.

Relying on the breath as such means that no special knowledge about optimal breathing is needed to bring the healing power of the breath into effect. Methods, such as physical interventions, massage techniques or other means to bring breathing into a desired or expected form, are initially unnecessary; the idea is rather that breathing itself comes closer to its best form when it gets the space to do so. This space is created by the attention of the person breathing to their breathing and by the compassionate presence of the facilitator.

Better and Worse Breathing

Sometimes clients come to me with the question of what the right or optimal breathing would be. An integrative view of breathing implies that there is a suitable breathing for each situation, but no generally valid form of breathing for all times. Our breathing reacts automatically to our current state and the level of activity in which we find ourselves. It constantly adapts to the needs of our body and soul.

At the same time, we notice that this adaptation works better or worse. Often our breathing is too shallow and too fast for the needs of the current situation, as a result of acquired dysfunctional breathing habits. This kind of breathing provides us with enough oxygen to ensure our survival, in other words, with a minimum to enable us to carry out our activities. But it does not promote lasting health and well-being.

Respiratory therapy in the narrower sense begins where blockages and restrictions of breathing become conscious and the accompanying person can offer support from their own knowledge and from their own experiences of the possibilities of breathing, in order to resolve the obstacles that stand in the way of deeper, fuller and slower breathing.

As we know, shallow and rapid breathing is always stressful breathing, which in many people has become chronic over the years, often starting in childhood. They suffer from stress all the time, although they hardly notice it anymore because it has become a habit. In these cases, the organism is constantly in a survival mode, and this mode drains the energy reserves of the body and psyche without contributing to regeneration and replenishment of the energy depots. Shallow and rapid breathing is an indication that the person is exhausting their resources, which will sooner or later create physical or emotional problems. The unused potential in terms of depth and slowing down breathing leads to stiffness and rigidity in the respiratory muscles. In addition, shock experiences or emotional injuries, e.g. through humiliation or embarrassment, lead to a reduction in breathing depth and thus to an acceleration, which further inhibits the breathing and restricts its mobility and flexibility. These inhibitions can even develop when someone has experienced as a child that their liveliness was not appreciated by their parents; to adapt to this condition, there is the simple option of reducing the tidal volume, and suddenly less vital energy is available. Traumatic experiences, which are often accompanied by breathing interruptions, have an even more detrimental effect on breathing. Many people therefore carry deficit breathing patterns from their childhood with them, which have become chronic and sooner or later express themselves in various health problems.

The relaxation and flexibilization of the breathing musculature, especially of the diaphragm and the intercostal muscles, which can be achieved in breathing therapy, leads to more freedom in breathing and to open up for its various possibilities. This is the type of breathing that we can use to best strengthen our own health and ability to regenerate. Often, clients have difficulty breathing in slowly and evenly or breathing out in a relaxed manner. Both abilities are accessible when the respiratory muscles become more flexible. This allows the parasympathetic nervous system to become more effective, in turn helping to decelerate and relax one’s breathing. It is the same with yoga asanas: with continued practice, the corresponding muscles and tissues grow and become more supple, increasing flexibility and mobility. In addition, the fasciae of the respiratory muscles are activated and invigorated, making them softer and loosening adhesions.

Regularly practiced breathing exercises and longer breathing sessions help to activate and train the respiratory muscles and the fascia tissues involved, increasing blood flow and improving performance, both in terms of breathing depth and in regulating breathing speed from very slow to fast. Muscles and tissued that are used in their various ways become more powerful and flexible. In this way, we integrate the diversity and variability that is inherent in our breathing.

With well-stretchable respiratory muscles, a wide variety of breathing exercises can be practiced effortlessly. These exercises are available in large numbers and all have specific benefits. Some of them are described according to Indian or Chinese tradition, for example in terms of their effects on the chakras or the meridians. Many of them lead to scientifically measurable improvements, for example in blood circulation, stress relief or sleep quality.

Integration with the Self

Here we have described the integration of physiology and health. With breathing, which we can consciously influence, control and train, we have a regulatory process at hand, that we can use again and again to come into harmony with ourselves. This is an important prerequisite for the lasting health of our organism. If we act against our body, i.e. take actions that harm it, we come into conflict with ourselves. We are separated from ourselves, disintegrated, split off. Then we not only feel uncomfortable, but also exert a strain on our physical health.

With conscious breathing, we integrate ourselves, thus coming to inner unity and often to a deep connection with ourselves. The intact self-relationship is the basis for our mental well-being and our organic flourishing. Peace reigns within us, and in times of peace all our powers and abilities can develop at their best. On the physiological level, this state of integration manifests itself in a high degree of coherence, that is, in uniform rhythms or vibrations in various regulatory systems in the body – breathing, heartbeat, blood circulation, autonomic nervous system and cranio-sacral fluid.

The self-connection that is created through breathing exists independently of whether we are aware of it at the moment or not. This attunement even takes place during sleep. But when we consciously breathe, our consciousness is also included in this harmony and we live from the core of our wholeness.

Breathing and Integration of the Environment

With every inbreath we take in the outer air and with our exhalation we expel the inner air. We are in a constant exchange with the medium that permanently surrounds us and represents our elixir of life. Through breathing, we are in touch with our environment in every moment. In a continuous flow, we give and take in the form of inhaled and exhaled air. Air is our primary outside world, which we turn into our inside by inhaling and turn it back to the outside by exhaling. The air gives us our first and most important information about the outside: temperature, quality, odours and other atmospheric messages that have an immediate influence on our experience. With breathing, the inner and the outer world integrate into a vibrant unity.

Body Contact in Breathwork

The need for physical contact is deeply human and anchored in our body, which responds to gentle touches with the release of endorphins and oxytocin. Research has shown that tender touch reduces stress and strengthens the immune system. And all those who go to cuddling parties, contact improvisations or Biodanza help this need, which is perhaps lost more and more in the modern world.

In the very early stages of our lives, touch is vital.  The sense of touch is regarded as the first of all human senses. It is developed in the womb even before the embryo is two centimetres tall. It has been observed that an embryo reacts to first contact stimuli as early as the eighth week of pregnancy, long before it can hear or see. Premature babies lying in incubators gain more weight if they are massaged regularly. Infants, on the other hand, develop less well if they are embraced by anyone.

We all have a history with touching and being touched, body contact, closeness and distance, from very early on, with many imprints. We have memories of pleasant, lustful, calming and connecting touches, but also of painful, inappropriate, insensitive or violent physical contact.

Body Contact in Breathwork

In many schools of breathwork, body interventions play an important role, while there are others where this is not used at all. This article is about gaining an insight into the complexity of this issue and sharpening the sensitivity for this area of therapeutic interaction.

The Role of Interventions in Conscious Breathing

When we engage in a process of conscious breathing and deepen and accelerate breathing, we enter into an unpredictable inner state. Because by changing the metabolism through breathing as if we were exerting ourselves physically, even though we lie quietly on a mat, a chaotic state arises in some systems of the body. The further course of a session cannot be planned and foreseen in advance, but is always good for surprises. This phenomenon characterizes the special power of breathing sessions. Existing patterns on the physiological as well as on the emotional and cognitive level get shattered and have to be reassembled afterwards. This is the experience of being born again, which gave the name to the method of Rebirthing. The therapeutic effect can be seen in the rise of suppressed or repressed material from the depths of the soul, due to pattern interruption. Then it can be accepted and integrated.

On the other hand, this power that is triggered by intensified breathing requires particularly careful and responsible form of guidance. The most important aspects the accompanying person should convey to the breathing person are trust and unrestricted presence without judgement, as well as caring for safety in the environment and keeping up with the breathing rhythm of the breather. These aspects describe the therapeutic attitude, i.e. the attitude that the therapist adopts towards the breathing person, granting her the security and confidence to engage in deeper feelings and difficult inner experiences.

In addition to these accompanying postures there are interventions with which the accompanying person influences the breathing process. These can be verbal (e.g. supporting or clarifying sentences) or physical measures. There are techniques that are taught in training and used in practice together with intuition. The forms and areas of application of body interventions are very different in the different breathing schools.

With these influences, three main purposes are pursued in practice:

1. Deepening and facilitating the flow of breath by eliminating physical blockages, tensions and inhibitions.
2. Bringing up feelings stored deeper in the unconsciousness.
3. Support, comfort and emotional nourishment. 

Releasing Breathing Blockages

On the one hand, physical contact helps in opening and releasing blockages of breathing, so that dysfunctional breathing habits, which have developed over years, can be changed. With the help of these interventions the respiratory flow should become freer and take up more space in the torso.  For example, pressure is exerted on the chest or loosening movements with the abdominal wall are applied. These procedures are comparable to the methods used by masseurs and physiotherapists. Through an external tactile influence, the body system of the person concerned should be brought back from a dysfunctional to a healthy state.

In this form of intervention, the therapist is the expert and the breather undergoes passive treatment. 

Bringing Feelings to Life

This aspect of touch is done with the intention of awakening feelings that are slumbering inside the breathing person so that they can be expressed and thus felt in their fullness and finally integrated. Feelings have their representation in the body, and the tactile contact to the corresponding areas can help to feel the emotion more clearly. It facilitates the external touch to maintain the connection with this area within the body from within. By strengthening the inner relationship, it is possible to experience and accept a feeling more deeply. In addition, the direct contact can support the easier acceptance of unpleasant and stressful feelings. Many of us have missed maternal or paternal strength and support we had needed as small children to learn to handle our emotions. These needs can be reactivated and appropriate touch can fill up the lack that is left from this early phase of life.

Processing Grief and Pain

Third, body contact can be used to help deal with grief and emotional pain. When we are confronted with deep pain, it is mostly about experiences of loss: Human contact has been lost or we have never received it in the way we would have needed it. At this point in the breathing process the touch by the accompanying person can help that the feeling of being alone or being left alone is not repeated. Touching can trigger the release of hormones that have a comforting and soothing effect. The contact gives the signal: "I am there and I am accompanying you through your pain". A negative experience of deficiency can be replaced by a new belief: "When I feel bad or sad, someone is there for me".

The Ambiguity of Touch

The nonverbal area contains a fundamental ambiguity. In the verbal field, it is often only with difficulties and via detours and feedback loops that unambiguous communication can be achieved. Especially in the area beyond words, there are many reasons for misunderstandings and unclarity. Every person brings along his or her own story touching and being touched, and with each touching and being touched this story unfolds its effects. Each part of the body is marked by individual experiences, which are often stored on several layers. When we touch a certain part of the body of another person, it is impossible to know in advance, which history we will activate with this touch, which memory will be released and which process will start. 

Let us take an example. The companion puts his hand on the head of the breather. This touch can evoke different associations and emotional memories. It can be a reminder of the unfulfilled longing from childhood to feel the loving and appreciative hand of one's own father on the head. But it can also remind us that it was the hand of an uncle who initiated an abusive situation with this gesture. Or it reactivates a disparaging patting touch, which was subtly experienced as unpleasant. 

One and the same touch can be experienced as a welcome, long missed confirmation or as a burdening and retraumatizing transgression of borders. The therapist cannot know beforehand what the client's touch will trigger, even if he already knows a great deal about her story. In the process of breathing, body memories are evoked that would otherwise slumber far below the surface of consciousness. Touching has a particularly profound effect, which is much more powerful than verbal intervention, because the memory is reactivated directly at the point of contact between body and body, without the brain interposing its capacities for memory and speech. 

The History of Body Contact

Touching is a primordial form of contact with the outside world. The first experiences are made in the womb, in contact with the uterine wall and in tactile touches coming from outside on the abdominal wall. During the birth the contact with the mother's organism in the birth canal intensifies dramatically. At the end of this process, the hands of an obstetrician and other contact experiences that are completely new for the experience of the tiny being usually come to the fore. 

When we imagine a baby (or ourselves as a baby), it immediately becomes clear that we all came into the world as highly sensitive beings. Anyone who has ever carried a newborn baby in their arms knows about the sensitivity and permeability of these tiny creatures.

Anyone who has ever carried a newborn baby in their arms knows about the sensitivity and permeability of these small creatures, who still have hardly any protective body boundaries. That is why touch that take place in this early phase are of enormous importance for the development of the world view, i.e. the image of the outside world. Is it friendly and attentive or rough, demanding and insensitive? Is my sensitivity respected or are the fine boundaries of my body overlooked and carelessly transgressed?

In this context it becomes clear that in this early phase of life, stronger, more powerful to coarse touch Aare totally unappropriate, but that a distinctive form of sensitivity is required in order to convey security and trust to the small being on the tactile level, qualities the baby needs to grow well inwardly. 

So if a breathing person is in this phase, an overly dosed intervention can have devastating consequences, because it repeats a too rough and therefore unconscious abusive experience of touch, thus confirming the original suffering instead of healing it. This means that the therapist must know exactly in which phase of life the client is currently in her regression in order to dose her touches correctly. Without intuitive clarity, it is better to hold back with interventions so as not to run the risk of causing lasting damage.

Particular caution is required in the abdominal area. The precious abdominal organs and the complex enteric nervous system that connects them, our enteric brain, are protected only by the abdominal wall, not like our head brain, which is surrounded by powerful skull bones. For example, a breathworker knows about acupressure points in the right upper abdomen which can alleviate depression according to the corresponding theory. But the breather is about to experience his or her vulnerability in a sensitive phase of his or her early history, so the applied pressure massage can be felt as a massive violent intrusion into his or her own body sphere.

All of us have a detailed and history of physical contact, reaching far back into early phases of life. This history is largely unconscious but nevertheless influences our lives. In the breathing session, in which we quickly find ourselves in a vulnerable state, in which our sensitivity is activated, it is particularly delicate whether and how we get touched. What one person experiences as a pleasant and invigorating touch can arrive at the other as a burden and as annoying and disturbing pressure. We have all been touched rudely, carelessly, negligently or roughly in the very early stages of our lives. Perhaps we were passed from adult to adult as a showpiece in a cheerful circle, shuffeled from one aura into the next in quick succession, and were completely overwhelmed and irritated by this mishmash of gifts and lovelessness.

Every single one of these experiences has left its mark and has been written down in our book of the history of body contact. Details and emotional contents of these memories can appear later during a physical intervention, relatively independent of the intention of the person applying the touch. 

Because if we are in a regressive state, which can appear quickly in a breathing session, we are much more sensitive than in everyday consciousness. We often receive surprising and sudden information that was previously inaccessible to us. Often this is information whose meaning cannot be immediately expressed in words and cognitively understood, but which is nevertheless immediately evident, present and real. In this state, touching is more intense and ambiguous than in an everyday situation, because the physical memory that stores early and earliest memories is more easily accessible. 

Free Flow and Intervention

It should be kept in mind that touching and other physical interventions guide the flow of information opened by breathing in a certain direction and, in some cases, manipulate it. Sometimes, they can come in appropriately if they focus the process of experience towards an important point of self-descovery; but they can also be experienced as strong disturbances and cross-border interventions if they do not fit the inner process and especially if they are applied insensitively. 

Here we can distinguish two types of disorder experienced by the breathing person: There are disturbances that shake the comfort zone, or disturbances that throw the deeper, autonomous process of experience off course and push it in an externally induced direction. 

The former are provocative interventions designed to interrupt a habitual pattern.In principle, such interventions are helpful because they help to release more energy and vitality. Although our inner self likes to react to impulses for change with resistance and perseverance, this barrier can be overcome more easily and quickly with targeted and empathetic interventions. The accompanying person is experienced as a support for a step of liberation, which often quickly takes off when the intervention corresponds to the self-healing tendency inside the respiratory and psycho-physical system.

Basically, the following principle should never be lost from sight that only resistances that have been previously respected and understood can be overcome sustainably. Resistances are protective mechanisms that were originally necessary and helpful for survival, as such they should be respected. A therapist who has internalized this attitude will always be attentive and empathetic in helping to dissolve resistances.

On the other hand, it should also be noted that any assault can be experienced as support or as a retraumatizing exercise of power. Depending on the situation, the accompanying person must ensure that the consequences of the intervention are dealt with in an integrative way. This includes a verbal exchange about the experience and the inner effect of the interventions at the end of the session. 

Interventions as Disturbances of the Energy Flow

In the case of the second forms of the disorder, the client is experiencing and healing a deeper process, in which the self-healing forces have already activated themselves and guide the process. There would be no external intervention necessary, except perhaps a gentle and cautious laying on of hands, which gives encouragement and security. Stronger, more powerful interventions are experienced as interruptions and insensitive interferences. The accompanying person must consider what motivated them to interfere where no intervention would have been necessary. Obviously, his or her own topics have smuggled into the client's breathing process, which should be clarified in an inner work in supervision.

What physical contact means, can be noticed by the body sensations and feelings that are triggered, even if only diffusely and unclear. However, with the help of an empathetic and mindful breathworker, more of this meaning can be understood by sensing a physical intervention precisely from both the breather and the sitter, and discussing the experiences afterwards.  

It is our body and its memory, and not our mind that decides whether a touch is right or wrong. Therefore it is very important that the accompanying person does not mechanically carry out certain interventions dictated by acquired knowledge, but is connected with his own intuition and sensitivity, so that he immediately notices when a touch does not arrive as it was meant to, which then allows to correct the disturbance caused by it. 

Transference and Touch

The phenomena of transference and countertransference play another important and noteworthy role in this topic. For example, it happens that clients do not address a touch that is inappropriate for them because they basically trust the therapist more than themselves and do not want to put this trust at risk. They had learned in their childhood that it is better to remain silent when something is wrong than to address it or defend oneself against it, and this pattern can be repeated in the breathing session without being worked on. 

If there is a hierarchical model of teaching and organization in a school of respiratory therapy, it is more likely that this model will be applied to the processes carried out in the framework and on behalf of that school. Students who have learned that they do not have the truth in themselves, that it is owned by their teachers, will expect this attitude from their clients and will pass it on to them.

In Holotropic Breathing, there is a far-reaching abstinence from touch. As little as possible should be interfered with the inner process, and only if the breathing person explicitly asks for it. So any directing influence from outside is avoided. However, this model also has a weakness, because the breather can experience the absence of touch as disinterest and coldness of feeling or as refusal to relate. These are, of course, projections in which the lack of emotional attention experienced by the breather in childhood is revived during the session. But if one fails to make the projections conscious, the injuries and wounds from the early experiences are not healed, but deepened. 

Countertransference and Intuition

In addition, possible sources of information, which are opened by the physical proximity through touching, cannot be added to the resources of countertransference if interventions are principally omitted. Any intuitive impulses to intervene are thus blocked, which can under certain circumstances result in an unnecessary restriction of the effectiveness of breathwork.

The role of intuition in accompanying is not a nebulous matter, but can be understood from the dynamics of countertransference. Every therapeutic process (as in any other form of communication) consists of conscious and unconscious levels. Therefore, we can assume that there is an exchange of information between the unconscious of the breathing person and the accompanying person. Often during a breathing session a space of resonance is opened when the accompanying person breathes in the same rhythm as the breathing person. In this space, intuitive ideas or impulses can arise in the therapist, which fit exactly to the process of the breathing woman. 

Therefore, after Integrative Breathing sessions, the breathers repeatedly report back that touches were made at exactly the right time and in the right way and were desired from inside, as if the companion had read the wish from her eyes. We can understand such phenomena as the interaction of the unconscious levels of the experiencing and the accompanying person. In the language of Holotropic Breathing, this means that there is a flow of communication between the inner healer in the breathing person and the corresponding and allied healer in the sitter. It is as if the person sitting next to the breathing person would hear inwardly what needs and desires the breather transmits on the unconscious level.

Models of Body Feelings

There are models in bodywork and in various schools of breathwork that assign certain emotional themes to certain regions of the body. Often they are transmissions from everyday wisdom such as "rage comes from the belly" or "in grieving the heart breaks" etc.. The chakra teachings and their assignments are also used, e.g. "Trust is present in the root chakra" and "Communication problems have to do with the throat chakra". The use of such models goes in two directions: If someone comes with a confidence problem, then the strengthening of the root chakra can be worked on. If someone feels tension in the solar plexus, then the assumption arises that it can be about unexpressed anger. Thus, emotional themes can be assigned to body regions and body regions to emotional themes.

All these approaches have their benefits and their use for practical work. However, the highest guideline for the application is never the model, but always the experiencing person. He or she decides whether an assignment makes sense or not. Some people experience sadness more in the stomach than in the heart, others find different forms of sadness in different parts of the body, etc. So it should never be about confirming the correctness of a model through practical work, but about opening up and exploring the individual meaning of body regions with each researcher. 

Schools that work with tables and classifications of body regions and related interventions should be particularly careful in their practical work. The previously acquired theoretical knowledge should always have the second rank behind the actual experiences in the current process with the respective person. 

Beginners, in particular, are not immune to the danger of compensating their own insecurity by clinging to given rules and guidelines. They hold on to the model and explain differing experiences or feedback either as resistance of the experiencing person or attribute it to their own lack of competence. In both cases, they pay too little attention to the particular nature and individuality of the client and neglect the valuable information that can be provided by the client from their own experience.

Persuasion and Manipulation

In this context, breathworkers often use the following phrase if the researcher disagrees with the intervention: "Let the touch in and see what happens". So the client should go neglect her own feeling that the intervention is not appropriate and instead trust the therapist. We were all persuaded in our childhood to do something that we ourselves did not want, but our parents did. When we are in a breathing process, we are always connected to the inner state of our childhood or prenatal years. Therefore, any intervention that is not adapted to our real needs and does not respect our will, but comes from an attitude of superior knowledge, will reactivate hurtful and oppressive experiences from the past. It will thus have a retraumatizing effect, as a repetition of an abusive situation, which has been described as a wound in the lower body.

Instead of healing, in this case a deepening and consolidation of the suffering occurs, often unnoticed, because the double-bind attachment is revived, which in the original situation may not only have been hurtful, but also paralyzing and numbing. A part of the client’s subconscious recognizes the abuse and the transgression of boundaries. Another part knows about the dependence on the abusing person and about the vital necessity to subordinate oneself to their intentions and desires. If this doubling experience happens in the therapeutic situation as repetition and is not made conscious, an inner division solidifies in the client. And, as a consequence of the originally numbing reaction to similar experiences in childhood, it will be simply forgotten.

The accompanying person, who is convinced of the correctness of his actions, because he has learned to act this way or because it has helped himself in another situation, may not notice at all what is going on, but is satisfied with the course of events. At the end of the session the client might thank the therapist, as for her on the unconscious level the confirmation of being a good client is more crucial than gaining more self-assertion and breaking through the manipulative dependence. The therapist naively assumes that he has done a good job. For his self-image, too, it is easier to take the final picture for the whole process and not to reflect more closely and in more detail, what might be problematic.

Parents whose children behave the way they want are also satisfied with the result. Their educational work is crowned with success, without them noticing that the inner boundaries of the children have been violated. They have, presumably without naming it that, successfully performed instrumental conditioning: Behavioral modeling through reward or punishment and not through insight and change of attitude. 

Not only clients are conditioned, but also breathworkers who assert themselves through the apparent success of the action itself and the model they use. The conviction of the correctness of one's own actions produces a closed-loop system: if my correctness is not accepted by clients, it is their resistance to get involved and to cooperate, and only more intervention (e.g. even stronger pressure) will make the desired experience possible.

The Misinterpretation of Relaxation

After a longer breathing process most people are relaxed and their smling face is like a confirmation of the success of the work. But relief and relaxation prevailing at the end of the process is no guarantee that deeper issues have been resolved. It can also be an adaptation phenomenon: A repetition of the original form of dysfunctional trauma integration, combined with a strengthening of the inner resistance. And this should always be considered as a possibility. 

The exact and honest reflection about the course and the adoption of physical interventions should therefore never be missing at the end of a breathing process. Then it can be clarified whether the intervention was helpful or counterproductive. For this it is important that the therapist is prepared to consider the latter possibility and not to dismiss it from the outset by throwing it back to the client's proneness to resist. It may be that some of the emotional charge stored in the body around a trauma has been released, but that the actual dream core is still untouched and possibly even more solid and permanent. 

Another danger for misinterpretations lies in mixing up emotional catharsis and healing. Some body therapists and breathworkers believe that the extent and intensity of emotional discharge is important for measuring the degree of healing of a trauma. The emotional intensity during a breathing process is not primarily a measure of the processing and integration of mental wounds, but rather an expression of the person's ability to allow emotional expression. There are also people who become dependent on an intensive form of expression and who appreciate or even demand equally intensive physical support for this goal. It can become a habit and solidify the existing emotional patterns instead of dissolving them from within. The client has an intense emotional experience because he has activated one of his traumas, but the passage through the fears in the trauma core can still be missing for full integration.

The Problem of Acting Out

That is why "acting out" in some therapeutic schools is in principle frowned upon as acting blindly, driven by unconscious and misunderstood emotions, a repetition of defensive actions against deeper inner conflicts.

Perhaps the client makes up for what was not possible in the original hurtful situation as resistance, thus regaining a piece of the power, which had to be split off at that time. On the other hand, it can happen that the violent transgression of borders, which led to traumatization in the early experience, is imitated in the session and repeated with a reversal of roles, so that the victim can feel like a perpetrator now. If this dynamic is not brought to consciousness, catharsis remains a meaningless blow-off of steam, resulting in nothing more than momentary relief.

Interventions and Self-Healing

In breathwork, as in many other therapeutic approaches, we assume that there is a tendency towards self-healing in every human being, which has been mentioned several times in this article. Systems that have been disturbed in their organic processes have an inner knowledge of the undisturbed state and an innate strive to return to this state on their own. However, if the disturbance is massive or chronic, then the systems do not find their way back by themselves. This is the point where we need help. If a cold does not calm down by itself, we need a medicine. If this does not help, we should see a doctor.

On the mental level, which basically functions just like the physical level and cooperates closely with it, we also need professional help when our emotional and thought patterns no longer regulate themselves, but begin to lead a life of their own that burdens and hampers us. This help is all the more effective the more it makes use of the self-healing powers in the therapeutic process. In this case the therapist works with the inner energies of the client and uses his empathic abilities. It is a kind of alliance from unconscious to unconscious that the therapist consciously creates and from which the right and coherent verbal and non-verbal interventions flow. This connection is the source from which the therapeutic relationship feeds itself, which also includes everything the therapist has learned and experienced, but in which the client's current inner process of experience exerts the most important influence. 

From this source intuition arises - both in the therapist and in the client. It becomes apparent that the therapeutic work can never be planned and predicted, but is determined by the interaction of the unconscious and conscious parts of both sides. The therapist's intuition consists in reading the unconscious of the client and implementing the impulses gained from it. The client's intuition shows itself in breathwork especially through the engagement with the breathing process, which leads to levels of experience that are not controlled by expectations and thoughts, but come from deeper sources.

Help for Self-Help

In the context of body interventions, it is particularly important to bear in mind that any external intervention replaces something that the client could experience for herself or gain from her own self-healing power. It is a balancing act between autonomy and commitment. The inner conflicts that lead people to the path of self-discovery originate from this field of conflict. In this place of tension, the events in therapy take place. The art of accompaniment in this process consists in bringing both sides to fruition in the therapeutic field and strengthening them equally in the client’s psyche.

Too many physical interventions can lead to dependence on the therapist. The client assumes that without external influences and directives he will not progress inwardly. On the other hand, a lack of physical interventions can also be understood as a lack of care and thus create a negative dependency by repeating childhood defects in therapy and transfiguring them as normal.

Such patterns should be discussed. A therapist who is aware of these possibilities and perceives signs of such dependencies talks to the client about them in order to bring the patterns into the client's consciousness. This opens the way to resolving the issue, which both strengthens the trust in the therapeutic relationship and thus the ability to bind, and also improves autonomy and self-acceptance.

The attention that comes from the therapist does not automatically strengthen the client’s self-awareness - as any outside help does not automatically strengthen the ability to help oneself. Neither does the withholding of attention by the therapist strengthen the client's autonomy, but can consolidate the feeling of lack of it. Finding the right balance is an important part of the therapeutic art and is measured by the trust that can be placed in the healing forces by both parties. The quality of body interventions is a touchstone for the sustainability of trust and thus for the progress of healing that can be achieved.

Breathwork in Large Groups

With regard to Breathwork sessions in large groups, I would like to highlight another important aspect. Thirty years ago I experienced Rebirthing group processes with many participants and a few breathworkers. This was still a pioneering time in testing and spreading breathwork. For quite some time this setting seems unsuitable to me, because it has several shortcomings, which can diminish or impair the quality of the experiences and also lead to subsequent problems – and to shed detrimental light on Breathwork as a whole.

When many people breathe more intensively in a room, an energy field builds up which influences every breathing person mostly unfiltered. Our subconscious opens up and influences from other people's experiences can flow into our own process without testing and protection. If, however, every breathing person has a second person setting next to him who follows the process in a present and attentive manner, without this second person having to have any training, shelter and safety is created. The accompanying person becomes the main source for the flow of information from outside and should ideally convey security and trust and act as a protection and filter against environmental influences. In this way, the inner process can unfold with fewer obstacles. People who walk around the room and interfere here and there cannot take on this important role.

The relationship aspect is part of every self-awareness process. Many, if not all, injuries from our life history have come from the most important people in our lives. So most severe traumas have been inflicted on us by other people. Therefore, in a breathing process, we need a reliable and constant accompaniment that is unconditionally present with us. This person does not need any special training, he only needs access to the general human competence of attentive and mindful presence. Under such conditions, we can go into inner areas of our emotional landscape that are painful and anxious. Someone who comes and goes during the process, but does not stay with us, cannot give this security, but can very likely activate experiences that have to do with the coming and going of caregivers. We suffered as children because we needed more continuity and presence from the adults around us. Again, we are at the mercy of arbitrary existence and its uncontrollable termination, when in a group setting leaders go around and briefly enter into relationships here and there, only to then immediately move on again.

Someone who accompanies a breathing process for the first time without any previous experience acquires an intimate knowledge of what is going on in the breathing person.  This knowledge does not have to occur in the form of words, but can also have the character of procedural, nonverbal knowledge, which expresses itself in the feeling for the needs and the inner state of the breathing person. Thus, an intense network of relationship is created in which large amounts of information are exchanged at the unconscious level, which is fundamental to understanding and trust. Someone who comes from outside selectively and at short notice is always inferior to this intuitive knowledge, no matter how well trained and experienced he may be.

Therefore, people who come from outside would have to take at least a few minutes to make up for this difference and get a sufficient sense of the course and inner patterns of the breather and her process before they intervene. Because it is not only about the observation of a current condition (e.g. a person breathes too little into the stomach), but about the experience of the whole process, from which the individual observation gets its meaning.  Every intervention that an experienced leader makes should always be coordinated with the accompanying person, so that their intuitive knowledge of the process is included and they are respected in their role at the same time.

For these reasons, the setting in which every breathing person has a companion at his side who stays with him throughout the entire process and then goes through the breathing experience himself in a role reversal seems to me to be much better, more helpful and more professional. Experienced process facilitators can still provide assistance by verbal or non-verbal interventions, if they can deepen the process in a sensitive way and help the breathing on the way to inner healing. This is the standard setting in both Holotropic and Integrative Breathwork and has proven itself over decades. 

Essential Aspects for Setting the Framework in Group and Individual Sessions

From my point of view, the above considerations result in the crucial requirement that physical interventions during the breathing process can only be carried out with consent of the client. In both individual and group breathing sessions, the possibility is pointed out at the beginning and its role in the breathing process explained. Then we discuss what the client wants and what not. It can also be agreed upon that the client leaves it to the sitter to use his intuition, in case the necessary trust is given.

For this purpose, a clear signal of interruption should be agreed with which the client can end an overstraining or inconsistent body intervention immediately, e.g. a gesture or the code word "stop! It is also the responsibility of the breathworker to carefully check with each touch how it arrives inside the breathing person and how it affects the further course of the breathing process. In this way it is ensured that the ultimate control over the use of touches during breathing remains with the breathing person and that assaults are avoided. 

All topics concerning the dynamics of the relationship between the companion and the breather in this context, which cause confusion or disturb confidence, belong to the supervision of the breathworker. There the personal backgrounds, which probably have to do with one’s own history of body contact, can be reflected and brought to consciousness. In this way, a high quality in this sensitive area of therapeutic work with people is ensured, which is owed to all those who embark on this path of self-enquiry.

Prenatal Traumas and the Healing Power of the Breath

We took our first real and independent breath immediately after birth. When working with conscious breathing – why should then issues coming up which have to do with prenatal experiences in which breathing did not even exist? The second question I want to discuss in this article is how conscious breathing can help with healing these early wounds.
When working with clients, I notice how many problems and distortions stem from traumatization dating back to the time before birth. We can imagine traumatizations like chains. When we had a situation of shock similar situations later on bring up this shock, not in all details but with the same patterns of sensations and feelings. This is what we call retraumatization. After the original traumatic experience, by repeating the experience in similar form retraumatization after retraumatization is lined up on a trauma chain. 

The last link of the chain is an actual experience in which we notice unpleasant symptoms or feelings which do not seem appropriate to the present situation. We get enormously angry at something which later on would seem like mere nothing. We get a diffuse fear and do not know why. We react defensively towards someone without any reason on the outside.
When we find back to the first and original experience of the trauma along this chain, and only when we find back to this event and not to a later retraumatization, we can experience a deep going healing which will help to dissolve the reoccurring symptoms and feelings. This is why we often have to go back to the prenatal phase of our lives when we want to cope with a problem at its root.

In the prenatal phase of our development, there are especially many crucial events. An organism which has very little inner organization and strength is highly vulnerable in any difficult situation. Survival is permanently at risk and there are only a few simple strategies to cope with such threats. The well-known fight-flight response as a reactive pattern of the sympathetic nervous system requires an organism which is able to act independently and free in time and space. In case of threatened survival, the embryo cannot run or fight, it can only withdraw by contracting every part which can contract and by switching to emergency programs with a minimum supply of energy (“primal withdrawal”). We will later discuss how this reactive pattern can or should be treated in breathwork.

In addition to that, the embryo as tiny and rather instable being reacts especially sensitive to the different disturbing influences from inside and from outside. “Peanuts” in the view of the grownups like a collapse of the mother or a fight with the father can be experienced as catastrophes by the tiny embryo.

The Theory of Cellular Memory

In the therapeutic work, the breath is always an important support and this can happen in two ways. In our clinical experiences, we can often observe that conscious breathing leads to remembering events dating far back beyond birth. Obviously, during intensified breathing the cellular memory is opened up. It releases recalls from the earliest stages of our development. So we can access memories which are not (or not mainly) saved and coded in the cortex. We know from brain research that a large part of our memory and especially the conditionings of fear are stored in the areas of our brain which are not accessibly by consciousness.

These forms of storage seem to correspond with the cellular memory. We can assume that even single cell organisms must have the capacity to safe memories in order to be able to survive. So we can imagine that for instance the egg cell right after conception has passed on its memory database to all the following cells which develop in the subsequent cell divisions. So all cells of the organism will dispose of this information when the organism develops and expands. 

Probably, the transmission of information works selectively so that not every new cell contains the information in the same strength and calibration. This would explain why certain experiences of fears from the prenatal phase can be felt in certain areas of the grown up body (as contraction, pressure, tension etc.) while other parts are free from these sensations. 

Scientific research in the area of epigenetics has shown how the mechanisms of cellular memory work. It has already shed light on the proceedings of storing and transmitting information on the cellular level. This fascinating area of biological research gains more and more public attention and gives a strong support for considering many diseases and psychological disorders as caused by early, prenatal and even transgenerational traumatization. Basically, it shows that we are only weakly determined by our genes but that the circumstances in which we started our lives and grew up determine our fate to a high degree.

The Evocative Function of Breathing

How does engaging in conscious breathing open up the cellular memory? It could be that the specific ability to remember and the accessibility of the cellular memory we can experience during a breathing process have to do with the deepened state of relaxation. When turning inside by giving the full attention to the breathing, a trance like state is entered. By abandoning the linear logical thought process, the associative abilities of our brain become more active and deliver memories connected with emotions, especially with fear. 

Another possible explanation is that memories come up as a consequence of the metabolic changes in the body as they happen due to the intensifying of the breathing. As we accompany these processes with our awareness, different systems of storage could start to cooperate. Thus, complexes of sensations which can be felt as rather amorphous and ambiguous on the physical level, could reveal their contents which is linked to an early trauma. This meaningful content sometimes comes in form of images, sometimes of felt ideas or any other form of intuitive knowledge.

Another explanation relates to the scientifically proven fact that stress the mother has to deal with during pregnancy can reduce the oxygen supply for the embryo. This will cause anxiety and stress in the unborn child. The attention directed towards the breathing in a session can bring up the memory about the lack of oxygen in dramatic situations of the prenatal phase. For breathing is the successor of the umbilical cord as oxygen supplier.

Here we are on the ground of assumptions rather than secure knowledge as these connections have not yet found a comprehensive theoretical explanation as far as I know. Maybe all these and/or other circumstances we do not yet know work together to allow the often stunningly deep insights we encounter during conscious breathing processes.

The Metaphorical Function of Breathing

This is the evocative side we can see as support by the breath to climb to the depths of our souls. Yet conscious breathing does not just serve for awakening of memories but also for integrating the issues which arise from layers of our lives far beyond conscious remembrance.

For this we use the metaphorical power of breathing. Breathing is the metabolic process closest to us as it is permanently active on and can be observed consciously at any time. By experiencing our breathing we experience the self-organization of our bodies, or, as seen from another perspective, the flow of life itself which develops its healing power throughout ourselves. We experience that we are alive and that it is this power of life which keeps us alive.

When we have to deal with unpleasant and burdening experiences in our lives it always helps to become aware of the breath which reminds us of life moving on, as terrible the present situation might be. We realize that there is a life force which moves on while we are entangled in some drama. This power drives us whether we are aware of it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not. It is with us when we enter the drama, and it is with us when we find a way out of it. The breath is always flowing with all these motions of the waves of life. So breathing can become a carrier with the symbolic power for life itself which is stronger than our consciousness and mightier as the control we like to exercise upon our lives.

Trust in life does not mean anything else than acknowledging that it is this power which carries our lives and which leads us on despite all the turbulences and distortions which cause our suffering. As the Arabic saying goes: “The dog is barking and the caravan moves on.” All the terrible and dreadful experiences have their place in this process. They are part of the caravan although it cannot be stopped by them. The moving caravan is the symbol for the flow of life power, which is portrayed in the self-realization of the organism we can perceive in our breathing at any moment.

The Symbolic Healing Power of Breathing

By taking this symbolic power of breathing with us when healing prenatal traumas, we can use it to reconnect to trusting life while the client is feeling despair, hopelessness, emptiness, and pain. “Feel with your breathing how the power of life carries you, with all these feelings which are there now.” By this, the facilitator can remind of the power of the flow of life which offers trust, until eventually the fearful and burdening feelings have resided and given way for a deepened trust, connected with inner safety.

When working with a lost twin, the breath is an indispensable help. At some point of the inner work, the client reaches back to the moment when this first companion in life died and vanished. Here he will experience very intense and deep feelings of pain and despair which seemingly come to no end. The feeling of loss and incomprehension can be immensely huge. 

The facilitator will encourage to accept all the feelings as terrible as they might be, and at the same time to feel the flow of the breath which guides trough this experience, as the constant and reliable power of life. At some point in time, the experiencer realizes that it is this life power which allocates the fate, may it be the gravest of all. For one twin it means an all too early leave, for the other a life to an end much later on. By accepting this major power which distributes fates without any influence from our side, it becomes easier to let go of guilt feelings which are often connected with going on in life in the face of a close companion dying. 

Trust in life is restored, deepened and enriched by a new dimension which indicates that life is a permanent process of giving and receiving, giving and receiving from individual life and from chances in life. As in any breath: Giving from one’s own and receiving the other, as a steady ongoing process which embraces and transcends every single life.

Primal withdrawal in breathwork

As long as strong emotions like anger expressed by kicking and screaming or sadness expressed by intense crying prevail during a breathwork session, the client deals with issues from perinatal or postnatal experiences. Intense breathing which comes with these strong emotions indicates that events from the childhood are processed. Withheld emotional energy which had to be suppressed rises to the surface and seeks its physical expression.
Minimising the breathing by contracting the breathing muscles is a sign for primal withdrawal and for re-experiencing prenatal traumatization. In case the facilitator motivates the breather in such a situation to intensify the breathing, the prenatal trauma cannot be accessed. The energy will move away from the early event and stuff from later experiences of retraumatization can come up. The breather can feel relieved but the symptoms related to the prenatal trauma will come back. Methods of breathwork focused on intense breathing alone thus cannot access or heal prenatal traumas characterized by primal withdrawal. Even worse, such approaches can reinforce the inner protection mechanisms against re-experiencing the trauma contents.

Instead, the facilitator should accept the shallow breathing pattern and carefully help the client to feel the contractions in all detail and allow the withdrawal come fully into the present moment. It is also useful to let the body of the breather go into the posture of withdrawal. By breathing gently into the tensions and by suggesting feeling the breathing as a source of trust and of the ongoing energy of life, the contractions can slowly resolve. Sometimes the client gets images, feelings or even words which indicate the event that has come up. Following this information, the therapist can deepen the healing experience. Often, it is helpful to explain the context of the prenatal experience after the breathing process so the client is able to integrate the outcomes of the session. Cognitive understanding of what has happened in the session as well in one’s own history is valuable for a sustainable integration which also needs the consent of the mind.

Recommended reading:
Arthur Janov, Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script That Rules Our Lives. Nti Upstream 2011

Cathartic Breathing and its Limitations

Some schools in breathwork focus on creating intense emotional experiences as a way of healing. This article looks at the value and the limitations of this approach.

Why does intense breathing cause intense feelings? 

One explanation for the dramatic results that can often be achieved through intensive breathing can be found in the fear centre of our brain: the amygdale. This small organ with the size of an almond seed situated deep down in our brain is developed in the third month of pregnancy and works as an accurate storage of all events, which have caused fear and emotional overwhelm throughout our lives. It works totally unconsciously and has no reference to time. This means that the amygdale stores the memory of a barking dog, which I perceived as dangerous at the age of one without taking a note about the time. So the same fear with the same intensity as I had experienced it in early childhood is produced when meeting a barking dog in an adult age. 

The task of the amygdale is to react within very short time to sensory data coming from outside, which indicate a dangerous situation. This is why the connection from the ears to the amygdale is extremely short: a signal that is coming in from the ears needs to jump over only three synapses to reach the alarm centre in the brain, and these three jumps do not need more than eight milliseconds. 

After that, the amygdale is able to set off the complex stress reaction immediately by activating other brain centres, mainly the hypothalamus. Thus an overall change in the whole body including intense breathing is triggered and all the body’s resources for fight or flight are mobilized so we can face challenges in an effective way.

Intense Breathing and Fear

In a Breathwork session, we usually start with relaxing the body. It is important for the client to let go of obvious muscular tensions, so that the breath can start to flow easier and deeper as usual. Then the breathing can be intensified by will and encouragement up to a point, where the amygdale is reminded of danger in which this form of breathing had appeared spontaneously in any former time of the history of the person. So the amygdale starts the stress reaction in the body similar to a past traumatic experience. The client experiences strange body sensations, bizarre movements and intense feelings of fear, anger or sadness up to the point of cathartic release.

The amygdale also connects to the other memory storages in the upper regions of our brain, the cortex. The connection is mediated by the hippocampus, which is our unconscious organizer for conscious memories. In this way, sensual memories from the past are activated and can be experienced as images, sounds or body sensations which come along with the intense feelings created by the amygdale. Past situations of traumatizing power arise, can be faced consciously until we are ready to integrate them.

We can understand the fact that memories come up often far beyond the range of our conscious memory storage, because the memory capacity of the amygdale reaches back to the early times of pregnancy. The visual impressions that come with it may not always be accurate, as they are formed by the associative cortex under the governance of the hippocampus. Their production does not follow a strict rule and principle. Yet it can provide a lot of relevant details. Our brain does not work like a historical scientist who clearly separates facts and fiction but more like a poet who creates images with complex meanings. (This is the place where the false memory syndrome comes in.)

The memories from the fear storage are provided in a different format, which is simple and accurate. This information is far from being complete or objective. It is like a database with very few parameters and it focuses on detecting dangerous signals in the environment quickly and precisely. When I got hit by a red car years ago, the same colour in a tiny spot in my vision can trigger the original panic reaction.

Just bringing up the fearful information would not help to heal them. On the contrary, it would intensify and strengthen them in the sense of retraumatisation. But the relaxed state, in which the body receives the traumatic memories, and the safety, which is provided by the therapist, help to integrate the memory. Integration means that the fear which is stored in the amygdale is strongly linked to a time frame from the higher regions of the brain so that we are able to allocated the fear far back in the past and to experience the present as safe and trustworthy.

Here, another important centre of the brain comes into play, the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This is our agent for reality check and responsibility. It matures during adolescence. The PFC is able to quiet our fearful amygdale when we bring old memories to consciousness. It says, that old experience was very frightening for us, but now we are grown up and we are no more in danger. (This is called a top-down-control.) But the PFC needs calm circumstances, because when anxiety prevails, its reasoning is set aside by the alarm centres.

One client of mine came to a breathwork session because she felt highly disturbed after a breathing session in a group where the person who was assisting her, became unsafe during the process and could not give her the support she would have needed to integrate the emotions that came up. So she needed careful attention and relaxed breathing to work through and integrate this disturbing experience.

When the right circumstances are provided, the client experiences the intensity of the emotion and feels safe enough to face it and to cope with it. She stays consciously focussed on the breathing, so she cannot be totally overwhelmed by the emotion as in the traumatic situation of the past. The therapist is present and aware of the needs of the client, encourages the client to experience the feelings and to stay aware of the breathing. He serves as a grounding anchor and a connection bridge to present reality. 

In case that daily life provides another situation, which could trigger the pattern of fear which came up in the session, it is much less likely that the fear will arise as intense as before and after some time, it will happen that the person can stay calm and does not even think of being afraid.

Limitations of Catharsis

Cathartic breathing has some limitations we should be aware of when using it as a therapeutic method. One limit is that strong emotions from past trauma can arise too quickly for the organism to integrate them. This brings the danger of overstretching and damaging a fragile ego structure and cause severe desintegration and decompensation resulting in psychosis. So persons with a fragile personality structure and a weak social background should not be guided into intense breathing sessions. They have to become acquainted with their body and their breath in the first place. When they have learned to feel grounded in their bodies and to relax with their outbreath, then they can slowly be lead to towards increasing the volume of the inhalation.

The other limitation can be found in the learning abilities of the amygdale. We know about the mechanism of extinction from classical conditioning as researched by Iwan Pawlow a hundred years ago. For a person who is exposed to frightening signals over a period of time without anything dangerous happening, the signal loses its scaring character. When we hear a car alarm going off every two minutes, we stop to listen to it. 

Similarly, after some experiences with intense breathing, the amygdale stops to get anxious when the breathing rhythm intensifies and the pauses of relaxation are omitted. It has learned with the help of the prefrontal cortex, that there is no real danger in the situation. So the client has learned to integrate her fears to a certain degree and has strengthened the top-down control to tame the lower emotional centre to fire off unnecessarily all the time. 

We observe that most clients who come to breathwork sessions on a regular basis, reach a level where they can breathe strongly and intensely in a connected rhythm without producing intense emotional responses or outbreaks. Their system gets adjusted to the “strange” breathing pattern. This does not mean that all their traumas are healed, but that their body including their brain has managed to cope with the intensified breathing pattern and is ready to move on from that level. 

At this point, the method of cathartic breathing has reached its purpose and needs to be changed. Working with relaxing the breathing combined with a full volume can provide deeper levels of healing. Still, not all issues and causes of suffering can be eliminated by conscious breathing. We need complementary approaches to access these ailments. This can be emotional level breathing, systemic breathing, interactive breathing or any other approach in complementary breathwork, which opens the door to the different levels of our soul other than by cathartic breathing.

The drama-resolution-cycle

Some therapists and some clients become disappointed at the point when cathartic breathing fails to produce remarkable and sensational results. 

As we know from wave theories, even the strongest waves cool down and disappear after some time. When the client and the therapist associate therapeutic success with high waves, they think after a smooth and quiet session, that something essential is missing. When dramatic breakthroughs are considered as the core of therapy. intensity as such is the marker for success, and the lack of intensity the sign of failure. 

The therapist will transfer his concept to the client whether it is shared verbally or not. Both, therapist and client become addicted to a drama-resolution-cycle: a drama is needed to obtain freedom so dramas have to be created to gain the benefit from the feeling of resolution. This is like seeking the experience that we never feel as good as after recovering from a severe disease. But it would not be considered as normal to acquire intense illnesses for the sake of the nice feeling after recovery.

If the therapist feels stressed for delivering dramatic results, she will look for new means of producing such. There are several tools to provide a high level of excitement and dramatic tension, mainly with interventions on the physical level. Applying pressure on certain points of the body will inevitably produce strong emotional reactions.  

Some breathworkers claim that more breathing is better breathing. So they motivate their clients for intense breathing and assume automatically that less intense breathing indicates psychological resistance. More breathing is equated with more life energy and this is stated like a dogma. 

But those therapists do not consider that the level of energy which the body can take from our breathing metabolism does not depend on the quantity of air taken in but on the ability of the body to take in the oxygen. Simple measurements can show that strong and rapid breathing takes more energy from the body as it adds to it.

So the question is whether any further healing can happen under such manipulative and ideological circumstances. Healing cannot be measured by the quantity of dopamine in the brain, which is likely to be high at the end of a cathartic session. Becoming addicted to emotional arousal is bound to create more suffering and to deepen neurotic patterns. When therapy turns into a sportive exercise, it would be better to tell the client to do an hour of running instead of the session which would probably give him the same or even a healthier result.

Good breathing is relaxed breathing

In many cases of therapy, catharsis is useful to open up the blocks, which are in the way of gaining more relaxation. So it is an episode on the way. Learning to intensify the breathing is needed and can be used up to a certain point, which is different for each person. When this point is missed, the deepening of relaxation is blocked and the craving for tension becomes an addictive pattern.

Therapy should result in weakening and dissolving patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, in reducing underlying fears and in enlarging the areas for relaxation in daily life. A healthy life can have its intense aspects and times but they should not arise from stress, fear or craving but should be associated with joy and pleasure, as the playful side of relaxation.

A good breathing pattern is a sign of a healed body-mind-system. In my view a good breathing pattern can be measured by the amount of relaxation in the breathing muscles and not by the quantity of air flowing in and out. A relaxed breathing rhythm is flexible and can adjust to different situations, calming down to slow breathing when the circumstances are pleasant and free of challenge, and speeding up when things need to be done. It provides the minimum of breathing activity which is needed to fulfil the actual demands of reality.