In his video „The relation-ship between breathing and anxiety“, Buteyko breathing practitioner Robert Litman speaks about his own breath experience and his path to breathwork.
He then introduces basic nose breathing excercises and explains how the fight-or-flight response is caused and/or maintained by mouth and upper chest breathing. Read More
A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Resting the eyes
I often get very tired eyes. So sometimes, when I sit on the train, I close my eyes and imagine the eyeballs sinking into their sockets. Often the eyes tense up again quite quickly and then I consciously let them settle again. When I do this, I also let the eyelids relax completely. Then I try to lift them as if they were very heavy before I relax them again. Read More
In his book, The Voice of the Body, the doctor, psychotherapist and founder of bioenergetics Alexander Lowen, writes the following passage about the motion of the breath wave. It serves as a vital reminder of how the experience of the breath wave is “one of the basic pleasures of being alive.”
„…it is the quality of the respiratory movements that determines whether breathing is pleasurable or not. With each breath a wave can be seen to ascend and descend through the body. The inspiratory wave begins deep in the abdomen with a backward movement of the pelvis. This allows the belly to expand outward. The wave then moves upward as the rest of the body expands. Read More
A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Sphinx
There‘s a simple and powerful fascia exercise where one lies on the floor with the palms of the hands facing downwards. One can imagine the fingers extending, like roots growing along the floor. On the train today I thought, why not do the same thing whilst sitting down? So let‘s try it out. Either leaning back or sitting upright in our seat, our hands settle on the upper thighs. Read More
A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Stability and Elasticity
Lying down with knees bent and feet on the floor, let‘s place one hand on one part of the torso and the other on another part of the torso. We can sense the body walls but also the breath movement beneath them. In natural breathing, the expansion and contraction of the breath movement can be felt and sensed mostly through the resistance and relaxation of the tissue that forms the vessel of our body. The vessel itself doesn‘t change but the spaces within it shift with the breath movement, depending on the elasticity of the tissue. And this, we can, in part, sense. Read More
In his book “I am not I”, the philosopher Jacob Needleman writes: „Among the great questions of the human heart, none is more central than the question, “Who am I?” And among the great answers of the human spirit, none is more central than the experience of “I Am.” In fact, in the course of an intensely lived human life — a normal human life filled with the search for Truth — this question and this answer eventually run parallel to each other, coming closer and closer together until the question becomes the answer and the answer becomes the question.“ Read More
A breath token is a breathing exploration that I develop for friends & clients and send out as a gift.
Now that we‘re coming to the end of the year, rather than add a new exploration, let‘s revisit a breath excercise that resonated with us, that felt good, brought joy or comfort.
“Airing the armpit” from October or “Sliding the knees” from April are favorites of mine, for example.
Let‘s repeat and sense how something has the same or a different effect. What’s changed and what’s stayed the same? Let’s meet it with acceptance, let’s meet ourselves with acceptance, receiving ourselves as we are.
I wish you all a good transition into the new year. Let’s stay in touch. Let’s be breathed.
I just spent the weekend in a workshop held by Erika Kemmann, with whom I was lucky enough to do my breath training. Every year, since 2000, she‘s offered a yearly research workshop for breath teachers. In one aspect of the research we explored the importance of the direction of the hands and arm movement in connection with the breath movement.
This really connected to something I‘ve been reflecting on this year: the difference between initiating and waiting. As I was exploring the movements, I realised it‘s not just a choice between waiting and initiating, there can be more steps in between: initiation-invitation-acknowledgement-openness. Read More
In a breath session I gave this summer, we explored the upper and lower breathing spaces. We began by writing about what we associated with the spaces „above“ and below“. Then we went on to explore those spaces: the lower breathing space by stroking the legs and circulating around the sitting bones, the upper breathing space by stroking the arms and circling round the tip of the sternum. (This is an area that is not often mobilized and can become quite stiff.) After each exploration we wrote down our associations to „above“ and below“. Read More
Last month a young woman came to my breath session for the first time. We began with stroking along the body walls which she found almost immediately emotionally challenging. Touching her own body, getting in touch with herself, triggered sensations akin to a centrifugal trauma. When I asked her if she felt a movement impulse, she said „I want to leave“. I asked her what the next best alternative – provided she wanted to continue the session – would be. She said „to leave the room“. „Ok, let‘s try that“, I said. Read More
