Chapter Eight: Breathwork as Spiritual Practice (Excerpts)

Is breathwork a therapy or a spiritual practice?

Seen from one angle, breathwork looks like therapy and from another it more closely resembles a spiritual technique. As a therapeutic technique without a therapist directing the process, it has the advantage of not encouraging the development of dependence on a therapist or imposing any outside system or doctrine on the client's unfolding self-awareness. The border between therapeutic and spiritual is getting harder to define. At least one major magazine focuses on the interface between spirituality and therapy. Many books and articles describe the therapeutic value of spiritual practice.

For centuries, ancient traditions have viewed the spiritual as the key to healing and the root of much illness. Psychologists and psychiatrists in the Western world are just beginning to study Chinese, Native American, Aryuvedic (Indian), and other systems of healing that view spiritual harmony and balance as crucial to physical, emotional, and mental health. Most such systems pay attention to the state of harmony or disharmony not only within the individual, but within her community, and between her community and all other living things. These systems measure our spiritual harmony or disharmony by the condition of our relationships.

The Twelve Step tradition is one of the few Western models that has recognized the importance of this. The Steps themselves are considerations of the state of our relationships: our relationships with our Higher Powers, our relationships between our values and our actions, our relationships with other people, and our relationships with our communities. Effective psychology usually focuses on these relationships as well: our relationships with our sources of inspiration, our internal communication with conflicting desires, our work and love relationships, our relationships with our bodies (health), and our life purposes within the human community.

Using breathwork as a personal spiritual practice

When we make the breathwork one of our personal spiritual practices, we schedule sessions regularly, just as we would practice any discipline systematically. Three interesting results may occur from this approach. The first result is that we strengthen our will and intention on our personal path by consistently making inner exploration a behavioral priority no matter how we are feeling about it at the moment.

The second result is that we become increasingly adept at moving from non-ordinary states of consciousness to ordinary states of consciousness. The spiritual practice of breathwork builds integration muscle and flexibility in dealing with our expanding belief systems and the normal changes of ordinary life.

The third result is that, when we adhere to a practice with regularity, even if it is something as non-ordinary as breathwork, the repetitive practice becomes "ordinary." The ritual retains its meaning for us, but at some very subtle level, without even realizing it, we drop our guards and surrender. When this happens we are often surprised by an experience of grace that we could not achieve by seeking it intentionally.

Quite a few people make monthly group breathwork workshops part of their personal practice for a year or two or even more. They and those who know them are usually quite satisfied with the speed and depth of their personal and spiritual growth during that time period.

The inner journey together

Some couples and partners make breathwork a regular part of their activities together. Breathwork, or any non-ordinary state of consciousness work, adds a special dimension to a relationship between two people. When two people feel they are each on a spiritual path, breathwork provides a structure for them to be present for each other. This kind of presence increases the intimacy between them. They share emotion, sit for and care for each other, and have profound experiences in the same context of sacred space and time. Without quite understanding the reasons for the change in her relationship, one woman reports:

Breathwork has brought us closer together and bonded us. Things have more of a tendency to work out in our relationship even if we don't consciously work at it. The commitment appears strengthened.

Thomas Merton Brightman reported on the impact of breathwork on relationships from his experience facilitating 700 people in breathwork sessions:

One couple prepared separate lists of what they wanted to do to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The top item on each list was to do a Holotropic Breathwork session as partners. Another couple chose to spend the last four days of their honeymoon doing breathwork.

Brightman goes on to say:

Friends, males and females and mixed, use the process to expand their friendships. Even couples who have divorced and married others have done very effective work being in the same room with their former spouses.

The spiritual partnership is any close relationship that encourages and strengthens each partner's commitment to a spiritual path. Breathwork is one model in which partners have a context to support each other on their individual journeys.