Therapeutic Breathwork: Clinical Science and Practice in Healthcare and Yoga

FROM THE PREFACE: This volume has been a labor of love. It has brought me joy and heartache in the process of putting it together. This book has had a very long lifespan already. It started out as a training manual a few years ago; and, in many ways, it has existed even long before it went on paper. The journey of this work, in many ways, started more than six decades ago, when I was a young child who had a hard time breathing, who grew up driving her family crazy because almost from birth she was coughing constantly. This book started way back then, when my parents worried about my respiration and had to take actions that were quite extreme to try to support my healthy breathing and growth. This book continued to find life as I moved through my years as a university student, who often had a hard time catching her breath given the demands of life and study in a foreign country (and language); who sometimes could not breathe because she was too afraid to be authentically herself in the settings and places where she was supposed to develop her professional pathway and persona. This book was already with me, when I felt professionally compelled to conceal a central practice that helped support my health and resilience, namely yoga. Yoga’s movement, breathwork, and contemplative practices, its deep grounding and ethics, and its encouragement of a lifestyle of discipline has guided my personal life and my professional journey. It has given me purpose and meaning, direction and guidance. This book already existed but was very much expanded when its contents and wisdoms guided me through my journey with cancer. It existed during moments of joy in my own life and during moments of awareness, awe, joy, and insight of my students and patients. This book is permeated by all the work over the decades with psychotherapy patients, who breathed with me, and more recently with yoga students, yoga clients, and yoga teacher trainees who share lifeforce with one another. This book has been a long time coming and it is my true joy to offer it to you in this moment.