Breath Awareness
About
I am passionate about using the breath to enhance physical and mental health
As a consequence of a chronic illness and heavy medications, I was always tired, couldn’t do much as the day passed and had a constant mental dullness and fogginess. I am a medical doctor, also trained in chinese medicine and started breathwork involving breath awareness combined with acupuncture principles. Within a fortnight, my fogginess cleared, and I was breathing deeper, better and healthier. I am living proof of the power of the breath and want to share my expertise and experience with you.
OUR APPROACH Our approach involves 2 key elements, breath consciousness and sensory sensitization using taoist principles.
Ancient taoist practitioners had a comprehensive body map of energy centers, meridians carrying energy throughout the body and acupuncture points. These nodes if carefully chosen and manipulated are known to heal and cure specific ailments.
In our breathwork sessions, we help you visualize specific parts of the body. We teach you to stimulate specific acupuncture points yourself while you breathe in an unforced, uncoerced manner. Also, specific postures that are easy to hold as well as gentle procedures such as self massage are used to enhance somatic awareness.
This leads to greater and more coherent psychosomatic fluidity. You learn to synchronize breath awareness with the visualization and manipulation of body parts, centers and points.
If these exercises are done regularly, there is a greater sense of ease, vitality and wellbeing. As you progress in your practice you open up to wholesome sense impressions of your own body and being as well as what is outside your body.
These new sense impressions and breathing patterns replace and remove distorted and unhealthy imprints that we create habitually and which accumulate in our body, mind and spirit. In short, you learn a whole new way of living, breathing and being! One that leads to health, calm, increased concentration, clarity and wisdom.
A CASE STUDY Neelam came to us with intense, unexplained anxiety. After a thorough evaluation, I started breathwork with her. In the first session she was taught to visualize a balloon in her belly filling up with inhalation and deflating with exhalation. This was continued for 10 minutes until she was restfully breathing from deep in her belly.
With her breathing gentle and unforced and her mind focused and rested, she was shown how to knead the centre points of both her soles. She did this herself for about 4 minutes feeling all the sensations coming from her feet and hands. After the kneading she was asked to combine breath awareness simultaneously with the awareness of the sensations and feelings coming from her soles. Then, for the next two minutes, she was asked to visualize that these points were opening up and that she was breathing in and out through them.
Following this, she was instructed about the 3 breathing spaces of the body known by taoist practitioners. She was asked to visualize her lower breathing space which begins at the feet and ends at the navel.
She then engaged in what is known as spacious breathing wherein she breathed gently and openly and directed her attention to the entirety of the lower breathing space. After some time, she began visualizing that her lower breathing space was breathing. Neelam soon remarked that she felt like she was "being breathed" by her lower breathing space and that there was perfect silence in her being. Neelam continues exercises to this day and is completely free from anxiety. If you feel, we might be able to help you, do contact us to know more about what the benefits of our breathwork practice can be.
