Just Breathe: Mastering Breathwork for Success in Life, Love, Business, and Beyond by Dan Brule

★★★★★ (5/5)

 A selection of my favourite passages from the book

Breath Awareness

• Breathwork is the use of Breath Awareness and Conscious Breathing for healing and growth, personal awakening, and transformation in spirit, mind, and body.
• Awareness (the consciousness factor): The message is “wake up!” Relaxation (the release factor): The message is “let go!” Breathing (the energy factor): The message is “take charge!”
• Breath Awareness means paying close attention to the breath as you allow it to come and go on its own, by itself. The idea is to simply observe your breathing, watch the breath, witness it. No need to breathe in any particular way. This is the passive aspect. It is the practice of pure awareness applied to breathing. The awareness we are talking about is meditative awareness. It is not thinking, not judging, not comparing, not analyzing; you are not trying to figure out anything or do anything right.
• As you become more aware of the breath, you naturally become more aware of other things occurring in your mind and body: thoughts and images, feelings and sensations, perceptions and emotions. You may become more aware of your physical tensions, energetic contractions, habits, patterns, urges, reactions, and inner dialogue.
• Combining Consciousness and Breathing: We are breathing all the time, but most of the time we are completely unconscious of it. The breathing is happening, but our consciousness is focused elsewhere.
• In breathwork we practice three fundamental spiritual principles: 1. Nonjudgment 2. Nonresistance 3. Nonattachment

Breath and the Body

• If you need to control yourself—your mind, body, emotions, posture, or behavior—then start by getting control of your breathing.
• the sympathetic system speeds up our heart rate and respiration, and the parasympathetic slows them both down and triggers our natural “rest and digest, restore and repair” functions. The parasympathetic system restores energy reserves and reduces inflammation.
• the activity of the vagal PNS system has significant effects on our abilities to trust, love, connect, bond, be intimate, communicate emotionally, and feel empathy.
• In order to reconnect with our creative energies, we must reconnect with the real feelings of aliveness in our body. The body holds everything. It never lies and it never forgets.
• When you are in the middle of an unruly crowd, or you are waiting and there is nothing you can do about it, it’s easy to get impatient and irritable. Instead, make a different choice. It’s a wonderful opportunity to affect change in the world without anyone knowing.
• It seems to me that as long as your body and mind are reacting, you cannot really be sensitive. It is not until the body and mind stop reacting that we are able to experience the energy directly. Not until we stop reacting can we be truly sensitive.

Types of Breath

• Hyperventilation: when hyperventilation is learned and intentional in your breathing practice, it can be an effective way to overcome deep fears and transform emotions, especially feelings of limitations, blocks, and old traumas. It is a method of spiritual purification and a powerful healing and creative practice when used properly.
• Breathing through the nose helps us to fine tune our awareness and our sense of subtle energies. And yet the mouth is more flexible: we can shape the stream of breath and play with sound when we breathe through the mouth. It allows more creative possibilities. And of course, you can’t laugh or cry or yawn through your nose. You can’t express or release powerful emotions through your nose.
• The Buteyko Method: A healthy person sitting at rest should be able to tolerate a comfortable pause after a normal exhale, for a minimum of thirty to forty-five seconds. To test yourself, simply take in a normal inhale and a normal exhale, then close your mouth, pinch your nose, and don’t breathe in. Measure the time before you have to breathe in again, and practice gradually increasing that time. 4. Practice controlled pauses after the exhale, very gradually (over a period of weeks) increasing the length of the pause until you reach a comfortable pause of forty-five or even sixty seconds. 5. If you have to take in a deep breath or two after the pause, you’re cheating. You should be able to resume normal breathing without taking a recovery breath. If you have an urge to take in a deep breath after the hold, then fight the urge and take little breaths slowly until you recover.
• Short Breaths: If you get groggy, feel tired, but still have work to do, here’s a Sufi technique that will help. (By the way, the Sufis—Muslim mystics—have lots of great meditations and exercises, combining breath with thought, prayer, movement, and sound.) Give yourself two to four short, quick powerful inhales through the nose, and then blow the breath out through pursed lips. Do that for two minutes, and see if you are not buzzing with energy and aliveness. Shoot these short quick breaths into your chest through the nose, and then release the breath out your mouth through pursed lips. We call this the “Sniff and Pooh Breath” because of the sound you make when inhaling through the nose and when blowing out through pursed lips.
• Headache: Breathe gently into the epicenter of the pain, using your breath to move all your attention into the pain. Then exhale softly and deeply, relaxing the muscles or the area around the pain and tension. Look for details. Is there a shape to the pain? Does it have borders? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? This isn’t about analysis, it’s about feeling. Use your breath to bring energy, relaxation, and awareness to the pain.
• Controlling Temperature: To warm yourself up: breathe through the nose and quickly pump the breath with your belly and diaphragm (similar to the kapalabhati or “Breath of Fire”). To cool yourself, turn your tongue up toward the roof of your mouth and inhale slowly, feeling the cool sensations under your tongue and in your throat. Consciously draw that breath all the way down to your perineum, and feel it cooling your chest and belly along the way.
• Hypopressive breathing: Start by taking in a big inhale and expanding the chest. Then squeeze all the breath out and hold it out. Now act as if you are inhaling. Expand the chest, but don’t actually let any air come in. Pull your belly button in toward your spine and pull up on your perineum. You will feel your chest expand and get the sense that all your abdominal organs are being sucked up into the chest cavity. Hold this upward pressure for about ten seconds, then relax and breathe in.
• Breathwatching: After the exercise, review your experience. What feelings, sensations, or movements did you notice? Where? How would you describe or characterize your breathing pattern: slow, quick, deep, shallow, smooth, chaotic, forced, natural, effortless?
• Spiritual Breathing: The power of spiritual breathing lies in its simplicity: just add a little stretch to your inhale. Consciously expand your in-breath a bit more than usual. Gently take in a deeper, fuller breath than normal. And then deliberately let go into a long, soothing sigh of relief. As you exhale, feel yourself or imagine yourself dropping down into your center—as if you are leaving the surface and settling into a deeper part of yourself. Leave behind what you think, how you feel, what you do. Let go of the mundane world, your daily activities, your habits and patterns, your routines. Just for a moment, let go of your thoughts about right and wrong, should and shouldn’t, must and must not . . .
• The Rebirthing Breathwork technique is as simple as it is powerful. Here are the basics: the inhale is active and the exhale is passive. Pull the inhale in consciously and let the exhale go quickly and completely (the key phrase here is “let go”). There are no pauses or gaps between the inhale and the exhale, between the exhale and the inhale. No holding, no hesitating. The breaths are connected in a smooth, steady rhythm.

Breath Holding

• Note when you feel the first clear yet subtle urge to breathe. Mark that time. We call it a “comfortable pause.” Note when you feel a strong yet manageable urge to breathe. Mark the time. We call it a “controlled pause.” Hold your breath until the urge to breathe is practically uncontrollable. Mark that time. We call it a “maximum pause.”
• If you have to take a recovery breath, it means you have gone beyond the comfortable pause. If you have to take in a deep inhale to catch your breath, it means you are not working with that first reading. Practice more awareness.

On Yawning!

• Did you know that sociopaths don’t share the tendency to yawn when others do? The less empathy a person has, the less likely he or she is to catch a yawn.
• We’ve been taught to think or feel that it is rude or impolite, even insulting or offensive! Besides attracting attention, there is often a perceived message of boredom, or that the yawner is not interested in what is happening or being said. Cultural mores about open mouths and human noises deem that they are not acceptable in “polite society.” All this causes people to suppress something that nature requires us to do.
• I imagine a young schoolboy in the back of a classroom allowing a big yawn, surrendering totally to it while the teacher is lecturing or writing something on the blackboard. I imagine this juicy, yummy, luxurious, full-body yawn taking over the child. With the yawn comes the natural urge to stretch and to breathe and to make sounds . . . It’s a beautiful moment of natural healthy pleasure and aliveness.
• When we yawn we clear and release subtle energetic blocks in our system, allowing us to feel more fully and deeply into what is happening, into what is being experienced. It allows us to be totally present to ourselves and the ones we are with. The yawning reflex lights up the same part of our brain that is associated with empathy, bonding, play, and creativity.

Points to Ponder

• Do your first five-minute practice session as soon as you wake up in the morning, before doing anything else
• He says the first step out of the trauma and the drama is to change your focus. “The more you think about it, the more you experience it. Change the way you look at it. If you change your story, you will change your future. Tell yourself you are happy. Decide to be better, starting right now. No need to focus on trauma: focus on breathing.”
• Deliberately generate gratitude and conjure up appreciation. Consciously enjoy the feeling of expansion on the inhale and deliberately enjoy the feeling of relaxation on the exhale. Strengthen that part of you that has the ability to generate comfort and pleasure at will. And remind yourself that life is good.
• Tens of thousands of thoughts are generated by our mind every day. The choice we make about what to give attention to is determined by our source beliefs, the archetypal decisions and thoughts that are held at the ground of our being.
• In fact, a certain amount of stress is good for us, even necessary. We need it to grow and to build resilience. The key is the way we think about it and react to it. Used properly, channeled wisely, stress can strengthen and inform us.
• He talks about feeding the “courage wolf” and starving the “fear wolf.” This means that we don’t allow any performance-degrading imagery or negative internal dialogue. It means engaging only in positive internal dialogue and visualizing success.
• Practice breathing in ways that are peaceful, accepting, trusting, loving, grateful, forgiving, inviting, and surrendering. Incorporating these attributes with spiritual breathing makes manifesting them in reality easy and effortless.
• We are all connected, so we help ourselves best when we serve others, and we help others most when we serve ourselves.
• Be careful what you think about while you breathe, because every breath you take gives life force energy to what you hold in consciousness. As they say: “thought is creative,” and “thoughts become things.”
• We realize that “nothing is happening to me, it is just happening.” Breathwork teaches us that everything that happens in life is happening for us, not to us.

Astonishing Facts!

• We normally measure heart rate in beats per minute, and we assume that a regular, steady rhythm is good. In fact, a steady, regular heart rate is the last thing you want! When we measure the heart rate in milliseconds, we find that the time between two heartbeats is never the same.
• Healing birth trauma is the process of changing life-limiting decisions that we made when we took our first breath. Healing begins in the moment we accept the possibility of change, the possibility of continuing to evolve on all levels of being, just as we did in the womb. Healing the first breath, however, is a process that is not always ecstatic and pain-free.
• Participants are encouraged to suspend any intellectual activity, which is a way of avoiding the emotional impact.
• When you learn to get out of your head, energy that usually goes toward feeding the ego is available to heal the body and awaken creativity.

Beautifully Constructed Sentences

• Being wide awake and totally relaxed at the same time is so rare that when it occurs during a breathing session, most people describe it as a peak religious experience, a peace that passes understanding. They describe the experience as bliss or ecstasy, a feeling of pure, causeless joy. They inevitably resort to spiritual or religious terms to describe what is actually a very basic, yet profound human experience.
• “When there’s too much aliveness in the body, we evacuate the building. When feelings in the body become too strong, we abandon ship and take up residence in the head. Creativity is not born in the head; it comes as a gift from beyond. It’s a heart thing. It’s an emotional thing. It’s a feeling thing. And so in the process of avoiding intense feelings, we cut ourselves off from the body, and therefore our creativity. The solution is to get back in touch with the body, to connect with feeling, and there is only one way to do that: breathing. Breathing is the whole deal!”
• We look out at the world, or we look at ourselves, we see suffering, limitation, disease, or negativity. But maybe we are not seeing reality at all. Maybe what we see is due to our warped consciousness. That’s why we need to do our inner work. That’s why we need to quiet and clear our minds; that’s why we need to deepen our awareness, to raise and expand our consciousness. And breathwork is a perfect way to do that.
• When you love what you do, life gives you lots of opportunities to do it!
• When a spiritual seeker is ready, the next book they pick up will have the answer, the next teacher they meet will show them the way, the next technique they practice will cause a breakthrough. It really has very little to do with the book, or the teacher, or the technique: it has everything to do with readiness. With that readiness, even something as simple and natural as the breath will set you free and fulfill your heart’s eternal desire.