Conscious Breathing highlights

Notebook Export

Conscious Breathing: Breathwork for Health, Stress Release, and Personal Mastery

Hendricks, Gay

Citation (APA): Hendricks, G. (2010). Conscious Breathing: Breathwork for Health, Stress Release, and Personal Mastery [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Preface: Beginning a Breath-Taking Journey to Wholeness

Bookmark - Location 100

Highlight(yellow) - Location 114

I must admit that I was obnoxious in my zeal when I first discovered the power of breathwork. Like many new converts, I was on fire with my new understanding, and I wanted the rest of the world to catch fire, too. Even though I have tempered some of my early evangelical zeal, I actually feel more enthusiastic now than I did when I began in the early seventies. But today it is definitely getting harder to find skeptics. Now, after several hundred studies of the effectiveness of breathwork in treating a host of psychological and medical ills, the scientific community has verified what the community of therapists has discovered: Breathwork works.

Bookmark - Location 124

Part One - The Breath of Life

Highlight(orange) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 200

For every in-breath there is an out-breath, and as these two currents meet in the nose, a fine microclimate is set up.

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 266

I have seen this simple but powerful piece of information change many lives.

Note - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 267

use deep, slow breaths

Bookmark - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 267

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 312

The major problems with feelings is that we tend to ignore them, hide them, or let them linger longer than they need to. Conscious breathing can become a most useful ally in learning to handle emotions.

Note - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 313

conscious slow breathing

Highlight(orange) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 331

Once you get the message from a feeling (say, “I’m scared”), you may want to make it disappear. Breathing is the fastest and most effective way to do this. Take a few big breaths into the physical sensations of any emotion, and watch what happens. Many times, that’s all it takes to move it out of your body. I have witnessed this done a thousand times now, but it still moves me to see the look on people’s faces when they learn that they are the master of their feelings.

Highlight(orange) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 363

The unpleasant qualities of emotions come from not letting them through, from holding on to them by not participating with them. By directly participating with feelings, largely through breathing with them, you can rid yourself of much unnecessary negativity.

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 376

She reasoned that since the disease affected her lungs, learning to breathe properly might help. She asked the research team at Stanford to teach her, but no one could tell her what healthy breathing was!

Note - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 377

Experts could not tell how to breathe

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 381

At any rate, the woman found her way to a longtime colleague of mine, Dr. Loic Jassy, and engaged in several sessions of breathwork activities. Within a month the disease disappeared and has not returned. It is a comment on modern medicine that no one in the research project expressed any interest in how she had healed herself.

Note - Chapter 1 - Well-Being of Mind, Body, and Spirit: Eight Reasons to Practice Conscious Breathing > Location 383

No explanation needed

Part Two - The Practice of Conscious Breathing

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 3 - Three Foundation Lessons in Conscious Breathing > Location 805

This is why if you corrected only this one problem and did nothing else, you would make major improvements in your mental, emotional, and physical functioning. We will use correct diaphragmatic breathing as the jumping-off place for all the activities that follow.

Note - Chapter 3 - Three Foundation Lessons in Conscious Breathing > Location 807

Better breath for better body and brain

Highlight(yellow) - Chapter 3 - Three Foundation Lessons in Conscious Breathing > Location 825

According to one medical researcher, poor breathing plays a role in more than 75 percent of the ills people bring to their doctors. In most cases, poor diaphragmatic breathing is the culprit.

Note - Chapter 3 - Three Foundation Lessons in Conscious Breathing > Location 826

Good belly breathing really helps

Highlight(yellow) - Foundation Lesson Two: Cultivating Full Diaphragmatic Breathing > Location 989

One is in the cultural taboo against rounded bellies. Fashion dictates that both men and women must have flat bellies. The gaunt fashion-model look still has power over certain segments of the population, as does the ramrod-straight military-inspired look for men.

Note - Foundation Lesson Two: Cultivating Full Diaphragmatic Breathing > Location 991

Not healthy but fashionable

Bookmark - Advanced Lesson Two: Fine-Tuning Your Whole-Body Breath > Location 1261

Highlight(yellow) - Advanced Lesson Two: Fine-Tuning Your Whole-Body Breath > Location 1261

Now we are ready to add a subtle and very powerful dimension to your breathing. As

Bookmark - Advanced Lesson Four: Breathing into a Profound State of Relaxation > Location 1476

Bookmark - Advanced Lesson Five: Generatin a Deep Experience of Streaming Energy > Location 1516

Highlight(pink) - Advanced Lesson Five: Generatin a Deep Experience of Streaming Energy > Location 1517

We struggle to prove we’re okay, rather than relaxing into our magnificence. To make matters worse, many of us have self-sabotage mechanisms that come into play when our energy gets too high. We feel close to a loved one, then start an argument. We get a buzz working out at the gym, then go for the triple-cheese baconburger and feel miserable the rest of the evening. When I first started as a therapist twenty-five years ago, I thought that people created negativity because they felt bad. Now, with many years’ experience, I see that it is often when things are beginning to go well that we mess up. I think it is because we do not have as much experience with feeling good, with things going well. Being happy, organically high, and successful is unfamiliar territory. When we stray into it, we often bring ourselves back into the familiar world of suffering and restriction.

Note - Advanced Lesson Five: Generatin a Deep Experience of Streaming Energy > Location 1523

We tend to mess up when things are GOOD!

Bookmark - Advanced Lesson Five: Generatin a Deep Experience of Streaming Energy > Location 1554

Bookmark - Advanced Lesson Five: Generatin a Deep Experience of Streaming Energy > Location 1571

Part Three - Conscious Breathing for Special Concerns

Bookmark - The Formal Trauma-Release Technique > Location 1783

Appendix A - Personal History: How I First Became Interested in Conscious Breathing

Highlight(yellow) - Location 2400

In the spring of 1971, my marriage ending, I packed all my earthly belongings into my VW bug. I didn’t have much stuff to start with, due to my state of general poverty; the divorce courts had also been helpful in lessening my attachment to material things. I

Highlight(orange) - Location 2413

Frequently the whole book would boil down to a single breathing practice, with an entire philosophy wrapped around it. Sometimes, maddeningly, a book would spend two hundred pages promoting the spiritual value of a particular style of breathing, only to say at the end that it could not be taught in a book.