Breathwork is not (Leonard Orr’s) Rebirthing, and (Orr’s) Rebirthing is part of Breathwork
Breathwork is not meditation, and meditation is part of Breathwork.
Breathwork is not martial arts, and martial arts are part of Breathwork.
Breathwork is not yoga, and yoga is part of Breathwork.
Breathwork is not gymnastics, and gymnastics is part of Breathwork.
Breathwork is not breathing work, and breathing work will never work fully unless it is combined with breath work.
Breathwork is not osteopathy, hands-on-healing techniques, reflexology, chiropractic, a relaxation technique, … and so forth; and all of these work better when combined with breathwork.
Etc!

So what then is Breathwork?
Ah!
As I see it, Breathwork does everything that can heal the bodymind and lift it to its highest potential, and does this in a respectful powerful way.

Breathwork is Psychoanalysis (without the theory)
Breathwork does psychoanalysis. Yes it really does. Don’t faint, don’t say ‘Oh no it doesn’t,’ too quickly, and please don’t stop reading – I’m purposely starting with the most controversial! Breathwork does psychoanalysis – but without its cumbrous theory. Breathworkers and their clients are not obliged to have Oedipus complexes or penis envy … but they may!
Here’s the proof. Of the classical five biggies of breathwork: “1: the birth trauma, 2: the parental disapproval syndrome, 3: specific negatives, 4: the unconscious death urge and 5: other lifetimes,”1 1, 2, 3, and 4 were part of early Freudian theory. Otto Rank (1924) was the first to write about birth trauma, followed by Nandor Fodor (1949). Relationships with parents (2) were fundamental material for Freud. Specific negatives (3) are largely the same as Freud’s repetition compulsion and Freud was also interested in the death instinct (4). If we get into classical Rebirthing, where it all started (in writing,) Leonard Orr and Sondra Ray’s book Rebirthing in the New Age (henceforth O&R), has many case histories that show breathwork doing the same work as psychoanalysis. Being free, however, of the cumbersome and somewhat outdated theory of psychoanalysis, Breathwork lets the analytical work happen in a more authentic way: clients are allowed to come to their own interpretations and conclusions with regard to the material that comes up,
Incidentally if you read the case histories in O&R carefully you’ll see that breathwork is not hyperventilation; so-called hyperventilation is one form of breathwork, at least for Orr and Ray. Certainly not for me!2

Breathwork is Awareness
Now this won’t surprise any of Breathe’s readers. All breathworkers know this, but in other fields of therapy, people like Eugene Gendlin (Focusing, Bantam Books, 1978) have worked out through painstaking university level research that therapy does not work for many people because they don’t have sufficient awareness of their body, feelings or thoughts. This section of the personal growth field (yes it is – conventional therapy is as much part of this field as breathwork is!) have had to teach their practitioners and clients awareness techniques. Much easier, I say, through the breath.

Breathwork is Analytical Psychology – with or without the theory
Jung (whose work is called Analytical Psychology to distinguish it from Freud’s Psychoanalysis), would have loved Rebirthing and Breathwork. Never mind dreams and the Royal Road (Jung said dreams were the royal road to the unconscious) – Breathwork is the Concord to the Unconscious. (Hence it should be used carefully.) Breathwork sessions can lead to experiences similar to dreams and bring us into contact with the archetypes. I had a client who would breath connectedly throughout her sessions without saying one word, and then in the end, her eyes gleaming, would tell me what had happened. After her first session she said she’d been walking in the country, along a path and had passed a Buddha in a field, and walked on until she could hardly see the Buddha any more. She told me that the Buddha was me. Well, that’s as good as any dream to tell me that she would use me as a guide until she needed me no longer and then continue on her path. And that is what she did.

Breathwork is Body Work
Well, it has to be, hasn’t it. Our breathing takes place in our body. Through breath awareness we can find the blockages in our body and by taking our breath to them, work with them and release them. There is no body work that can succeed without using the breath to support it. Osteopathy, hands-on-healing techniques, reflexology, chiropractic, relaxation techniques, etc., all work better when combined with breathwork and so do all forms of exercise, the martial arts, yoga, gymnastics and sports. (If you’re a keen sport, go to to find out more about this!)

Breathwork is Trance Work
It is normal in conscious connected breathing, and even without connecting the breathing, to enter a variety of trance states. These can also be called altered states of consciousness or non-ordinary states. They are periods of enhanced consciousness of various qualities: light or deep states of concentration, regression trances, trances that take us into past lives, ecstatic trances and trances that take us into states of Oneness and contact with the Divine.
Read Kylea Taylor if you want to learn how to work with these states.3

Breathwork is Spiritual Practice
Breathwork is spiritual practice. Well of course it is. How could it be otherwise when trances take us into states of Oneness and contact with the Divine. The Buddha4 (around 400 B.C.E. and the Jains (perhaps 500 B.C.E. or earlier) used the breath as spiritual practice. Yoga does the same. The martial arts use it to get energy flowing before ever starting the body movements. Chanting in church, synagogue and mosque is a form of breathwork. In O&R spiritual practice is intrinsic to Rebirthing. Where ever is there a form of breathwork which does not lead to spiritual experience and thus practice? Wherever is there a religion or spiritual practice that does not use a form of breathwork? Read Taylor again if you want to understand this aspect of breathwork well.

Shamanism and the Breathwork Process
Breathwork has its own process which tends to develop as follows:
Most clients, and certainly all who have never had any experience in therapy before, come to us ‘loaded.’ They are loaded with their emotions, pain and suffering, and usually these come pouring out in the first conscious breath: Breathwork is conscious breathing. I ask a new client, ‘Put your attention on your breathing and tell me what happens,’ and immediately the tears that were uncried in childhood or other traumatic experiences flow, and the sorrows that were unfelt then become to conscious, felt and integrated.
After a certain number of sessions, which I cannot predict, clients have experienced substantial integration of suppressed experience and a good quantity of ‘unloading’ has taken place. I know this because the periods of conscious breathing in-between episodes of ‘unloading’ become longer. Then I introduce conscious connected breathing: Breathwork is conscious connected breathing.
The connected breath takes the work into deeper layers of suffering and into deeper layers of the body. It brings out memories that are suppressed on the cellular level such as conception, intra-uterine and birth trauma, and memories that are suppressed on the body level, such as experiences of physical and sexual abuse and so forth. This is not surprising as Breathwork is bodywork.

The breathwork process usually works in this way: In the early stages, many clients can only manage shorts periods of connected breathing before they become activated, and their suffering arises from the unconscious into consciousness to be worked with. As they develop, however, they become capable of ever longer periods of connected breathing, and the material that is brought to consciousness comes from ever deeper layers of the unconscious and may or may not be painful. What comes up may include past-life earth experiences as well as those that took place on other planets, visions, guidance, clairvoyance, evocation of healing capacities, personal healing of ailments, etc., because Breathwork evokes transpersonal experiences.
Competent and confident conscious (although not necessarily connected at this stage) breathing leads to contact with archetypes such as spirit or animal guides because Breathwork evokes shamanic experiences. Clients will go on shamanic voyages quite naturally without the need for inductions, and will do it easily when inductions are used.
Conscious connected breathing will make energy flow in the body so as to bring about healing. It can make so much energy available that the client can cause it to flow to heal another person. Healing is a shamanic capacity.
Conscious connected breathing leads to ecstatic states. Sondra Ray writes, ‘Something was breathing me. … I began to tingle all over. It kept building and spreading. It felt like a thousand orgasm! … I had never felt that happy in my life. ... I heard the breeze totally, all of it. … I heard the trees talk to me.’ (p. O&R xxii-xxiii) Ecstasy is a shamanic capacity.
Breathwork leads to deeply spiritual transcendent states, such as oneness, or the void, or the experience of the direct presence of the Divine. The developmental process that Breathwork brings about is the process of becoming shamanic.

Afterword: Breathwork is not connected with torturing people
I have frequently mentioned Orr & Ray. Theirs is the first book on Rebirthing, as readers of Breathe use the term, and contains many ways of working with the breath, some of them using completely soft and gentle ways of breathing, others using more energetic ways. It is the book that gave Rebirthing to the world. There is no occasion in this book, or in any other Breathwork book I know of, where anyone was wrapped in blankets or anything else, against their will or willingly and forced to fight their way out. I write this in the light of the Colorado tragedy where a child was wrapped in a blanket and ordered to find her way out, and was unable to and so was suffocated and died. This is no less than torture! Such a dangerous practice is totally unjustifiable under whatever pretence. Breathwork is not about torturing people or abusing them in any way, and nor is Leonard Orr’s Rebirthing.
The term ‘Rebirthing’ did not originate with Leonard Orr. The practice of making people push their way through bodies forming a tunnel was used by R. D. Laing and called ‘rebirthing.’ He learned natal therapy, which was originated in 1969 by Elizabeth Feher, from her daughter Leslie. ‘Rebirth’ is part of the process of natal therapy. I know of no physical harm occurring either through Laing or Feher’s methods. Janov became interested in inducing birth in 1972. In his Primal Therapy, he had the client crawl through a rubber vagina. (Feher, p. 15) Primal therapists in Zurich have used pillows in a dark room for the same purpose: pushing them against the person who was supposed to make his way out of them and become reborn. This practice killed someone a few years ago! To prevent such confusion of terminology occurring again, as far as one can, I propose that Rebirthing is henceforth referred to as ‘Leonard Orr’s Rebirthing’ or ‘Rebirthing Breathwork.’ The term as we have used it previously is not precise enough. The Rebirthing we do has no relationship whatsoever with the dangerous and irresponsible practice in Colorado which goes by the same name and which has now been banned in that state.

Joy Manné PhD

Acknowledgements
I thank Catherine Dowling for her very useful suggestions.

Bibliography
• Feher, Leslie (1980), The Psychology of Birth: The Foundation of Human Personality. London: Souvenir Press (E & A) Ltd.
• Fodor, Nandor (1949), The Search for the Beloved: a Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning. New York: Hermitage Press Inc.
• Gendlin, Eugene T. (1981), Focusing. Toronto: Bantam Books
• Joy Manné (1994) Rebirthing, an orphan or a member of the family of psychotherapies? Int. J. of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine. (1995), Rebirthing, is it marvellous or terrible? The Therapist: Journal of the European Therapy Studies Institute, Spring 1995. (1997) Soul Therapy (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books)
• Orr, Leonard & Sondra Ray (1977/1983), Rebirthing for the New Age (revised edition 1983). California: Trinity Publications
• Taylor, Kylea (1994), The Breathwork Experience: Exploration and Healing in Nonordinary States of Consciousness. Santa Cruz, California: Hanford Mead.
• Taylor, Kylea & Joy Manné, Dialogue on Hyperventil-ation between Kylea Taylor and Joy Manné, The Healing Breath: a Journal of Breathwork Practice, Psychology and Spirituality,’ Vol 1, No 2, 1999.
• Rank, Otto (1924) The Trauma of Birth. New York : Dover Publications, 1993 edition.

Notes
1 Orr & Ray, p.58 - 63.
2 See Kylea Taylor and Joy Manné, 1999.
3 Kylea Taylor, 1994.
4 See Joy Manné, 1997.

Joy Manné is editor of The Healing Breath: a Journal of Breath-work Practice, Psychology and Spirituality, available free on www.i-breathe.com/ She is the author Soul Therapy (North Atlantic, Berkeley, California, 1997), of the first breathwork novel The Way of the Breath available free on www.i-breathe.com/wayofbreath, & many articles on breathwork and Buddhist Psychology and the relationship between them. She has a private practice in Switzerland.

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