Breathwork

 Breathwork

Throughout history, virtually every culture has provided an opportunity and a method to access non-ordinary states of consciousness for inner exploration and healing. These methods have included drumming, chanting, dancing, fasting, ingesting psychoactive plants, altering breathing patterns, and many others. Breathwork, through deep breathing and evocative music, facilitates access to all levels of human experience, including unfinished biographical material, birth memories, transpersonal phenomena, and residues of trauma stored in the body.

Breathwork can help individuals:

  • Deepen their spiritual connection.

  • Resolve preverbal issues untouched by “talk” therapy.

  • Make the 11th Step a reality.

  • Heal emotional contributors to physical disease.

  • Get to the root of anxiety problems and reduce panic attacks, phobias, OCD, and generalized anxiety.

  • Provide a safe and natural way to experience non-ordinary states of consciousness.

  • Unblock the creative process.

  • Release assumptions of “I can't” and empower positive life path changes.

  • Provide the true transcendent experience that we might seek through drugs, love and sex, spending, and other addictions.

 

My Training and Experience

I completed the Holotropic Breathwork Certification through the Grof Transpersonal Training Program in 1998. I have led workshops continuously since January 1997 in NJ, NY, FL, NC, and various retreat centers in other east coast states. I was a long-time Board member of The Grof Foundation (fka The Association for Holotropic Breathwork International), for whom I served as President for 5 years.

In addition, I completed Carol Lampman’s Integral Breath Therapy training and taught in this program, along with providing the music for trainees and graduates. I continue to return periodically for further Breathwork experiences.

Resources

 
Upcoming Workshops
Stay Home and Journey Longer
Nov 17
Stay Home and Journey Longer
 

Individual Breathwork Sessions 

If it is inconvenient to attend a workshop, or if you are not comfortable experiencing Breathwork in a group format, you can have the experience in my office by scheduling a double session. In 90 minutes, we can check-in, breathe to music for about 55 minutes, and have some time to process the material that arises. This also provides the opportunity to receive more direct facilitation and process verbally during the session.

 

Holotropic Breathwork

Holotropic Breathwork is a powerful approach to self-exploration and healing that helps participants reconnect to their higher selves and to a larger whole. (The word “holotropic” literally means “moving towards wholeness.”) Based on insights from modern consciousness research, anthropology, transpersonal psychology, Eastern spiritual practices, and the world's mystical traditions, the process uses accelerated breathing and evocative music to help participants enter a non-ordinary state of consciousness.

This state activates a natural “inner healer” that guides the participant's process and brings forth an experience that is unique to that person in that particular time and place. Every individual in a workshop experiences something different. And while broad themes may recur for an individual across multiple sessions, no two sessions are alike.

What to Expect in a Workshop

Workshops are about 12 hours long and include a 3-hour session for each participant, a chance to hold space for someone else's process, mandala drawing, group sharing, and eating.

 

Focus Breathwork

Breathwork has been found to be a precise key to the body's natural healing resources. It triggers a natural process of integration, cleansing, and purifying in the body, mind, and spirit. As the meeting ground between the conscious and the unconscious, it is useful in healing the split between these aspects of the psyche.

What is Focus Breathwork?

“Focus Breathwork” is an approach I developed that allows participants to experience breathwork with a reasonable time commitment. Workshops are about 4 3/4 hours long and include an 80-minute session for each participant, a chance to hold space for someone else's process, and group sharing.

 

Resources

Breathwork & Internal Family Systems (IFS)

By integrating Breathwork and IFS, the powerful insight provided through Breathwork's slight trance state accelerates the IFS process, helping parts that have been unknown to become known more quickly and parts that aren't serving us to become powerfully transformed into effective allies.

What Happens when Breathwork & IFS are Combined?

From an IFS perspective, purposely increasing the breathing invites more Self-energy into the body, leading to a variety of possible experiences:

  • Parts unblend, and the participant experiences the attributes of Self.

  • The transpersonal Self is experienced as light, energy, bliss, or other spiritual manifestations.

  • Guides, in various forms, are encountered.

  • The presence of Self from the breather and facilitator or sitter invites the emergence of exiles.

    • The exiles find acceptance from Self.

    • The exiles express through the body to varying degrees, showing Self scenes from the past to be felt, witnessed, and healed.

  • Manager parts that have concerns about any of the above emerge, providing the opportunity to work with them. The process is especially effective at bringing to awareness managers that live in the body and serve to restrict the breathing and block the flow of energy. They can be unburdened of the need to inhibit the life force and experience that the result is not only safe, but also beneficial and enjoyable.

What to Expect in a Workshop

In-person workshops are 5 hours long, with a 1-hour optional pre-workshop lecture on IFS. After a demonstration of the Breathwork & IFS process, we begin the workshop by discovering how our parts react to deeper and fuller breathing. Each participant then breathes for 50-60 minutes, while their partner and facilitators support their process. The breathing sessions are followed by group sharing, which allows integration of the experience with daily life.

Online workshops are about 3 hours long and include one breathing session without sitters. They are preceded by a 45 minute optional presentation on IFS.

Online Breathwork

Due to the increased opportunity for virus transmission when a group of people breathe faster and deeper in a room, in April 2020 we pivoted to an online format called “Stay Home and Journey.” In a time when people were feeling isolated, these inexpensive workshops offered a chance for people to experience Breathwork while creating a little connected community for the day. However, because they allow participation from anywhere, I plan to continue them even when it is safe again to breathe in person. Some folks even prefer the privacy and convenience of this format, as indicated in the feedback to the right.

 

Feedback from the online sessions

“I was curious whether the breathwork would be as effective at home, and was pleasantly surprised that my experience was as deep and fulfilling as it had been when I attended in-person workshop in Ted and Jeannine’s space. Meeting everyone during the introduction period before we settled in to breathe was important in feeling connected and supported by the other participants. Setting up my space to create a nurturing environment and playing the music through a good speaker helped optimize my journey. Great music! Thank you, Ted and Jeannine!”

“If you experienced a breathwork session in-person you will be surprised how connection to self and others can be facilitated online. Ted & Jeannine’s guiding presence streams into you. Literally! You are not alone and you feel held by others. In a time of isolation this breathwork session helped me feel like I am part of a nation with participants from all over the United States. It felt like home.”

“I felt great! Ted gave excellent guidance up front, we went on our journey, and returned to discuss our experiences with everyone. I felt alive and relieved after my breathwork session. Totally worth it - the affordable price for the session was a gift!”

“It's worthwhile - as Ted said, underneath the individual differences we all feel, there is - I agree, although I may be phrasing it differently - a flow of universal energy that we can tap into in an experience such as this.”

“This is a powerful modality, an effective way to get past resistance and allow awareness and emotions which are ready to be felt to bubble to the surface. I highly recommend it!”

“Very beneficial, although online, the effects feel the same as in person as Ted and Jeannine are so gifted in holding space, in creating a safe container. Also by the way they introduce the session (sending out reading material beforehand) and after the session (information on closure). The music they used was very vivid and incredibly helpful to dive inside. It feels like a complete experience, traveling into the depths of my being through breath, while feeling unconditional support, although not physically present. I recommend it to anyone who is curious and willing to travel inside!”

“Give it a try - I was skeptical too, but breathing - it still works!”

“It was definitely a valuable and meaningful experience. Despite what you may think, you can feel very connected with people you've never met before even if they are just a square on your computer screen. There is something intimate about hearing someone speak on a personal level, when you also get to see them in their own environment. Also, I think with this online connection you tend to really focus in on people as they are speaking without other distractions so it was an effective way of feeling connected. Based on the connections I felt from this opening portion, I felt like I was part of a community when I started the breathing session. Even though I was alone in my apartment breathing, I didn't feel alone because of the established connection I had with the other breathers and I felt safe knowing that Ted and Jeannine were keeping an eye on us if that's what we chose to do. It also helped to know that we were going to come together after the breathing session to share our experiences. I found the sharing portion very meaningful and got some value out of each person's sharing. In these challenging and isolating times, I'm very grateful for Ted and Jeannine for this gift of being part of a community and doing deep personal work, while still maintaining all social distancing rules.”

“It was surprisingly easy to establish connection with the group and I enjoyed the privacy of breathing alone and reconnecting afterward.”

“The structure of the workshop included a check in with each participant before and after the session, and the freedom to be on or off screen during the breathing portion, while knowing that the facilitators were present. This provided a supportive, contained platform which ignited a moving (literally and figuratively) and healing journey home to myself.”

“It is a wonderful way to have a deeper connection with yourself - so loving.”

“I'd say "try it for yourself!" I'd say that if you aren't really comfortable with intimacy, this is a great way to dip your toes into breathwork without all the touchy-feely stuff that can be off-putting in a normal breathwork session. Also, nothing like having your own home/bed/down comforter to feel at home. Also, one can scream, cry, act out as much as one feels like doing without self-consciousness.”

“It really gave me time and space to go into some material in-depth and be connected to a healing community.”

“I've been practicing breathwork in-person with Ted and Jeannine regularly for a few years. I was so excited to hear that they were offering these workshops online. Their experience as facilitators and the beautiful space that they hold absolutely translates to the online environment. I expect that I will practice breathwork with them more often while they are offering workshops online because the shorter time commitment is even easier to fit into my schedule. I'm so grateful to have their grounding guidance in this practice during this really unsettling time.”

“Thank you so much for the other day, and organizing these online sessions. I’ve been finding them so useful, especially during a time when I thought a lot of my interior work might not be able to be explored in the way I wanted to.”

“This was a truly necessary and immediate and sensate experience and I am ever grateful for your offering it.”

“Go for it if it calls to you. Actually it works even online. You may even like the fact that there is no one next to you processing.”

“I told my friend that I gained a lot from it. It was perfect for me because I wanted a baby step before I dive in to an in person session.”

“A good opportunity to focus on yourself and hopefully become aware of and work through some issues.”

“Surprisingly, this weird format seems to work fine. I was a little concerned about people who have intense experiences, especially newbies, and people with abandonment issues feeling a 'retraumatization' rather than a healing. But maybe the document sent beforehand saying 'don't do this if your issues are about abandonment' weeded those people out? IDK. Seemed like people had some pretty deep experiences!”