The Brain Benefits of Holotropic Breathwork, Transformational Breathing and Rebirthing Therapy

And as it turns out,
Holotropic Breathwork, Transformational Breathing, Rebirthing Therapy is not fluffy hippie stuff, it has tons of research for proof of how it can bust stress, aid in recovery from buried trauma, help recover from chronic anxiety and panic attacks. If you don’t have any of those issues it is also one of my favourite ways to hit the ‘reset’ button, and re-energize after a stressful day or week and release tension that you don’t even realize you are holding onto until it’s gone!

Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist at Harvard University, and leading brain researcher, sums up why breath work is so powerful. It is the one physical thing in our bodies that we can access easily that links what he refers to as our ‘bottom up’ processes in the brain or autonomic processes and those processes in the brain that are under our voluntary control called “top-down” processes. The breath is the link between the ‘bottom up and top down’ uncounnsouc and conscious processes in the brain.

Various styles of breath work span an entire spectrum of uses and effects on the nervous system, on one end of the spectrum you have breathing to relieve stress and induce calm (such as the healing breath link to our video here) and on the other end, you have specific breathing to produce a catharsis and intense emotional release, such as something called Holotropic breath work also known as rebirthing therapy and transformational breathing.

Holotropic Breathwork also uses music as a catalyst to access deep emotion and unconscious thoughts, feelings and emotions and tensions along with deep circular breathing. This practice was coined and studied by Dr. Stansilov Groff in the 1960’s as a powerful therapeutic tool and this is the practice I am going to focus on in this video.