Thursdays May 15, 22, June 5, 12, 19, 26 • 11:00am -12:30pm PT
or
Saturdays May 17, 24, June 7, 14, 21, 28 • 11:30am -1:00pm PT

You can attend either class in any given week. *No class Thursday May 29 and Saturday May 31.

with Robert Litman – Buteyko Educator since 2003 
One Private Session included
All sessions will be recorded

We breathe. No two breaths are alike. Every breath is tailored to your specific conditions, including your health status, body chemistry, levels of stress or relaxation, state of sleep, and physical activity. Breath is always changing to accommodate the needs of your heart and your body’s organs. Even when you’re caught in a pattern of gasping for air or feeling you cannot receive enough breath, breath does its best to accommodate—whether the need is known to you or not. Discomfort can bring your attention to something, including breath. Most of the people who come to me for counseling about breath, come because they sense that their breathing isn’t functioning well.

We can manipulate breathing to change our state, and we might call it breathwork. Doing this can shift the pulse and tenor of our nervous system, our heart’s rhythm and breathing cadence from hyperactive or stressful to calmer. But I prefer not to call it work. It’s not a task like working in an office or cleaning house. Putting our breath to work can be yet another stress.

Our breathing bodies are in relationship to the rhythm and ecology of earth. We breathe, plants breathe, four-legged animals breathe, birds breathe, fish breathe, and on and on. I think it’s more useful to feel ourselves in a relationship with our breath than to add another item onto our to-do list. We need to breathe with the rhythms and needs of our bodies and the earth in order to sustain and enjoy life.

Like any relationship, you and your breath may grow more intimate. You are exploring a relational potential, learning the ins and outs of what serves this connection to nurture health and find pleasure in the connection. When you practice “breathwork,” you turn breath from a sacred gift into an object that needs fixing. In that mode, you might ask, “Am I doing it right?” trying to fit a dynamic process into a box. One client told me that when she was trying to make her breath behave according to her idea of how it should, she felt as though she were trying to corral a wild stallion. And it rebelled.

So, instead of “breathwork” as “work,” simply enter a state of receptivity. That way, even if you practice “Box Breathing,” Pranayama, or another technique, you can do it as an exploration, not a task. In this open state, feel how it feels to be curious about how this “imposed” pattern affects your inner ecology, and see if you can then enter an intimate relationship with your breathing body—where the breath you’re breathing is an experience rather than a task. You are the breather, and breath is your intimate partner. Breath and the movements of your body are in relationship with your inhalation and exhalation, and this is one of your most primary relationships.

I can’t tell you what your experience will be like. It will be your experience and whatever discoveries you make are your own. I can, however, guide you to explore and experiment with different breathing patterns as ways to contact the nature of breath and its impact on your nervous system and other biological functions. Even to call your nervous system a “system” is to act as though it can be separated from the unified bodily experience. There is, in fact, no separation of systems or the activity of cellular life, or between your biology and the biology of the ecosystem you’re in. The trees and the microorganisms of the seas produce the oxygen we breath and absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale.

If we call carbon dioxide a byproduct or a waste gas, though we deny the biological truth that it nourishes the plants around us. And our bodies retain a fair amount of CO2 for other bodily functions. The Bohr Effect shows that carbon dioxide helps regulate the acid/base balance of our blood and helps facilitate the movement of oxygen from our lungs to our red blood cells and into the mitochondria within our cells, where they metabolize into the energy that powers our metabolic processes.
Although I can’t tell you the content of your experience of breath, I can tell you mine, how breath moves through me and the benefits I receive from being in a dynamic relationship with my own breathing. Teachers of breathing can pass along their experience, and the ways of breathing that have been of benefit to them. These instructions can guide you as you enter your own intimate relationship with your own breathing body.

It’s like having a psychotherapist or physical therapist to help you become aware of activities and ways of being that benefit you. But they only “work” if you try them on for yourself. Your breathing and the pacing, sounds, and touch of breath and your body’s movement in response to the play of breath are your real teachers. The Breathable Body invites you to practice, to explore, and to discover. You don’t have to “work.”