Creating a Context for Breathwork

Breath represents the bridge between body and mind, reflects the inner world, absorbs outer experiences, can support or fail, and binds us together. Breathing is essential for life and therefore largely automatic; it comes naturally. However, sometimes breath presents or reflects challenges, difficulties, illness, and worry. In this moment, therapeutic breathwork—learning about healthful and nourishing breathing—becomes life-changing. This chapter briefly reviews breathwork’s history and presents an integrated holistic context for using therapeutic breathwork to increase health, vigor, and resilience, and to foster fortitude, persistence, and compassion. This chapter explains breathwork as a practice that attends to the biopsychosociocultural context that shapes human lives and experiences—demonstrating breath as profoundly linked to circumstances, relationships, work, communities, even the planet. An integrated holistic context is provided for breath, breathing, and therapeutic breathwork that attends to accessibility, beneficence, intentionality, wholism (honoring all layers of human experience), and integration (drawing on all available resources) to deepen and enhance human life.