Specialized Intentional Breathwork

Rounding out the therapeutic breathwork journey and offering a final set of strategies, this chapter presents three complex categories of breathing practices that have specific purposes and can be tailored in a multitude of ways: alternate and single nostril breathing, breathing with sound, and breathing with force. As is true for subtle and four-part-based breathing, these practices are selected based on client needs and adapted to clients’ specific circumstances. As these strategies can be used as a form of hormesis, they need to be used purposefully and designed intentionally. They are not offered in a uniform way to all clients, nor simplistically by differentiating beginning from advanced practitioners. Variations involving breathing with movement, for polyvagal states, and in daily life (detailed in Chap. 10 ) are applied again in this chapter to continue to highlight individualization of therapeutic breathwork. An additional offered variation within nostril-, sound-, and force-based breathing integrates the four breath phases. For example, breathing with sound can be varied with emphasis on the exhalation or breath suspension; breathing with force may be embedded in a context of emphasizing force on the exhalation versus the inhalation. Offering variations that are carefully tailored to client needs becomes increasingly crucial with the more complex demand characteristics of the therapeutic breathwork offered in this chapter.