Creating Attunement with Breathwork

Initial approaches to therapeutic breathwork incorporate breath attention and awareness, an important step of self-observation toward resilience, coherence, and adaptability. This chapter provides detailed guidance to foster such breath attunement and grounds practices in purposeful and intentional design and sequencing. It recapitulates breath characteristics in the context of helping patients become familiar with quality of breath and develop interoception, neuroception, proprioception, exteroception, and calmer states of mind and nervous system. The chapter gives detailed instructions, cuing, and sample scripts; recommends sequencing options within and across sessions; and provides practical guidance about variations and adaptations for patient-centered tailoring of breath observation and awareness. The goal for attention and awareness practices is attunement to the impact of breathing on all layers of being, including noticing its manifestations in the physical body; understanding its energy, affect, and arousal in the vital experience; noting its impacts on mental, emotional, or cognitive experiences; recognizing its reverberations into nervous system states and psychological presence; and accessing the deep sense of well-being that arises simply through being with breath in a conscious and mindful manner.