From Tai….

A Brief History of Breathwork

Tai Hubbart

Breathwork originated from ancient Eastern traditions over 2500 years ago, and the term is now widely used to encompass a variety of practices that engage the breath to affect the body and consciousness, from yogic pranayama to anxiety-reduction techniques and dynamic processes to open the doors of perception.
The form engaged in this ceremony is an active, dynamic process derived from the
work of Wilhelm Reich, a German psychotherapist working in the 1920’s. Reich
described “muscular armor” as tension in the body that disrupts a person’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being, caused by unconscious breath retention in response to the experiences of life. His therapeutic model incorporated deep breathing practices to help release these blocks, and to liberate life force energy. Later in the 1960’s, the practice of breathwork was further developed by Stanislov Grof and Leonard Ore in the systems of Holotropic Breathwork and Rebirthing, respectively.

Grof developed Holotropic Breathwork as a successor to his LSD-based psychedelic therapy and a means of accessing non-ordinary states of consciousness (NOSC). Ore’s Rebirthing focused more on the release of trauma from the body, specifically incurred at birth and in early childhood experience. In the past fifty years, practitioners have created variations of these systems which have circular breathing as the foundational practice: Transformational Breathwork, Clarity Breathwork, Integral Breathwork, Shamanic Breathwork, BioDynamic Breathwork, and many others.