Breathwork has been around since humans began to develop the means to feel happier, improve health and be more connected to the universe. In the past five decades, breathwork has evolved to a whole new level; it has been developed into the technique we know as rebirthing breathwork or the more cathartic style originally known as holotropic breathwork. Thanks to the work of Leonard Orr, an American spiritual disciple, and Stanislav Groff, a Czechoslovakian doctor of psychotherapy, great psychotherapeutic advances have been made through the use of the breath.

Not all styles of breathwork are the same. What the ever-growing community of breathwork facilitators around the world view as breathwork is often different from what the average yoga, meditation, chi gong or psychotherapy practitioners may view as breathwork.

The main distinction the traditional breathwork facilitators agree on is that a breathwork session is based on an emotional energy cycle completing through a connected breathing technique of breath control. That is, the inhale is connected with the exhale and the exhale connected with the inhale, with no gap between the two. A continuous breath results. It’s often viewed that this continuous connected breath results in what most spiritual and therapy disciplines are trying to achieve: the connection between inner and outer consciousness, the merging of the conscious and the unconscious mind.

The definition of emotional energy cycle (EEC) length can differ in different schools of breathwork. The EEC is the cycle of an emotional pocket in the unconscious being penetrated and discharged thoroughly. The EEC can take from one hour for rebirthing breathwork to up to three hours for holotropic breathwork. Despite the differences, the merging of conscious and unconscious is what genuinely results for both. The near-magical quality of this style of breathing results in a breaking-down of the barrier between the conscious and unconscious mind and results in the client experiencing unconscious emotional-level memories coming to the surface.

The key word here is “emotional”. Mental-level memory recall is nothing new or special. Hypnotherapy and other effective psychotherapeutic regression techniques facilitate remembering long-forgotten or repressed events. Breathwork, however, enables people to access the emotional-level memory, the emotional aspect of past incidents: the actual deeply buried, traumatic, emotional aspect of an experience that may not ever be accessed through other means. These emotions could originate from as early as the womb, birth and infancy. It is the feeling of these emotions, not analysing mental-level memories, that results in deep healing and permanent change relatively quickly.

Breathwork and anger

In the average session, some people release anger and rage, which are some of the main foundations of relationship issues and self sabotage. Anger is a very powerful energy that can do one of two things: either it goes outwards, is expressed and leaves the system or is turned inwards, becoming self-directed anger and rage, which is the true cause of self-sabotage of one’s life. The anger we speak of here is not the reactive anger we experience while driving or with our partner, for example, but rather the real reason we carry anger, which present-day situations and people trigger in us.

Just because a person is comfortable to express their anger at home does not mean they are healing the real cause of their anger. It usually means the total opposite, as rarely are we really angry about what we consciously think we are angry about. It is usually an earlier childhood or school period of disempowerment being “re-triggered” that is an adult’s genuine cause of anger. At times, the anger is a cover-up of deep hurt or grief.

Some people, on the other hand, have their anger buried so deeply they don’t experience it as the “raw emotional energy” of anger. These people will be so out of touch with their emotions that they will experience only the mental-level symptoms of anger, which are having critical thoughts of others and themselves, making people and themselves wrong or judging harshly and having fantasies of arguments with people they feel wronged by or have not communicated their truth to. Some people will not even be aware of that level and will simply experience the very end result of holding on to anger, which is lack of energy, personal power, motivation and inspiration to do things. This is because buried anger is such a massive amount of trapped life-force that they have very little energy left with which to truly live.