Book Review:

Conscious Breathing: Breathwork for Health, Stress Release, and Personal Mastery' by Gay Hendricks

This book takes a gentle, loving look at the breath and how to increase our capacity to breathe more fully for optimal vitality.

I enjoyed reading this particularly since I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Gay on my podcast Positively Influential in the last 18 months about one of his more recent business related books, especially The Big Leap, decades after Conscious Breathing was published. It was interesting to see the same man, and his aura of kindness and love, albeit younger, on the page, and I enjoyed learning about his younger years.

Custom HTML/CSS/JAVASCRIPT

Early on in 'Conscious Breathing' Gay details the anatomical and physiological process of breathing in the most beautiful, poetic way. He made it easy to visualise and understand the minute details of something we take for granted and gave me a new sense of the miraculous inside the everyday.

The structure of Conscious Breathing is largely designed to introduce Gay’s foundation and advanced breathing techniques, which he and his wife have developed and refined through working with thousands of patients in his counselling practice, and during his time researching his pHD at Stanford University. Hendricks considers breathing with conscious awareness of the process as a hotline to improved health, mental fortitude, stress release and personal mastery. 

The techniques are arrestingly simple, designed to improve deep belly breathing. He introduces small movements of the arms to increase lung capacity through stretching.

The descriptions of the  basic activities are accompanied by illustrations of how to complete them successfully (which combined with Gay’s references to his CD-Rom collection give away the age of the text as a relic of the late 80’s/early 90’s!).

Conscious breathing highlights particular activities for addiction recovery, asthmatic healing, trauma release and sports performance - again, each simple and achievable - if the patient is willing and able to put in the consistent daily repetition to create new and better breathing habits for long term vitality benefits. 

I was especially curious about the chapter on trauma release, where he describes using touch to aide the release of blocked emotions. Specifically, he experiments with touching his fingertips on the patient’s forehead, on the meridian points, This puts me in mind of EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique/Tapping) and the particular points of Eastern philosophies that are tapped whilst emotional and/or memory statements are made by the patient. It was interesting to consider how breathwork and meridian energy work could be combined.

Having experienced first hand the radiant, healthy author, a man in his late 70’s, it is remarkable the effect of his commitment to daily breathing practices. Gay’s own health and energy levels are testament to his attention to the quality of his breath and his own personal desire for self mastery.