The Breathing Festival 2021–The Power of Our Breath

I have always been interested in health and wellness.  Recently I completed some additional Gale courses on brain health and mindfulness.  (I previously did a Gale course to learn some sign language.) Participating in The Breathing Festival and learning about breathwork seem like a great next step. 

I learned about this festival from a wonderful person, Nicole Price.  (I am biased.  She is my cousin, but that does not at all change the fact that she is absolutely fabulous!)  Rather than just sharing my Festival experience after the fact, I want to let you know about it now so that you can check it out and hopefully share your experiences, too.

As a start, I asked Nicole and her husband, Marc, another co-founder (and great guy), some questions so that I would better understand The Breathing Festival.

1)  What are the International Center for Breathwork and The Breathing Festival?  What is breathwork? 

Our mission is to bring the benefits of breath awareness and conscious breathing to every human on the planet.  Breathwork starts with the simple awareness of paying attention to your breathing.  And you’re probably asking why this is important since we’re all breathing all the time? Well when we learn to pay attention to our breathing, that’s when at the most basic level, we start to understand that when we can consciously change our breathing, we can completely change our state of mind.  And then we can change the way we feel … the way we think …. The habits we have … as we strengthen our mind/body connection, the possibilities for how we can shift our lives consciously in the direction that we dream of are endless.

2)  How has learning about breathwork affected your life?  How have you incorporated this into your life?

You may remember that I used to have a lot of stomach problems. For years, I got sick to my stomach after eating.  I saw many, many doctors and kept hearing that nothing was wrong with me but yet I continued to get sick.  When I started doing growth work and breathwork, I was able to learn how to be more in-tune with myself.  And learn to let emotions flow through me the way they’re intended.  I learned that the stomach problems were primarily due to stress, anxiety and emotional build up.  Once I was able to release that, the problems disappeared.  That’s just one of many big shifts that have happened in my life as a direct result of this kind of work.

3)  I am a science gal and a health professional, so I have to ask this.  Is there real science behind the field of breathwork? 

There are decades of research behind breathwork.  Peer reviewed, published research.  Take a look at the new NY Times best-selling book by James Nestor titled Breathe: The New Science of a Lost Art as an example.  This angle looks closely at the detrimental effects of mouth breathing and discusses much of the accepted science behind it.  Look at the ongoing research by the HeartMath Institute that shows how breathing coherently improves heart-brain coherence and heart rate variability (HRV).  You can also investigate the research on coherent breathing by Stephen Elliott and the Psychophysiology research by Peter Litchfield, Ph.D.  These are just a few of the many contributions to science by breathing and breathwork researchers.

4)  I noticed that there are a lot of speakers lined up for The Breathing Festival.  Is there really that much information to cover in the area of breathwork?

Our speakers are over 50 of the world’s greatest teachers and masters in the world of breathwork.  They’re the ones doing the research, writing the books, creating the styles and modalities. Our original plan was 36 presenters and we had so much excitement about the event that we ended up opening it to 55.  I also have a huge list of even more people who wanted to be in the festival and we’ve invited them to be part of another digital library we’ve created in the International Center for Breathwork. Yes, there really is that much and more information on breathwork.

5)  How did you become involved in the development of The Breathing Festival?  Describe your path from learning about breathwork to organizing this event? 

In addition to Marc and myself, we have two other founding members – Dan Brulé and VJ Odedra.  Dan is also the founder of Breath Mastery and the author of Just Breathe.  He is widely regarded as the top world master in Breathwork and he came to me in mid-2019 asking if I was interested in helping him start a festival.  And the rest, as they say, is history!

6)  How does breathwork relate to or tie in to meditation and/or mindfulness?

The first pillar of breathwork is breath awareness, which is very simply paying attention to your breathing without doing anything, without changing anything, just noticing the sensations of your breathing as you continue to breathe the way you normally/automatically do.  This is meditation.  People who have tried meditation and gave up because their mind continuously wanders find that they are able to meditate by paying attention to their breath.  Breathing is always in the present moment so while you are paying attention to how you are breathing, you are always in the present moment which is mindfulness.

7) Where can someone get more information?

thebreathingfestival.com 

Copied directly from the International Center for Breathwork website, “The Festival will run from Thursday – Sunday over three weekends in February: February 11-14; February 18-21; February 25-28, 2021. Each Festival day will be broken into lectures, experiential breathing sessions and “toolkits” which are tips and tricks for bringing breathwork into your everyday life.  All daily sessions will be released at 10 am US Eastern Time / 3 pm GMT and available for 48 hours to allow for you to watch at your leisure.”  (It seemed easier for me to just copy that than find some other way to summarize it.)

The theme of this year’s Breathing Festival is “Change Your Breath. Change Your World.”  A major goal of the Festival is to teach us all about breath awareness and paying attention to one’s breath.  It is geared towards everyone, and there is something for everyone at this Festival.  You can find the schedule here.  

By having the Festival take place over several weekends, participants have a better chance of taking an initial experience and turning it into long term behavior.  If we view and participate in at least some of the sessions each day and then practice what we have learned between sessions, we will hopefully develop a new, healthy habit.  (I am really hoping for that to occur!)  In my opinion, it seems like there is a lot to gain and very little to lose by participating.   I already ordered my ticket and am looking forward to learning a lot more about breathwork.  If you join (if interested, you can order a ticket here), please share your thoughts afterwards!  Take a deep breath and get ready!  I am!