No.2 Why do breathwork?

First & foremost, to feel better about ourselves, our relationships & our lives. To understand how breathwork can positively affect these issues, we need to have some kind of model as to why we are dissatisfied in the first place. Popular philosophies to the effect that ‘life’s just like that’, or ‘I’m too sensitive for this world’, simply don’t help us.

We need to see that whatever we have, or haven’t, achieved in life is relative. In other words, judgement is a large part of our problem. But judgement against what standard exactly? Against those standards that we have internalized, ‘how things should be’ as opposed to how they are. Our frames of reference set us up for a lifetime spent running inside our cage’s wheel. The perfect self, the loving relationship, the fabulous home, attractive, well paid career, enviable possessions etc.etc. The friction between our idealized images of life and the reality that we experience day to day can be both profoundly motivating – and profoundly depressing. Research in positive psychology has demonstrated that achieving a certain standard of living has only a short term impact on our level of happiness and sense of well-being. Hence the expression the ‘hedonic treadmill’ – on the level of material satisfaction, we seldom ‘arrive’ and must just keep on running.

Moreover, most of what we dream for and actively pursue is simply not going to make us that much happier in the long run. Research has shown that even a lottery winner will have more or less the same, or worse, level of life satisfaction after 9 months than before they won the lottery! Again the research is telling. It is estimated that our circumstances account for only 10% of our happiness. Intentional activity – all that running on the treadmill – accounts for another 40%. But a whopping 50% of our happiness is more or less ‘fixed’ – it depends upon our ‘set point’ or baseline level of happiness in life. The million dollar question is, therefore, can we change our set-point?

The answer to that question depends upon what our ‘set point’ is built from. We can view the ‘set point’ as a spectrum ranging, on one end of the scale, from relatively ‘fixed’ genetically inherited traits all the way through various levels of unconscious and conscious affect and belief to how we use our minds on a day to day basis. Therapeutic and personal development approaches and techniques are interventions along this spectrum to permanently shift the ‘set point’ of life satisfaction in a more positive direction. How breathwork accomplishes this, and for what range of issues it is particularly well suited will be dealth with in a future post.