What is Breathwork?
In today’s world there has been a recent resurgence of Breathwork thanks to research that shows the myriad of benefits that conscious breathing has on all areas of personal wellness.
Many practices use the term ‘Breathwork’, including yoga breathing (pranayama), box breathing, coherence breathing and more. Breathwork is an umbrella term used to describe practices that include conscious, connected breathing techniques.
Some Breathwork styles use mouth breathing that is hard, fast, sympathetic activation breath styles, and others that are nose-based, parasympathetic, styles of breathing. Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery is the latter, a parasympathetic activation breath, that is subtle and relaxed, to allow for a broad range of experiences.
What is Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery?
This question is best answered, “Who is Alakh Analda?”, so as to understand where RBM fits within the myriad of Breathwork styles currently available.
Who is Alakh Analda?
Alakh Analda was initiated as Yoga Swami in 1976, and has been a Breathwork Mastery practitioner since 1987. In 1993, Alakh became a practitioner Trainer and the founder of Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery.
Born in Australia in the 50’s, Alakh studied Metaphysics and trained as a metaphysician in her teenage years.
She was initiated into Kriya Yoga, India 1976 and lived in India for a further nine years after being initiated into the holy Yogic order of sannyasa, as a Swami, in the Yogashram of Swami Satyananda Paramahansa (1977 – 1980) where she gained extensive Yoga training and teaching experience. Here the teaching was direct, indirect and by direct transmission.
Upon her return to Australia, Alakh facilitated a series of Yoga Teachers Trainings and trained as a Rebirther Breathworker graduating 1987.
She was at the forefront of the parasympathetic revolution in Breathwork, and over time, based on thousands of client sessions developed a Breathwork technique, Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery, or Breathwork Mastery, decades before the scientific validation of more gentle styles of Breathwork.
This strand has its emphasis on using breath for integrated personal/spiritual development where the emphasis is on self awareness and self paced clearing leading to self mastery. This style of conscious, connected, full breathing allows integrated access to the spiritual, mental, physical and emotional levels of experience in a breathwork session, clearing and reprogramming at the level of the cellular memory, which is the main emphasis of her work.
Who is Eleanor Mann?
Eleanor began training with Alakh Analda in 2009, after initially exploring Holotropic Breathwork from 2004. She has worked full time as a Breathworker since this time, and applied RBM to her own life, and embodies the promise of the RBM training, ‘living from a place where you completely trust the process of life’.
She studied counseling and psychology including honors thesis research into the effects of RBM, and worked for years as a counselor and therapist for families and children. Her literature reviews confirmed her experiences in RBM professionally and personally, that building a baseline of parasympathetic activity in the Nervous System improves wellness in all areas over time, mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually.
She is continuing to grow and expand the theory base of RBM to include the neurobiology of trauma, breath and interpersonal connection.
What distinguishes Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery from other Breathwork styles?
The instructions in RBM breath sessions are for full, conscious, connected, easy breathing.
Subtle shifts are honored and integrated as well as mild or intense releases all of which lead to ultimate resolution in time. The emphasis for each session is on you taking a step that is fully integrated by the end of the session. Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery is about having your life go in the direction you intend.
From Alakh Analda:
“Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery (RBM) is a conscious, connected body/breath technique which activates an inner non-mundane experience. This results in a number of internal experiences. One is where thoughts, pains, memories or feelings or energies that have been held down with the breath, are able to surface to be released, cleared or resolved. The process is freeing of limitations from previous decisions, beliefs or conditioning
This also can include the psycho-emotional aspects of your physical birth, in-utero experience and early infancy and their psycho-spiritual implications. The opportunity is to de-condition and reprogram self. In the non-mundane experience of a Rebirthing Breathwork Mastery RBM session, a new perspective to life issues emerges.
The continued process brings a point of choice or free-to-be-in-action instead of reaction to events and people. In a breath cycle of approximately 90 minutes’ duration, the conscious, full, longer than normal and connected breathing discharges constricting sensation blocks in the body. This opening extends from the physical into an emotional, mental and/or spiritual transformative experience.
There are broadly two styles of breathwork – both are conscious breathing.
Sympathetic activation through stronger and faster than normal conscious breathing which winds up the system and brings cramping and spasms and emotional type releases.
Parasympathetic activation applied in Breathwork Mastery RBM which is longer than normal conscious breathing which mainly unwinds the system and allows the constrictions in the system to drop out as body sensation discharges.
And the unwinding of the system = parasympathetic allowance is in place with Breathwork Mastery as a path of self generated authentic mastery. Mastery here meaning authentic and automatic ease’.
