BREATH TAKING offers an easy and provocative programme that uses human instinct as the basis for maximising the 20,000 breaths we take every day. Through a series of 15 second, 1 minute and 5 minute breathing techniques, author Lorin Roche helps readers tap into the basic human instincts: eating, exploring, homing, resting, playing, grooming, mating, hunting, self expression and healing. Accessing the hunting instinct can increase confidence and aggression levels - key elements to a successful business interview. Nerves can be calmed before public speaking by tapping into the resting instinct. And the mating instinct can improve intimacy - and even increase the intensity of orgasm. The 60 techniques in BREATH TAKING have been developed through work with vocal coaches, yoga instructors, athletic coaches, drivers, Lamaze instructors and others who use breath to enhance awareness, promote relaxation, improve performance and focus concentration. The simple, effective exercises can be practiced anywhere, making BREATH TAKING the most practical guide to using breath to improve the quality of life.
Now 59, Lorin has been meditating since age 18, when he signed up to be part of a research project on the physiology of meditation. He was a control subject, and received no instructions whatsoever they wanted him to just sit in a totally dark, soundproofed room in the lab for two hours a day for several weeks, and measure his brain waves. With no instructions, and never having heard of meditation, Lorin just paid attention to the total silence and darkness, and spontaneously entered entered a state of intense alertness. A few months later, someone handed him a little book describing 112 meditation practices, and he realized that he had experienced many of them while sitting in the lab.
This experience made it clear that meditation is a spontaneous and natural human experience, and that there are many doorways into meditation. After the experiment was over, people began asking Lorin to teach simple meditation practices as part of scientific studies and university classes. One thing led to another, and soon Lorin was running his own College-within-the University, called Experiential Workshops, which offered classes in meditation, Tai Chi, Structural Integration Movement Awareness, Yoga, Dance Meditation, Art Meditation, and Gestalt Body Awareness.
Lorin was born in 1949 and grew up in Southern California, in little beach towns such as Ventura, Malibu and Dana Point, which in the 1950's, 60's and 70's were middle-class and unpretentious. Both his parents were surfers and members of the San Onofre Surfing Club from the 1940's on, and took him into the ocean before he could walk.
