Free Your Breath, Free Your Life: How Conscious Breathing Can Relieve Stress, Increase Vitality, and Help You Live More Fully (Paperback)

by Dennis Lewis (Author) "Work with breathing has great power to transform our health and our lives..." (more)
Key Phrases: metaphysical breath, other breathing muscles, working with your breath, Drawing the Bow, Conscious Standing Practice (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"This is by far the most compelling and compete book on breathing I've ever read. It is 'must' reading for everyone who is interested in optimal health."—Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom "Lewis teaches us how to assess our breathing and provides practical tools to help us learn to breathe better and create a healthier balance in our everyday lives. He makes clear that how we breathe reflects who we are and the manner in which we express ourselves—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This book is a wonderful resource for anyone who wishes to improve his or her health and vitality through the breath."—Len Saputo, M.D., coeditor of Boosting Immunity "Dennis Lewis has a deep understanding of the central importance of breathing, in both its physical and spiritual dimensions—as the breath of life and the breath of the spirit. This book is a practical, inspiring guide to opening yourself to the larger energies of life through the medium of the breath. Highly recommended!"—John Welwood, author of Toward a Psychology of Awakening "A delightful and innovative path to the most profound truth, shared by the world's greatest healing traditions: the way through any trauma, stress, illness, or injury is to first put attention on the breath. The reader will not only understand through Dennis's inspired writing, but get to experience through numerous excellent, practical exercises how conscious and authentic breathing is the gateway to enhanced health and vitality."—Meg Jordan, Ph.D., author of The Fitness Instinct and founder and editor of American Fitness "It is extremely difficult to write well and truly about the healing role of breathing both in our everyday life and on the way to great self-knowledge. Dennis Lewis succeeds through a rare combination of clear-headed, practical thought and spiritual sensitivity."—Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul "Dennis Lewis is a colleague, teacher, author, poet, and dedicated student of the breath and breathing. Free Your Breath, Free Your Life is not just a good book—it is a great book. It is required reading for all my students attending the Optimal Breathing School. It should be required reading for everyone."—Michael Grant White, Executive Director, Breathing.com "This is a truly inspiring and informative book. It is a master breath-worker's book for those who wish to attain breath, and thus self-mastery."—Dr. Joy Manne, author of Soul Therapy, editor of The Healing Breath: A Journal of Breathwork Practice, Psychology, and Spirituality

Product Description
This book will show you how being aware of your breathing can have a profound impact on your physical and emotional health in a most positive way. Whether you are interested in stress reduction, easing a chronic breathing problem, or exploring the more spiritual aspects of breathing practice, this illustrated guide will provide you with practical, simple exercises to calm, energize, and generally enhance your sense of well-being. Dennis Lewis also explains how becoming more conscious of your breathing can reveal a lot about your self-image and help you deal more effectively with difficult emotions and situations.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Shambhala; illustrated edition edition (May 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590301331
• ISBN-13: 978-1590301333
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #32,116 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must reading for anyone interested in the breath!, September 2, 2004

By	Dagmar Trebichavksa "Acupuncturist/herbalist" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've taken several workshops with Dennis Lewis, the author of this important book, and I've been able to incorporate much of what I've learned into my work as an acupuncturist and bodyworker. This book really captures the essence of the author's on-going work with the breath, and, in my opinion, offers numerous insights and practices that will be helpful to anyone interested in the breath--no matter what their level of understanding.

The author outlines, with helpful exercises and practices, seven basic self-directed ways of working with the breath, and shows why a "one size fits all" approach to breathing is neither safe nor useful. He then goes on to provide safe, effective practices for helping to open up the breathing spaces of the body, using awareness, touch, and special movements, postures, and sounds.

The author also throws a great deal of light on the way our self-image--including our self-importance, vanity, and low self esteem--impacts our breathing, and goes deeply into the fact that the quality of our breathing depends on our ability to exhale, to let go of everything that is untrue and unnecessary in our lives.

The meditation section, which is oriented toward helping us explore the question "Who am I?", is very helpful and includes a variety of powerful practices: Conscious Breathing, The Six Healing Exhalations, the Smiling Breath, The Breath of the Heart, Expanding Time, and The Boundless Breath.

The book also includes three appendixes, which cover the importance of breathing through the nose, the importance of effortless effort in doing breathing exercises, conscious walking and standing practices that will help the breath engage the whole body, and exercises for stress relief, slowing down your breathing, reducing pain, and many more.

This is by far the most comprehensive and practical book on breathing that I've seen, not from the standpoint of the quantity of exercises offered, which the author says are "a dime a dozen these days," but rather from the standpoint of the principles involved in helping to free up our breathing so that the "breath of life" can engage our entire being.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in living a healthier and fuller life.

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "M ust Reading" for Anyone Interested in Stress Reduction, May 22, 2004

By A Customer

I've worked with computers for many years and have faced (and continue to face) a great deal of stress in my life. I've tried a variety of breathing exercises to help deal with this stress, but most of them didn't really help--at least not for very long.

I picked up a copy of this new book a couple of weeks ago at the
San Francisco New Living Expo, where the author gave a talk, and it has already helped immensely. The book does not take a "one size fits all" approach to breathing exercises, but rather explains the seven fundamental ways that we can work with our breath, including what he calls conscious breathing, touch-supported breathing, movement-supported breathing, and sound-supported breathing. His exploration of these various approaches, along with safe exercises illustrating each one, has given me many new insights into what I suppose could be called "the anatomy of breathing exercises." It has helped understand better what various types of breathing exercises can and cannot do, and which ones are most helpful for me personally.

In addition to offering a variety of simple practices, along with helpful illustrations, the book provides an entire section to help open up our "breathing spaces," a section on the relationship of breathing to our self-image and to the spiritual dimensions of breathing, and another section with some very helpful breathing meditations for going deeper into ourselves. The two meditations that I have found very helpful so far (I have not tried them all yet) are "Awakening the Breath of the Heart" and "Expanding Time."

I recommend this book very highly to anyone who has to deal with high levels of stress in their lives, which is probably most people today. It has already helped me a lot.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Discover the heart of your life: your breath, June 14, 2004

By A Customer

I came across this book when looking for something to help me understand and deal with a problem of overbreathing, which was leading to a variety of health problems. As a lapsed meditator, I'm familiar with watching the breath, but over the years had developed a habit of trying to breath too much, and, in return, not breathing well.

This book gave me first of all a chance to look at my breathing and see how it should be. The early sections of the book, that discuss how you breathe, and above all how you should let yourself breathe, recentered me in this area. Then the exercises let me relax and calm my breathing, until it quickly got back to a more normal ryhthm and depth. While there's a long way to go, the book's many exercises and insights provide an ideal program for rediscovering the breath and letting it do its work correctly.