Dave Lee's breathwork
and personal development coaching
MY BREATHWORK STORY
At a conference in 1991 Lionel Snell introduced a group of us to Rebirthing breathwork. I lay on the floor of the mediaeval room and within the first few minutes was overwhelmed with a flood of emotion. After the session and my initial surprise, the emotions resolved smoothly, and I found myself happy, bewildered and impressed.
Awed by the power of so much emotional release with such a simple technique - who’d have thought that just breathing could achieve so much? - I vowed to do more of it.
Back home, I found a Rebirthing practitioner in Sheffield and went for a series of sessions over six months. Connected breathwork came into my life during a difficult year. My father was dying and a relationship of seven years was coming to an end. My life had lost its sparkle and vigour. Breathwork sessions opened it all up, like letting air and light into a shuttered, dusty room.
It was so effective that I decided to go in for professional training.
I learned that there are two modern ‘lineages’ of connected breathwork techniques, both from the early 1970s, one starting with Stanislav Grof’s ‘Holotropic Breathwork’ and the other with Leonard Orr’s ‘Rebirthing’. Each has given rise to a few ‘schools’ of connected breathwork.
The Rebirthing movement gave rise to a new development called ‘Vivation’ by its originators Phil Laut and Jim Leonard. They trained Hilary Newman of London, who launched her first Vivation Professional Training course in Autumn 1992.
In six weekends in London over a year I qualified, and we had a graduation party picnic in August 1993 at Oxleas Wood, recently saved from demolition.
So my experience of connected breathwork started with the gentle Rebirthing approach, then I qualified in its close relative, Vivation, then much later I experienced the healing bedlam of group Holotropic sessions under Stan Grof.
I developed my own approach to breathwork and have been coaching professionally in Britain and occasionally mainland Europe and the USA, for fifteen years. In 1999 I wrote ‘Connect Your Breath’, a booklet with accompanying CD. Click here to read samples of it.