Drawing Breath: Breathing into the Rhythm and Form of Art Therapy: Exercises and Workbook for Psychotherapists and Educators

Sitting in dignity, we bring our awareness to the object of our awareness. The breath is that object.

Breath, which pumps healthy oxygen into our bodies more than 20,000 times a day, is common to all living things. Developing a deep understanding of the process of breathing can reveal to us our inherent connectedness with all of life. Breathing, which has long been known to aid in relaxation and pre-exercise during stretching, is a focus in most meditation practices and serves as a vital reference point from which the mind wanders and is drawn back. Breath work can expand the uses of breathing to include rhythms that speak to both our life forces and our creative processes. I offer both theoretical background and experiential exercises in this paper.

As a child I suffered from a myriad of respiratory problems and allergies, which frequently landed me in the doctor's office to have my nose drained. Memories of gasping for air became more vivid years later when, as an adult, I took up more serious swimming to increase my lung capacity after quitting a long habit of smoking. In the beginning, I barely made it through one lap, but, as I moved through the water, one stroke at a time, the water held me in a womb-like weightlessness, allowing my body to move, pain-free, through the silence, except for