Based on the experiences of people who use these practices, here are the benefits you’ll likely enjoy:

• Steady high energy that lasts all day.

• A calm, centered feeling deep inside you.

• Mental clarity and focus.

As with any other useful human endeavor, practice and focus is required to get those kinds of results. The processes produce results quite rapidly, though, so even five or ten minutes of daily practice will usually generate noticeable positive effects.

For Personal Transformation And Professional Development
We have made available for immediate download our most popular video breathing instruction resource:

The Breathing university : How To Breathe For Relaxation Health And Well-Being.

Thousands of people have purchased this hour-long program for their own personal transformation.
However, it is widely used by professionals as a training resource to learn how to use our techniques in their practices.

Tami Simon, head of Sounds True, approached me a few years ago with an idea that I immediately loved. She asked if I could put everything people really needed to know about breathing into one package. The Breathing Box is the result.

It contains audio, video and printed materials, all nicely organized in a way that makes it easy to use. Almost every day I receive “thank you” expressions from people who are using The Breathing Box for their wellness, performance enhancement and stress release. I’m very proud of it.

You can get it directly from Sounds True by clicking here.

I was working on my Ph.D. at Stanford in the early Seventies when I first saw how quickly the right kind of breathing could make people feel better. Before that moment, if someone had told me that I could feel energetic, calm and mentally-sharp all day by breathing differently, I would have probably said “You’re nuts.” One day in The Counseling Psychology lab where I trained, I had a moment of inspiration that changed my mind.

The lab had one of the first biofeedback machines available for clinical use. Nowadays, you can get a sophisticated biofeedback device that’s as small as an iPod and costs a few hundred dollars. Back then, though, the equipment was the size of a refrigerator and cost nearly $20,000. We would hook clients up to the machine and teach them how to relax. Gradually, by watching the meters on the machine, they would figure out how to make the meter go down by relaxing their muscles and quieting their minds. As they got more and more relaxed, their breathing would slow down to a certain rhythm and pace. One day a thought popped into my mind: Since the breathing slowed down to this particular pace when the person got relaxed, why not just teach the person to breathe that way in the first place? I raised this question with the professor. “Why bother with all the fancy equipment?” I asked. “Let’s just teach our clients how to breathe!” The professor, who had invested thousands of dollars and several years of research proving the effectiveness of the machinery, didn’t think very highly of my idea. He was convinced that it was the machinery that did the job. I wasn’t so convinced.

On my own I began to try out my idea with clients. Lo and behold, it worked! I found that by using the breathing techniques, most people could learn to relax in a fraction of the time it usually took with the biofeedback machines. It also solved a problem often encountered with biofeedback machines, especially in the early days: a lot of people feel anxious being hooked up with electrodes and connected to a big machine with meters and gauges on it. Since most of those people were being treated for anxiety, I didn’t see how it helped to hook them up to a gadget that made them even more anxious. I was excited to find a reliable and simple new way to help my clients. I also began doing more breathwork on myself, to see if I could map out the best techniques and find out why they worked. Nowadays, you can find hundreds of scientific studies on the effectiveness of breathing techniques, but back then about all I had to go on were old yoga and Taoist books, some writings from European biophysical pioneers such as Franz Alexander and George Groddeck, and my own experiments on myself. Gradually over the next few years I built up a set of breathing techniques I could use with confidence to help my clients.

Later, as a professor at University of Colorado, I often got the “You’re nuts” reaction from other professors when they saw me teaching breathing techniques to my graduate students. My conservative colleagues needled me mercilessly when my book, Conscious Breathing, was published. One rat-psychologist held the book aloft in the faculty lounge and said, “Hey look, Hendricks has written a whole book about breathing!” However, I never set out to please rat-psychologists, and I’m pleased to say that science has since caught up with what clinicians, yogis and others have been saying for a long time. Hundreds of scientific studies have been conducted over the past few decades on the power of breathing to treat many conditions. Not long ago, the ultra-conservative FDA even gave their approval to breathing techniques for the treatment of hypertension. It’s been a long time now since anybody told me I was nuts (at least for focusing on breathing!)