Experiencing your breathing – Breath Experienced – offers the possibility to reconnect with your own resources. Working with the natural breath brings balance, healing and a sense of wellbeing into all aspects of one’s life.

Breath Experienced, an impulse by Ilse Middendorf (“Der Erfahrbare Atem”), is one of today’s leading breath practices that develops the ability of allowing the breath to come and go on its own. We explore and discover the principles of the natural breath by sensing the movement of breath within our body. This happens because we are present and participate in the experience of allowing breath to come and go on its own. Through Breath Experienced a core of health is accessible, a unity and clarity within each of us, a core substance that is always intact, healthy and sane, as long as we breathe. The parts of our organism that have lost the connection to this healthy core substance, be it through injuries, traumatic experiences, or simply a lack of consciousness, can be reconnected to this core substance through Breath Experienced and in this way heal.

Breath Experienced does not push any healing process, but orients and connects to core substance within and in this way initiates a development that enhances healing forces emerging out of our own resources.

The awareness of the sensation of the movement of breath throughout the body is the basis of the Breath Experienced process. The mutually corresponding experiences of the following elements:

• allowing the breath to come and go on its own,
• awareness of the sensation of the movement of breath
• personal presence and participation in this process

develop personal skills such as: connecting to vitality, the capacity to resolve stress, flow rather than reaction in response to life’s challenges, clarity and effectiveness in communication and self-responsibility.

Breath Experienced is a form of somatic education, based on connecting with the natural breath, free from control of the human will. This approach supports the essence of the Self to unfold and develop to its true essence.

Breathing affects our entire Being. By focusing and sensing breath movement, we experience our breath, without interfering with its natural rhythm. Through this breath we gain direct access to a knowledge and power that is greater than a simple intellectual understanding: We call it a Somatic Intelligence encompassing the physical realm of posture, movement, and overall health and fitness, as well as the spiritual and mental spheres of thought, feeling, sensing, and intuition. Breath not only reaches our inner world and moves us, it also connects us to the world outside. Breath that comes and goes on its own creates movements both inward and outward, in an ever-continuing act of filling and emptying, receiving and giving, expanding and consolidating, the principles of the receptive and directive elements, the masculine and the feminine in a dialogue, searching for balance and oneness.

Breath movement becomes meaningful. Through simple exercises we become aware of breath laws and principles, and use them as a tool to experience and understand breath movements as the source of our creative forces as well as an outlet for their expression. The Self becomes embodied through the movements and gestures that are initiated by breath. We enter a self-analytical process of growth and development. Body, soul, and spirit can be experienced as one.

Every single breath cycle actualizes past, present and perspective of our Being. By learning to listen to our breath we connect with a source that can help to direct and lead us through an appropriate process of integration. Breath becomes our teacher and healer.