Jessica Dibb, "Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation" (W. W. Norton, 2025)

Welcome to the new Books Network. In this episode, I talk with Jessica Dibb about her book, "Breathwork and Psychotherapy," clinical applications for healing the body, mind, and spirit. Breathing is something we do all day, every day, usually without giving it much thought. And yet, as Jessica Dibb explains, the breath is one of the most direct pathways we have for shifting our nervous system, changing our emotional state, deepening our presence, and opening the door to healing. In this book, Jessica brings together ancient wisdom, contemporary science, depth psychology, spirituality, and years of clinical and breathwork experience to show how conscious breathing can become a powerful support for psychotherapy and for personal growth. She offers not only theory and research, but also case examples, practices, and guidance for anyone interested in the healing potential of the breath. Jessica has spent decades exploring the connection between breath, body, mind, and consciousness. She is the founder of the Inspiration and Consciousness School and its extensive breathwork and psychospiritual facilitation program, and she is also a founding, co-director, and ethics chair of the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance, where she advocates for rigorous training and ethical standards in the field of breathwork. Welcome back. I'm Elizabeth Cronin, a host for the new book's network, and today I'm very excited to be talking with Jessica Dibb about her new book, "Breathwork and Psychotherapy." Thank you so much for joining me today. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be with you, Elizabeth, and just really appreciate the work that you're doing for the world and trying to help people actually feel a greater sense of wholeness and aliveness. Ah, that you just struck such an important point, how many of us are looking for our sense of wholeness, and your work around how we can use the breath in an effort to experience that. I just want to say, too, that I had the chance to meet you. I was at the psychotherapy networker in March, and so I had the chance to meet you and experience you walking a group of us through some breathing exercises, so I'm really excited to have you tell us a little bit more about that. Do it. Yeah, so maybe you can help us get oriented around how you became interested in this. I know that you said you were always interested in how breathing could be a pathway toward healing and a pathway toward sort of feeling more whole. Yeah. I think that the first impetus was actually that I experienced when I was from my earliest memories, that everybody wanted to be love. And I think that has borne out for me that not only do we feel that way when a baby's born, that baby just deserves the world and deserves love, but I've also had the privilege to be at many death beds as well as many birth beds, and it's so clear to me that everybody realizes that the most important thing was, did they love, could they have loved more? Are they loving right now? So I think that from my earliest memories, even as a child, I just wanted to find something that would help people unlock any fear that they had about giving that love to the world. Oh, there we've got kitties in the house, kitties, beautiful, and what would help them unlock fear and open up this love so it could really flow deeply into the world. And I went through a series of looking at, like when I was very young, I thought, oh, ballet is so beautiful and that will elevate everybody and they'll want to become love. And of course, by the time I, so I went into that very seriously, moved to New York, but at the age of 12, danced at Lincoln Center, danced with the Royal Ballet from England when they would come over. But I realized by the time I was 15, that ballet wasn't a universal language, and I really became interested in that point at what would be a universal key, something that could transcend culture, religion, educational status, socioeconomic status, race, language, any of it, and really be unifying and that anybody could do it. And I wanted to go to medical school. I really loved medicine. I loved biology, so I thought I'll get the degree. I was starting to do yoga, breathing practices and realizing that I could elevate my energy level. I could help put myself to sleep. I could interrupt, you know, if I was getting sick, I could sometimes interrupt those breathing respiratory illnesses. There was just a lot that was going on. But even medical school, I realized this has a particular orientation that is so powerful, that there's going to be times I'm going to be asked to do things, treat people with certain treatments that I don't even think are the most effective. And so at some point I was introduced to what I now call human potential breathwork practices, which is the group five. I've broken breathwork down into five groups of kinds of breathing practices and those human potential practices really take us underneath our conditioning back to our most earliest implicit memory, like when we're born or even before that. So we're sort of less conditioned, less defensive, less adaptive and we're in a place of real unconditional presence. And that can open up expanded states of awareness and consciousness and open up just more capacity. And I was doing that kind of breathwork and I had the sepiphany that this is the universal key that everyone's breathing. It doesn't matter their language, their country, their religion, their race, their whatever. I later came to understand that the primitive brain, our brain stem rather has this mechanism in it for recognizing in group and out group, what is safe and what is not safe? Who is safe and who is not safe? And it gets stimulated by cortisol, it gets stimulated by fear. And I came to understand that we could create an in group and an out group about anything. I mean, I'm feeling very connected to you, but let's just say I was in a state of doing that. In some kind of fearful state, I wasn't present. And just because you have a different color here than I do, I could create that sense of like, you're not quite, you know, what blondes are different than brunettes or whatever. And I could only think of one group in the entire world that you couldn't do that with. And that's the group of breathers because we're all breathers. And so I think the neurological implications, the psychological implications and the spiritual implications of everybody being able to understand the potency of conscious breathing from the first breath to the last could not only bring individual regulation and individual well-being and individual awakening, if you will, but could also contribute to a collective experience of connectivity and caring and collective functioning and collective wisdom. Well, that's beautiful. I think your point is really well made too, that breath is available to everybody and we all breathe. We all have it. So unlike the ballet, where only maybe only certain people have the opportunity to attend the ballet, we all get to breathe every single day. Yeah. And it's even about preference because not every, you know, some people like country music and some people like jazz and some like classical and some people won't like ballet. They might not like any dancer. They might like a different kind of dance with breathing. We all prefer to breathe, you know. And I think that the feeling that we can't breathe as we certainly felt when George Floyd said those famous words that really re-adnited a lot of caring about breathing at the same time that we were experiencing COVID and we were understanding the importance of breathing there and at the same time that we were experiencing the forest fires in Australia and Europe and the United States, it's like we all understand that breathing is precious. And I think humanity is even more aware of that since that very infamous year of 2020 with COVID and George Floyd and the fires. So it's sort of like it doesn't even require a preference, we all value it. So having said that, I think it raises an interesting question though about preferences about how we breathe though. I do think some people, I know even myself, when I try to do that really, really deep breathing sometimes and you talk about this in the book, it can be uncomfortable initially. And so it is interesting because there are, and you could tell us more about that, the different ways we can breathe and I think that I find myself feeling like I have some preferences. Yes, yes. Well, let me say a couple of few things about that then that was part of why I decided to take a kind of, you know, bold step in a way and and put out that breathwork is a spectrum of breathing practices from very simple court, relaxing, cortisol, regulating kind of practices all the way up to these human potential practices that are so deep. And I broke it down into five groups of the first has to do with regulation and restoration. Second has to do with just awareness practices. Third has to do with very specific therapeutic interventions that might address fatigue or lack of focus or lack of or having a respiratory challenge like asthma or having insulin, you know, that isn't regulated. There are very specific techniques we know can can have results for most people. And then I brought then the fourth group has to do with the development of desirable human characteristics like compassion and joy and strength and value and loving kindness. And then finally, this group that can open up our awareness to such an extent that we are more able to access our emotions, our memories, our capacities, our potentials and have even expanded states of awareness that include mystical experiences and that kind of thing. Because I knew that everyone, you know, has different histories and different genetics and different stories and different conditions to deal with. And I wanted people to understand that there's no one kind of breathing that is going to work for everybody in every similar what works for one person when they're feeling anxious may work for many people, but will not work for everybody because of all these different conditions. So then secondly, I could say that of course, it's true that like anything that we might want to develop, we might want to develop, for instance, greater tolerance and understanding for other people or we might want to develop a leadership capacity. So you know, there's so many things we might want to develop in life. And so sometimes you have to challenge yourself, you might want to exercise more so your body's healthier and that might be a little bit of a challenge and you might want to press up against your edge in terms of breathing. However, I would say that the ultimate thing and the third point here is that there is an optimal breathing for each person that is actually very bio individualized. And it's optimal for that person in every unique situation with, you know, different things happening internally and externally. And I think that ultimately people who are breath workers and trained at a very high level of training and ethics are going to be learning how to help each individual experience their own capacity to find the breathing that works for them in each moment and each breath the best. And that will involve sort of daily maintenance breathing kind of awareness that goes on from the moment you wake up until the moment you sleep just being aware of your breathing inviting yourself to breathe a little deeper when you might be holding your breath aware of different, you know, things that you can do that can help with regulation and presence and even greater awareness. And then knowing some techniques that stretch you that may be deep in your lung capacity that breathwork techniques that do bring some of those specific results physiologically or emotionally. But ultimately, being able to find the breathing that helps support your life and your purpose, you know, and your capacity to be loved. And so it won't be the same for everybody. It will be very different for everyone. So for someone that doesn't know a lot about this, maybe we should go back and just I should let you do a definition of what breathwork is. Because I think there could be listeners who are saying like, what breathing can, breathing can help you become more loving. So I do make a slight differentiation between what I caught what we call conscious breathing and breathwork. Conscious breathing means that we're sensing now some people might think of it as just awareness that we're breathing. And that is very powerful in and of itself. I would expand it a little bit to say that it involves somatic intelligence and energy, emotional intelligence and energy and cognitive intelligence and energy in that conscious breathing would be being aware and inhabiting and sensing the sensations of our breathing. That in and of itself is very powerful. It's an embodied intelligence that breathing is seminal for. I mean, there's probably nothing that is as powerful as helping us get quickly the fastest way to get embodied is to become aware of the sensations of our breathing. Then the emotional part would be the appreciation for breathing that we value it, that we're breathing deeper or we're bringing awareness to our breath because we know that it's valuable to be aware of our breathing. And that would be the emotional intelligence and energy. And then the cognitive would be actually being aware of it, understanding and experiencing and observing how by being mindful or being aware of our breathing, it's helping us in some way. And I think that's conscious breathing, the sensations, the appreciation and the awareness, growth. And so you can do that throughout the day. And I think that if people can commit to a seven minute formal practice period of just any kind of breathing that they've learned, you know, box breathing, regulated breathing, alternate nostril breathing, just slow deep breathing anything for seven minutes a day, they're going to start to experience pretty profound changes after a week and after 30 days and then really after 90 days. And then they can just kind of be have the awareness during the day of am I aware of my breathing, am I inhabiting my sensations, if I'm losing presence, I can restore it very quickly by coming into my breathing. Breath work is a very formal thing where you're sitting down to do breathing practices or lying down to do breathing practices if you're doing these deeper kinds. And what happens is in these more regulated or more invitational to go underneath our normal conditioning to our more implicit memory, particularly the implicit memory of the first breath and even the implicit memory of the pre breaths that we do when we're in the womb. So we're less defensive, less formed, but we're more in our original purpose, which I think we are wired originally physiologically to breathe. That's the very first thing we're like we've got to breathe when we come out and emotionally we're wired to connect. That baby just wants to connect and we could call that love. So I think when we're doing formal breath work practices, we're increasing our capacity to connect to that more unconditioned self, what Dr. Dan Siegel might call the plane of possibility. And physicists might call the quantum sea of potential or the quantum vacuum. And I think that in that place when we're willing to breathe more deeply or more quickly or with more variations of the breath that could involve movements, we open up a space where the limbic brain, the emotional brain is valuing the practice. The neocortex is directing us in some way to do a particular practice. We're having our body be impacted by these sensations and it makes us it creates a kind of global neural coherence where all these respiratory circuits and all the different parts of our brain are activated and they're activated around the same activity of breathing. And so we become more integrated, more aligned, less distractible. We have access to our emotions, we have access to our desires, we have access to memories that we might not have realized or remembered for a while. We have access to our more spiritual self and I think that that it's an elevating experience. We have at least two pilot studies, one is like 24 people, the others about 40 people that show that that kind of breath work produces equivalent if not greater results as a psilocybin or other kinds of psychosis. like Adelaide's do, but without the side effects, just have to say. And you can stop the experience at any time. And so I think that, yeah, it becomes totally possible to remember in a visceral embodied way that our primary purpose, or our primary sort of directive in life, was to connect and to love and to be a part of all of this. And we can experience that through breath work. So when you said, I think you said earlier, and so obviously there's dramatic opportunities available through breath work. And then even just through conscious breathing, though you said, after just seven days and then again, it might be days, or seven minutes, seven minutes or seven days, and then 90 days. Yeah. What might somebody notice though, like if they were trying to do what, what would they, what would they notice, like just an ordinary person who doesn't have a lot of instruction other than to just approach it like that, sit and just be aware, feel yourself breathe, appreciate it, you know, what would they notice? And yes, and notice what's happening as a result. I think they would notice, first of all, that for most people, not everybody, but I would say that, you know, 98, 99% of the people are going to notice that your breathing is going to slow down just by bringing attention to it. Because our body seeks well-being, you know, when we cut ourselves, everything rushes to heal that cut. The body seeks homeostasis, it seeks well-being, and when we are, when we're calling ourselves into the present moment by inhabiting the breath, the body is going to seek that state of well-being where our ononomic nervous system is balanced. We don't have sympathetic dominance, we're going to tend to have our breathing slow down, which will bring those who are sympathetically dominant, will bring up their parasympathetic activity, those who are lethargic and unenergized will start to bring up their sympathetic activity. So there's a greater balance. So most people will notice, almost from the get-go, a kind of contact with inner peace maybe or just a sense of relaxation that's different than meditation. Meditation is very, it's similar, and it has a conciliant factors. But with meditation, your eyes are usually closed, you're going inward. You may or may not be experiencing your breathing, and for 90% of people that can be very, very helpful, we found that about 10% of people can actually feel somewhat distressed by that experience. When you're doing breathing practices, you can keep your eyes open, you can close them, it's very potent, but you can also just keep your eyes open, and you're not kind of sinking into a detachment, you're actually engaging in an activity. So it keeps you more, it can keep you more in the present moment, I would say, than meditation can. So people will notice that they feel more relaxed, more regulated, a greater sense of peace. I think even seven minutes, you'll start to notice that you notice things more than you did. You're more aware of color, you're more aware of your body, you're more aware of what you might be feeling, and there's an empowerment feeling about it, because you start to it realize that, wow, just even one deeper breath can create a state change in me. So now maybe you're driving and you're feeling frustrated because it's a traffic jam, you're going to be late for something, and you can be surprised, just that one deeper breath, maybe two, maybe three, starts to help you relax a little bit and feel like, okay, you know, so I'm going to be late, and what else, you know, might happen, that might be good in this experience. So it gives you more options, it opens you up to a greater toolkit, if you will, a greater treasure chest about how you're going to relate to each moment of your life, and that can even include really challenging situations of things that human beings go through around betrayal, loss, you know, failure, where you might recover faster, certainly we know that people who are doing sports can recover faster by doing some simple breath work exercises, and it's also true about our emotional states. So what about other ways that doing conscious breathing or actively doing breath work helps and thinking of like sleep? Yeah, yeah, so I mean, many people find that just by slowing their breath down, and of course, they might want to follow a specific breath work protocol, like Angie Wilde has his four, breathe in four, hold seven, breathe out eight, or the famous box breathing that the Navy seals do, where you breathe in four, hold four, breathe out four, hold four, or there might be one, there's coherent breathing, what you're breathing, somewhere between five and six breaths per minute, there's many recordings of like bells that ring to tell you when to inhale, when to exhale or waves coming in and waves going out, and so many people like those kind of practices because it interrupts their normal way of being and puts them in a kind of a different state, which can often help a person make a transition from waking and worry and anxiety or just, or just even busyness or thinking that you should be doing something to interrupt the pattern and just help you go to sleep. And many of those breathing patterns help people breathe extend their exhalation a little bit, which does increase parasympathetic activity and can help induce sleep. However, I was taught when I went to Indian live there for many months that there's actually a breathing technique, which I have some validation from a breathing researcher, Steven Elliott, who actually developed coherent breathing as it's popularized nowadays, that show that I was taught that if you breathe in a little deeper and then just kind of let the exhale be very light, might even almost be like half the amount of time as the inhale. They're actually going to turn off a lot of activation of some of the organ activity, not like you're, you know, doing something unhealthy. It's just going to slow it down very quickly. And so that can actually help induce sleep too. So there's a number of different ways that that can be, people can fall asleep easier. Okay, that's helpful, that's helpful information for listeners. You also mentioned that Navy SEALs use certain types of breathing, can you say more about that? Yeah, well, so of course, Navy SEALs are the best of the best and they need to be able to be paying attention and really aware of their surroundings and everything that's going on in their surroundings and available and ready to take action, but not to take action when it's not needed because then that also could be a problem. So it's a state of presence and readiness. And I think that we, you know, we can both get distracted where there's like two, so we're getting distracted by things that are not about the present moment or we can retreat from the present moment, not with distraction, but almost like a numbness. And so using breathing is going to pull us out of the numbness, it'll stimulate a little bit of dopamine, if we're a little bit in the frozen state, it'll interrupt the patterns that might be happening in our muscles and our brain, you know, the neurotransmitters that are being secreted at that point, and it'll also remove distraction. So it's both pulling us into the present moment, but it's also taking us out of numbness. So it brings together awareness and focus and that is very energizing and skillful for a Navy SEAL. Absolutely. I think that's fascinating. You know, when I was reading the book, I was thinking about how it was once popular to use breathing for labor and delivery and somehow that kind of fell away. I don't know if you know any of the story behind that, but I think it was the Lamaz method or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, Elizabeth, because I've noticed that too that I think that with the advent of things like hypnobirth and different techniques that people came up with breathing is still taught and mentioned, but it isn't what you hear at the forefront as much as you use to. I think part of that is because there were specific ways that different people would come up with about how a person should breathe in certain parts of their labor, like maybe if they're in transition, they should breathe in quickly and then kind of puff out. Or if they're pushing, they should do it this way. And I think that there's a more organic way of doing it. I really feel as we talked about earlier in our podcast today that I think there's an optimal breathing for every person. that is highly bio individualized. And I think that's what's gonna be most useful during labor or during childbirth. I've had particularly one woman that I'm thinking of. I love attending births, especially if I've been somebody's breath worker. It's amazing that we already have that relationship and I can support their breathing to do what it needs to do. This one woman was actually able to win a contraction, which I like to call rushes after the spiritual midwife, Ename Gaskin said, let's call them rushes instead of contractions. They're rushes of energy. So anyway, this person, whenever that would happen, would breathe in deeply and then instead of yelling or moaning or just trying to let the breath go out, she would sing. She would sing on the exhale. It was just one of the most beautiful bursts I've ever been to and that baby was born having been sung to. Then I've noticed people that when they're having these rushes, they actually consciously breathe faster. And what I notice about those people is they're not panicking. They're not in fear, but it's almost as if they're natural and intelligence of their body is saying, look, you're going to experience this long thing. So I'm about to break it up into small little bite size pieces so that you can get through it. And I have just found it much more useful to support people in finding the breathing that's working for them during labor. And I think that we should get back to that because we want those babies to be well-oxygenated during labor. Yeah, I think that was sort of my first appreciation for the breath was just very long time ago, just learning that it could be helpful in getting through something that could be painful. Yes, either physically or emotionally or spiritually. As just sometimes we're really struggling with something and what is it to really invite the breath to or invite ourselves to come into a wider awareness? There are people that have described with physical things, back pain, knee pain, chemotherapy treatments that they're going through, heart procedures where they use their breathing to remember that there's something that they are that is not just the person that is going through this procedure. There's a deeper, more centered, stronger part of them that's having an experience that can relate to the procedure rather than feel like a victim of the pain or the procedure. And this is true of emotional things as well. Things some of what you're talking about has to be experienced though, because I feel like myself, if you have sort of that skeptic come from a skeptical, we're looking wanting the science or the facts or whatever, until you experience it, it can kind of seem like magical, something magical you're suggesting, and then you can have the experience and just really be transformed. It's transformed. You know, I think you're very right, Elizabeth. I think it's like childbirth when you're going to have your first child, you know, you're studying all the books. Everybody tells you what it's going to feel like. They even try to simulate what it's going to feel like. I remember being in a class and having, they asked my husband to squeeze my arm a little bit so I might have this, but you and it can help a little bit, because you're going to have some cognitive understanding of what's happening, but nothing can actually prepare you for what it's going to feel like. And then going through that initiation of childbirth, now you have a knowing. Now you have a somatic understanding as well as an appreciation and a cognitive understanding. I think the same as true of breathwork, you're absolutely right. - Yeah, yeah, I think that just is worth saying. And I also think it's also worth mentioning that there's been a growing appreciation for breathing and integrating it into things like psychotherapy, but even integrating conscious breathing into our daily life. And so I don't know what the trajectory of that has been like, but where do you see things going or? - Well, I'll give you my immediate take on where it's going and then my audacious dream where I think it can go. I do think humanity experienced in 2020 a kind of opening to breathing because of the three very close things that happen COVID and are, you know, just I think about people that were watching their loved ones breed and just thinking to themselves, just one more breath, one more breath. If you can hang in there one more breath, maybe you can get through this. You know, we just became so aware of the preciousness of every breath. And then George Floyd saying, "I can't breathe all those times." And, you know, it's not just him saying it's all the countless people throughout history that have said the same kind of thing in a similar kind of situation. And it kind of ignited us all to be more aware of all the other being and the marginalization and the how, you know, I think everybody has the right to be able to breathe safely and freely. And then those forest fires that would suffocate, you know, a billion animals in Australia and countless animals and people and these other fires. And I think those three things happening very close together really moved the awareness about the importance of breathing and the breathwork field from a place where it was kind of an auxiliary to something that we might want to have at the center of our awareness. And I think in the immediate what we're going to see and we are seeing is this being incorporated into health settings, into schools. We now know that places where children and teenagers are invited to breathe deeply when they're feeling upset or angry or just as a general practice. I think that it's sports people are using it in sports. I think there are, whereas it used to be just the Navy seals. Now it's other armed forces as well. It's also like first responders, like firefighters and policemen, some of them are starting to have those trainings in their academies or in their particular individual stations. So I think my motto is a breath worker in every emergency room, a breath worker in every school, breath worker in every even movie theater. Just there should, you know, these are essential workers. And I think we're going to see over the next five years that's going to start happening. You're seeing breath workers being brought into corporations for health, for people to get trained. My audacious vision is we create a breathing centered culture where really the physiological experience of being so present with our breath creates also opens up that twin directive, which is the directive to connect to love and that it opens up a more loving culture that has a lot of drive to understand each other and to work together to create a world that we can all thrive in. And that's, you know, I really think that's possible if we were really valuing the first breath, the importance of it as the neural substrate of the rest of our existence. And then we were teaching our children and our adults had these tools. We would find out that breathing is the unifying language of the human species. Even if somebody only speaks Chinese and I only speak English, breathing together opens up a kind of a connection. And I think that even at a deeper level, if I may say, you know, all animals breathe. So it's not just human animals, it's all animals and it's plants, they're breathing in reverse. And it's the earth that has oxygen in it and the air that has oxygen, the waters. And it's like there's one big breath cycle going on and we're all part of it. So I think it could help us have a greater understanding, tolerance, and actual embrace of all life. - Yeah, that's really, that's lovely. Yeah, I just want to say too, though, that in your book, it's really interesting to see that there can be some instruction in breathing. Since we all naturally know how to breathe and it happens automatically. But again, you can be more conscious of it and then there's instruction. And I just wanted it before we wrap up but wanted to make sure I asked you about any ethical concerns or cautions you would put out there for somebody who's all excited about learning how to use their breath. - That is really a wonderful question, a very close to my heart. So, you know, it sounds like you read chapter six and switches about optimal breathing and goes through in some detail, what are many of the different aspects of breathing, like the rate of breathing, breathing through the nose or the mouth. the ratio of inhale to exhale, how the, you know, being aware of your, how your back is and your mouth is and offering different possibilities so that people can really feel into what is comfortable for them and also what they could optimize. And then there are many breathing practices. There's probably about, you know, I estimate there's about 50 or 60 or something like that. Chapter 7 is a kind of daily toolkit of many things that will address physical, emotional, cognitive and spiritual well-being and it's a, you can use any of the practices or you can do them all every day for about a 35-minute workout. And then there's a chapter that really works on those qualities of like compassion and beauty and joy and strength and all of those things. I highly recommend and the publisher actually had this thought and I was quite moved by it that it actually says in the beginning of the book that we recommend that people search out a breath coach or therapist breath worker preferably a breath worker that has been certified by the global professional breath worker alliance because that is the organization that sets the standards for global training and ethics. And the ethics part is extremely important because every human being is an individual and every human being has had varied experiences and you want. But breath work opens us up to such a beautiful place of presence and non-defensiveness and expanded states of consciousness. So you want to be working with a breath worker who has the highest respect for a person's individual needs and their boundaries, you know, and like what would be good for them and is really able to serve that person. And also has the training of understanding the physiological effects of breathing and it's not requiring somebody to breathe in a certain way. So I would just recommend that people would seek out really look at the training of the person. You can go to the to breathwork alliance.com and you can see a listing of those that have found the global breath work professional breathwork alliance and want to be listed as somebody that's following those ethical guidelines and and has had the right training. And even if they haven't yet found the global professional breath work alliance, just really check out their training and their their sense of ethics around doing that and their capacity to attune to the individual. Thank you for that. And I want to also give you a chance to share anything else that you're currently working on, whether you have any ongoing projects or your own website that you'd like to share as a resource. Thank you, Elizabeth. So, you know, if people would like to be in touch with me, if you'd like to get referred to a breath worker that I personally have trained or you'd like to perhaps look at online classes that you could do or come in person, we actually have for those that live far away from Maryland, Europe and Africa and the Western United States. We have an eight day program now called Awakening that takes us through all those five kinds of breathwork all the way into the more expansive states. It's a it's really a life changing program. Anyway, our website is inspiration community dot org all one word inspiration community dot org and you can write to the office and to me at essence at inspiration community dot org. There is an initiative that we launched in March of 2026 this year and launched it with Dr. Jack Cornfield and Dr. Dan Siegel that it did come to me in 2020 when all three of those breathlessness events happened that every human being does have the right to be able to breathe safely and freely and well. And so I just penned something called the universal breathing declaration, which is an affirmation of that truth and that people who sign it are saying that they want to help bring about a planet where everybody can breathe safely and well and freely and all the things that that would mean clean air, economic justice. You know, the the dissolving of violence and marginalization help for respiratory challenges medically. Yeah, just support and also that we commit to doing a few minutes of conscious breathing practice ourselves every day to remind us of the sacred privilege of getting to breathe well and safely and so that website we would love to have you. We would really welcome your signature anybody it's very simple you'll go on it's a beautiful website shows many different kinds of animals and people and landscapes that are enjoying breathing and enjoying the air and then it's just a click and you can sign your name and you'll be posted we have people from about 25 countries now. The first signers of it are Jack cornfield and Dan Siegel and myself and we have about 200 and we're hoping to grow to be about 2 million so or 200 million or 2 billion so please spread the word and that is universal breathing declaration all one word universal breathing declaration dot earth. Great and I would also like to give your listeners a little bit a coupon that if they would like to get the book it will give them 20 it'll be free shipping and 20% off so I will give you that link. Oh great and I can put that into the blog post that goes with this yeah that is wonderful thank you so much you're doing so much to help bring breathing awareness to all of us and at a global level we really appreciate it well thank you Elizabeth it's been such a pleasure to do the breathing with you that we did recently the breathing journey and thank you for this invitation I really honor and respect. The dedication that you have to bring people information and inspiration for wholeness in their own life and it's an honor to be able to contribute to that thank you for listening to this episode of the new books network we are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. 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