El signo y el símbolo en el juego simbólico

Of the other fields that include breath practices yoga is probably the best known. Most breath practices, whether in yoga or elsewhere, like rebirthing and holotropic breathwork, use breath to some end, requiring the practitioner to do something with their breath. Rather than try to review them I will look briefly at those practices that share Middendorf’s approach of letting breath come and go on its own.

The ‘non-interfering’ approach to breath can now be found in a growing number of yoga practices, including those of Sandra Sabatini (2000) and Donna Farhi (1997, 2003). Most yoga practices still emphasise manipulating or controlling breath in some way. ‘Allowing breath’ can be found in a few somatic practices that pay attention to breath, including those of Speads (1992), and Selver (Littlewood & Roche 2004), as mentioned above. It can be found in the voice work of Kristin Linklater (1976, 1992) and her followers, as I discuss below (see

‘Breath in voice training’, p.162), but elsewhere in voice (and especially in singing) most practitioners advocate breath control. Most other breathwork practitioners subscribe to ‘doing’ something with breath. Dennis Lewis (1997, 2004) is an exception – and he learned from Middendorf and Speads. Letting breath come and go on its own is perhaps most widely found in the West in forms of Buddhist meditation, especially Zen meditation adopted from Japan. Ruben Habito,

academic theologian and teacher of Zen writes:

One breathes – placing one’s full attention on every breath as it comes in and goes out – literally with one’s whole heart and whole mind. Each full breath is received with a new freshness, lived in each here and now. It is this living in the here and now, focused on the breath, guided by the breath, that will open one to a deeper level of awareness (1993, 45).

The ‘full attention … with one’s whole heart and whole mind’ is the same as what Middendorf practitioners in Berkeley call ‘full participation and presence’. Habito regards this form of breath meditation as

connecting one with the living world:

As I focus on my breathing in and breathing out, here and now, I literally put myself in connection with everything else that is connected with this very breath: all the living beings of the human and animal domain with which I share the air I breathe; all the plants who receive what I exhale and give me oxygen in return, and so forth (1993, 54).

I noted earlier that Larry Rosenberg structures his book about breath meditation, Breath by breath (2004), around the Buddha’s Anapanasati

Sutra. He writes:

Most forms of pranayama, yogic breathing, involve controlling the breath. Anapanasati accomplishes some of the same things – it is a kind of Buddhist science of breath – by letting the breath be as it is, by surrendering to the process (2004, 20).

Middendorf breathwork also involves being fully present and focused on breath, so readers with some experience of these forms of

meditation may more readily understand one of the bases of

Middendorf’s work. There are important differences too. Middendorf breathwork is concerned with sensing breath movement throughout the whole body and is not a meditation conducted in stillness.

I finish this section with a lengthy quote from Magda Proskauer, who was born in Hamburg, Germany, in the early 1900s. When she was eighteen she went to Munich to study medicine, specializing in physiotherapy. She also studied with Rudolf Laban, with Carola Speads, and, for about fifteen years, with Cornelis Veening, who had

such an impact on Middendorf. She moved to Yugoslavia to flee Hitler, but eventually had to leave there too and moved, eventually, to the US, first to New York and later to the Bay Area of California. Moss writes that Proskauer’s work was called ‘Breath Awareness’, and that ‘Magda’s popularity in the Bay Area made it difficult to attend her classes directly’ (1981, 69). Nina Winter includes Proskauer in

Interview with the muse (1978). This is Proskauer’s voice:

During my early years in Munich I worked especially with people who had asthma or tuberculosis or emphysema – all conditions

characterized by breathing difficulties. During my work with these patients I discovered the breath as a healing tool. I was fascinated that with the breath you could help people not only with the cure of certain diseases, but with postural problems, emotional problems, and many kinds of pain … When I came to this country [the US], doctors were just beginning to experiment with new approaches to help cerebral-palsied children. I found that when you used breathing techniques with these spastic children, together with warmth and love, they became relaxed and could gradually learn enough balance and coordination to function better. It was a simple thing, but no one had ever taught these children how to relate to their breath … Most people think that you study

breathing so that you can breathe better or get more oxygen, but this is actually only one part of this work. For me the breath is simply a tool for getting in touch with the inner life … The breath happens to be almost the only function which is connected with these two nervous systems, the autonomous one which works without the mind, and the mental conscious one … I think of the breath, more than anything, as a

meditation. If you let your own rhythm come up through the breath, then you don’t make the breath quiet; it makes you quiet. In the beginning there is no right or wrong way of breathing to be corrected.34 _{There is}

just you experiencing yourself (Winter 1978, 67).

34 _{My impression is not that Proskauer thinks that later on there}

is something to be

Here is another German woman born around the same time as Middendorf and Selver saying much the same things about how to approach breath, and with a moving story about what is possible when breath is approached in this way. So Middendorf is not alone in working with breath that comes and goes on its own, but that is still an unusual way.

When it comes to voice and movement training, particularly to voice, there is quite a history of different understandings of the place of breath, and in the next chapter I turn to that realm to complete this section on locating Middendorf breathwork.