What if you could shift your state of mind more powerfully than coffee or wine, reduce anxiety naturally, and access deep wells of clarity and calm – all through something you’re already doing 23,000 times per day? Enter conscious breathing, a universal tool for transformation that transcends culture, belief systems, and backgrounds.
In this illuminating conversation, pioneer and researcher Jessica Dibb reveals how intentional breathing can become your greatest ally for physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Drawing from her groundbreaking work detailed in “Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation,” Jessica shares powerful insights about the five distinct categories of breathwork and how each serves a unique purpose in our journey toward wholeness.
You’ll discover:
β’ Simple breathing techniques that can instantly shift your nervous system from stress to calm
β’ How specific breath patterns can cultivate virtues like compassion, patience and focus
β’ Why breathing together may be the key to bridging societal divides
β’ A 7-minute daily practice that can profoundly change your relationship with yourself
β’ The science behind how conscious breathing impacts both body and mind
Whether you’re new to breathwork or a seasoned practitioner, this conversation offers fresh perspectives on accessing the healing potential that lives within each breath. Learn how this most basic of human functions can become a pathway to greater presence, wisdom and love in every moment of your life.
You can find Jessica at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
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- Youβll also love the conversations we had with James Nestor about the transformative power of breath.
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Episode Transcript:
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] I’ve been having fun starting off these conversations with five true false statements, and we will unpack these along the way in the conversation later. First, how you breathe can be as important to your health as what you eat or how much you exercise.
Jessica Dibb: [00:00:16] True
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:18] Because breathing is a natural thing. It’s impossible to breathe in a way that’s not good for you.
Jessica Dibb: [00:00:23] False.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:24] Just a few minutes of intentional breathing can shift your state of mind. More than a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
Jessica Dibb: [00:00:31] 150% true.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:33] Ah, that’s a strong one. All right. The right kind of breathing might help you feel better in the moment, but it won’t have any kind of lasting benefit.
Jessica Dibb: [00:00:42] Absolutely false.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:43] Okay. And our last one, breathing exercises alone are all you need to make big changes in your health and life.
Jessica Dibb: [00:00:51] A qualified false.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:52] Okay. We’ll circle back around to that and unpack these in our conversation. So what if breathing in a very particular way could shift your state more quickly and powerfully than coffee or wine? Want to power up? Just breathe this way. Want to chill out? Breathe that way. Want to drop into deep focus and unlock creativity? Yes, there’s a breath for that too. But it’s even bigger than that. I mean, what if the greatest medicine for anxiety, stress, and disconnection wasn’t a pill or practice or procedure that needed to be invented or taken, but something you’re already doing but you’re not even aware of, at least most of the time. What if the simple act of breathing in a very particular way could radically affect your physical and mental health, and even potentially bridge divides between people that seem impossible to cross? My guest today, Jessica Dibb, has spent decades studying and teaching the transformative power of what she calls conscious breathing. As the founder of Inspiration Consciousness School and author of Breathwork and Psychotherapy Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation. She’s discovered something remarkable. Breathing may be the only human experience that truly transcends all boundaries of culture, belief, and background. She’s witnessed profound shifts in people from all walks of life, from medical students to members of Congress to Naval Academy midshipmen. All through breathing would unfold in. Our conversation was extraordinary. Jessica revealed these five distinct approaches to breathwork, each unlocking different dimensions of human potential and well-being. And when she shared the story of what happened in a room full of leaders from vastly different backgrounds who simply breathed together well, it offered hope for healing even our deepest societal divisions. So excited to share this conversation with you! I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:52] And before we dive into really breathing, conscious breathing. So many of the things that you explore and share. Curious just what your path to breathing was?
Jessica Dibb: [00:03:02] Thank you for that lovely question, because I think every person’s path is critical. And I just want to say, Jonathan, before I begin, that it’s really a joy and an honor to be on here with you, who is someone who has dedicated so much energy to creating things, this podcast that brings so much enlightenment and educational and elevating content for people on the planet. So I just really want to tell you how grateful I feel to be with you.
Jonathan Fields: [00:03:40] Um, thank you for that.
Jessica Dibb: [00:03:42] The earliest memories I have in my life, I remember looking at my parents and feeling how each of them had so much love inside of them, and they had so much creative potential and they were amazing people. And yet somehow I could feel that there was fear that kept them from expressing that love and that creativity. 150%. And I just remember feeling like I wanted to be a, a force, a source of somehow helping that to change. And then I saw it in myself. I saw it in my siblings when they came along after me. And so by the time I was five, I was really looking for kind of a key to unlock that fear. And I remember when my mother took me to the Danish Royal Ballet and Under the Stars, it was an outdoor in New Hampshire and the wilds of New Hampshire, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I just thought, that’s the answer. Beauty. So I went into ballet thinking that the beauty of ballet could really change the world and give everybody this access to this love and creativity. I went to New York, I danced at Lincoln Center. I was very privileged to dance with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn and people from the Bolshoi.
Jessica Dibb: [00:05:15] But of course, by the time I was about 14, I just realized this is not a universal medicine. And that was when it really hit me that what I was looking for was a universal medicine. So I left the traditional school system, and I was part of a founding your own high school movement. And I was studying a lot of different things. And then I got interested in yoga. I moved into a yoga ashram for four years. We were doing intensive breathing practices every day for hours and hours. I knew that breathing could make a difference. I knew that I could get energized, I could help myself go to sleep. I could change my body temperature, I could focus, I could calm. All of these things could happen. So I thought, I’ll go to medical school and I’ll get a degree, and then I’ll be. That’ll validate. I loved science, I loved school, and I really thought I would. I love medicine, so I thought, well, I’ll, you know, I’ll get this degree and then it’ll, I’ll be able to teach people how to do these things with this validation. However, I had had a son at that point, and he was very small, and I really felt torn about going to medical school because I, I just really knew that raising him was one of the most important vocations of my life.
Jessica Dibb: [00:06:42] In the middle of all of this, I’d been going to a holistic healing center, and somebody had suggested that I do breathwork with the founder of the clinic, who was also a breath worker, and I will never forget in my first session. Now, breathwork, by the way, is a spectrum of breathing practices. So the kind of breathwork I’m about to describe is that the one end of the spectrum, I call them human potential breathwork practices, where you just go really deep to the core of your sensations, your feelings, your awarenesses you access muscle memory and cellular memory, it opens up expanded states of consciousness. But I will never forget, after that first session, I opened my eyes and I just thought, why isn’t the whole world doing this? And I realized at that point that conscious breathing was a universal medicine that everyone could do. That it transcends culture, belief system, religion, politics, you know, anything we could come up with? And I just became dedicated to what would need to happen with breathwork in order for it to be accessible, as it really in its true nature, which is it’s the medicine of the people. It belongs to everyone.
Jonathan Fields: [00:08:07] So where do you go from there, though? Because you have this, I would almost call it a mystical experience in the context of breathwork, done in a very traditional setting, where it comes through a lineage that’s been passed on, oftentimes through generations and generations, and it’s often also wrapped in larger cultural teachings or community, which is not mainstream for most people. Right? Which is not something where people are like, oh, this is a, quote, legitimate approach to managing all sorts of different aspects of who I am, from health to mindset and things like that. So how do you start to bridge the gap between first having this experience and being affected by it, and then deepening your knowledge and then finding ways to eventually turn around and share this with other people in a way where they they may still raise an eyebrow, but they’re like, okay, like, I’m open to this and I can understand how this might be, quote, real.
Jessica Dibb: [00:09:04] You know, I was just and it was like a mystical experience, by the way, that time, because I’d been doing breathing practices that had created all kinds of state changes and trait changes. You know, I had practiced them long enough that some of them had created trait changes, but this was definitely like an opening into an expanded awareness. Um, the plane of possibility, as Doctor Dan Siegel calls it, and I so I really felt committed to do exactly what you just described. Like, how can this become accessible through culture, through, you know, different ways of looking at life. Way different political orientations, religious orientations, atheist orientations. I am telling you, Jonathan, I just feel that we are all uniquely an expression of the creative life force, if you will, or the source. And yet there is something that we are unified about. We all arise from something together. And some people call that the divine and God and other people might call it the force, and other people might call it biochemistry. But whatever it is, it’s that thing that makes it us be able to imagine a bigger life than just what is this body doing? It has to do with connection. And I just became very committed to having an approach to breathwork that had the science, the The philosophy, innovation, ancient understandings, new emergent understandings, poetry, I mean, health, all of it. I just really want. And the arts. I just wanted all of that. So if I would have been a doctor as a pre-med major, I was majoring in cell biology. I loved cell biology, and that would have been what I would have gone into. So the the science part of it was always very fascinating to me.
Jessica Dibb: [00:11:08] And I felt that a lot of the breathwork at the time was so mystically oriented or expanded, states of consciousness oriented that people were just it was helping them feel greater possibilities than how they were currently living their life. But the language around it felt, to me, nonspecific, if you will, or just it felt like it was creating its own culture, so to speak, and that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to create language that would allow each person to approach this and find their own place of homeostasis with it, find their own place of harmony with it. Because, like I said, breathwork is actually a spectrum of breathing practices from simple regulating, relaxing cortisol regulating to awareness practices, which might be called mindfulness, of course, by many people to therapeutic interventions that have to do with addressing respiratory distress or temperature in the body, or energy levels or inability to focus, and also to character building, like how do we develop greater empathy for somebody by breathing? How do we develop greater compassion? How do we become more empowered? Like these are other parts. And then there’s this breathwork that’s like, how do you go to the core of what you are and release the gifts that you are? So, you know, I can only say that I was interested in the science. I was interested in the philosophical underpinnings and finding out if there were indeed philosophers that had talked about the potency of breath in terms of a foundational way of relating to life. And there are the poetry that comes down through the ages through many different lineages. There’s one poem by Rumi in particular that almost speaks to this very thing that you and I are talking about, about how does it not get associated with a particular culture? Just this very beautiful poem by Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks, where I’m now going to paraphrase, but it essentially says, not Sufi, not Hindu, not Buddhist, not Christian, not Jewish, not any religion, I am not from down in the ground, nor am I from up in the sky.
Jessica Dibb: [00:13:40] I am not from any origin story. My place is Placeless. A trace of the Traceless. I have seen the two worlds as one, and that one called to. And know as first. Last. Outer. Inner breath. Breathing. Human being. So here is one of the greatest mystics of all time according to AI and the internet. The most beloved poet on the planet universally. And he says, in the end, it’s not about any culture or any religion or any origin story. That the thing that we’re all looking for is happening right here in this breath breathing human being. So I would say that I also, you know, really cultivated in myself a way of listening to people that I was talking to or teaching or, you know, guiding in some way and really hearing what mattered to them and how I could frame the the potential of this medicine that lives in their own chest, you know, to work for them. You know, that’s how a lot of this has culminated in the book that I was asked to write by Norton, Breathwork and Psychotherapy Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation. It was really a convergence of these many different streams of understanding about conscious breathing and breathwork.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:18] You lightly referenced different quote use cases for breath, but you get more granular actually, and you actually describe five different groups breathing. I’d love to walk through those in a bit more detail. Starting with relaxation and resetting, take me into what this category is about.
Jessica Dibb: [00:15:36] Well, these are all of the most simple breathing exercises that, as you said in the beginning of our conversation, three breaths can make a difference. I mean, really, one breath begins, state changes in the brain, but three breaths and you’ve already got something different going on if they’re conscious. Now, we understand that breathing, depending on your orientation to it, is an interesting scientific phenomenon, or it’s a gift from, you know, the beloved, so to speak. Um, and whatever it is, it’s the power of it. The potential that lies in it can be accessed both by bringing awareness to it and by inviting it to deepen or change or do some kind of Adaptation that can produce a particular result. So once we just bring that awareness to it and do even three deep breaths, generally in that category, the kind of breathing we’re talking about is a slightly deeper or slightly longer or slight or both inhalation followed by a relaxed letting go exhalation, which could again be longer, or it could just be more full or something like that. Now along with that, you might make a noise or a sound, which might help you release on the exhale a little bit more. You might move, you might have an inner visualization with it, but essentially it’s just most people are over adrenalized most especially in today’s culture, most of us, we’ve got way too much cortisol going on, way too much of the time, not situation appropriate anymore because of all the input that we’re getting. And so what three mindful well three reset breathing will do is bring up parasympathetic functioning more and reduce the sympathetic dominance so that there’s a greater balance and people are going to feel more relaxed.
Jonathan Fields: [00:17:47] And just for clarification, sympathetic is what we often know as the fight or flight state or now it’s actually been expanded, I think, to four different things fight, freeze or fawn and thing. Yeah, right. And parasympathetic is sort of like the rest and digest when everything kind of calms down and settles, you go into more of a relaxed, restorative state. So you’re saying that by intentionally changing your breath, you have a direct response on your nervous system either activating or downregulating or Upregulating. Is that right?
Jessica Dibb: [00:18:18] Absolutely right, Jonathan. And the thing about most people think, and again, I think it’s because we live in an over adrenalized too high of cortisol way of living for most of us. But most people think that parasympathetic dominance is sort of the goal. And that’s not true. These are reciprocal things. And you and I, we want to be able to optimize our lives by, let’s say, an emergency happened right now. And I needed to respond to something. I’d want to be able to harmoniously rise to the occasion without getting panicky. And yet, when that was over, why waste our time continuing to be at that level? Let’s just flow right back into presence with whatever’s happening in the moment. So those rest and rather relaxation and regulation exercises, breathing exercises can be really good for restoring the balance. And that’s where we really want to be.
Jonathan Fields: [00:19:17] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Take me into the other major groups.
Jessica Dibb: [00:19:25] So the next group is awareness. And, you know, of course, the mindfulness movement and Jon Kabat-Zinn and all the Buddhist traditions that have really brought awareness to this have done us a great service, because this is one of the two most powerful things that any of us can bring to conscious breathing is awareness, mindfulness with the breathing. As soon as we do that, rather than our breathing just being stimulated from the brain stem. And by the way, the very interesting part of the brainstem that Doctor Jacques Feldman at UCLA discovered, it’s a rhythm generator that initiates breathing, which he called the Pre-bΓΆtzinger complex is in there. And so that will happen whether we’re aware of our breathing or not. But as soon as you begin to breathe consciously, you activate the limbic brain because some part of you is deciding that there’s a value to breathing deeper, and that’s going to get your emotional body, your limbic brain going. But you’re also stimulating the neocortex because you’ve made a decision and you’re paying attention to the breathing. So now you’ve got a state in which you’ve got way more neural global neural coherence than you did before. You’ve got way more resources to respond to life. So all of the awareness practices with breathing that you can do, whether you don’t change your breathing at all, but you’re just being aware of it, or whether when you change it that invites which often happens longer and deeper inhalations and exhalations, or whether there’s a particular practice that, for instance, many of Vipassana or Buddhist lineages like to do like loving kindness meditation.
Jessica Dibb: [00:21:21] So they’ll bring awareness to breathing, but they’ll also invite that maybe with each exhale, your heart relaxes and opens to all sentient beings, for instance, or the Heartmath Institute does these kinds of mindfulness, you know, loving kindness kind of heart exercises. So anything like that or just watching the breath and its different permutations, that will do it too. And actually, doctor Jack Feldman at UCLA has a not yet published study, which I referred to in the book. We’ve had a lot of talk about it. I call it mindfully meditating mice. Because he helped these mice. He wanted to find out what is the source of mindfulness. And by having these mice breathe at a certain pace for a certain amount of time each day, and then the control group would still react with a lot of fear to an external situation, whereas the mice that had been practicing breathing and mindfulness in a way didn’t have nearly the same fear response. So we do know that the core of mindfulness really comes down to the breathing, whether we know it or not.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:34] Okay, all I can think about here is how do you train mice to breathe differently?
Jessica Dibb: [00:22:39] No, he well, he kind of put them on respirators, you know, like little respirator.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:44] So it’s sort of like can control their breath from the outside in.
Jessica Dibb: [00:22:47] Yeah. They were controlled.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:48] Got it, got it, got it.
Jessica Dibb: [00:22:49] I can’t wait for that study to be published.
Jonathan Fields: [00:22:52] I’m picturing investigators sitting there talking to them. I say, okay, I need you to slow down a little bit here. Um, so this would be an approach to breathing that’s really about deepening your state of presence or awareness or mindfulness. Sort of like really putting you in a highly attentive and aware state, which could be good for all sorts of different reasons in your life.
Jessica Dibb: [00:23:12] Yes. And you’ve brought up A very important part of this whole thing is the potent medicine, nutrient and teacher, in a sense of conscious breathing, for having us be able to meet each moment of our lives, which all of our lives are going to have ups and downs, ecstatic and happy times and times of loss and disappointment. And there’s going to be times of fear that could be personal. It could be collective, as it is for many people right now, and times of great hope and vision and expanded states of consciousness. And how what is the one thing that each of us can do to learn to meet each of those and dance with them? You know, as as Rumi would say. And that really is going to be our ability to breathe with any experience that we’re having to breathe Optimally. To breathe deeply. To not hold our breath. To not let our breath get into a panicky state. But to feel our capacity to breathe. It’s almost like this is the choice. But it lived experience that there’s something that’s always here, regardless of what’s happening out there. And what’s always here has tremendous resources to it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:24:35] Got it. So we’ve talked about three different categories of breathe. Two. Okay.
Jessica Dibb: [00:24:41] So the third one I just call therapeutic. It’s it’s all your practices where you change, for instance the ratio of breathing. Like you can breathe in and breathe out twice the amount of time. Or you can breathe in and breathe out half the amount of time you can breathe through your mouth. You can breathe through your nose, you can breathe in as one long segment, or you can breathe several segments, like for instance, one example would be the the breathing technique that was developed by a research group that was Spiegel and Huberman, um, and a bunch of others at Stanford, where they compared different kinds of breathing practices, box breathing, which is in, in for four or in for whatever number you do hold for the same amount, out for the same amount, and then hold for the same amount. Uh, they compared that and cyclical hyperventilation, which is where you breathe a little quicker than normal to get your energy up. And then you take a long deep breath and hold it for a second and then let go. Very effective. All of these techniques, the box breathing has been made famous as a Navy Seal intervention. And, um, but what they discovered was that if you’re working to reduce anxiety, the most effective breathing was you breathe in a slow inhale. And when you finish breathing in, you take in another little sip of inhale so it’d be like.
Jessica Dibb: [00:26:13] And then you sigh it out. So you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. But it’s two segments in and then one segment out and five minutes a day for 30 days. Created trait changes of lowered anxiety and, much to their surprise, elevated mood. So that would be an example of a therapeutic intervention. Or like, for instance, a lot of people know about coherent breathing or sometimes called resonance breathing, which is tends to be for most people, somewhere between 5 and 6 breaths per minute, although it can range from 3 to 7 or 3 to 8. And you can find sort of your personal resonance, but or a technique that I learned. I have a lot of these kinds of practices in the book where you can interrupt an asthma attack, for instance. Or you can develop by practicing this respiratory wellness kind of breathing every day. You can strengthen your lungs and reduce the possibility that they will go into spasm. So and then energy sleep any of these kinds of things I would put in this category. But it’s basically you’re looking at your ratio of breathing. You’re looking at the depth of your breathing. You’re looking at the the pace of your breathing. Are you doing like a breath of fire thing? Like which is for energy or are you breathing slowly, mouth, nose and other things that you can adjust as well.
Jonathan Fields: [00:27:48] So this category then, if I can tell me if I’m getting this right, is if you are looking to create a fairly specific or well defined change in state and maybe over time like something more sustained, whether it’s high anxiety, low anxiety, low energy to high energy, whatever the specific change is you want. These would be fairly detailed ratios of breathings or approaches to breathing, designed to create, to bring on a very specific change in state.
Jessica Dibb: [00:28:17] Absolutely.
Jonathan Fields: [00:28:18] Okay.
Jessica Dibb: [00:28:19] The fourth category I call it development. Just because it’s about human development and all of those desirable qualities that we might like to have compassion, kindness, empathy, focus, strength, empowerment, discernment, wisdom. I mean, just patience, equanimity, all of these kinds of things. So then you can do these very specific kinds of breathing adaptations, sometimes connected with movement, sometimes connected with visualizations, sometimes with various orientations that are specifically designed to have you have a somatically experience the energy you know of love, the energy of compassion. And what happens is the whatever orientation you’re evoking, the breathing will help stabilize it as an embodied neurological and cellular experience. And it’s not just, well, let me think about compassion and then breathe deeply. It’s that various people will discover that by, let’s say, breathing a certain way. For instance, if they have the sensation of breathing slowly and deeply into the heart and feeling their focus, concentrate on the heart. And then on the exhale, the feeling of letting the chest soften and melt and just flow out into the world. This helps them have a visceral experience of what compassion feels like. I remember there’s one technique that Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches in his book, Wherever you go, there you are. A mountain breathing. And that helps with a, you know, a sense of empowerment. And I have developed like probably, you know, 50 breathing practices that awaken these different qualities within us as a visceral experience. And they use movement somewhat, but it’s mostly about orienting your awareness in different parts of your body with different visualizations while you’re doing different kinds of breathing. And that creates muscle memory that you can then carry around with you in your everyday life. And when you find yourself getting irritated, for instance, at somebody who’s taking too long in line, but some part of you realizes, well, this person has a cane and I really, you know, there’s a particular way you can breathe, then that will actually evoke patience.
Jonathan Fields: [00:31:03] It’s a nuanced difference. We’re not really talking about a very specific change in state, but we are talking about a specific change in, how would you even describe it, an affect in if you’re breathing in a way designed to, for example, cultivate a higher level of compassion in the moment or a higher level of forgiveness or love? Um, yeah. I don’t know exactly how you describe it, but it does feel in a nuanced way, different than the more therapeutic approach that we were just talking about.
Jessica Dibb: [00:31:32] Oh, absolutely. I mean, some people would call it a higher state of consciousness. Um, I would say it’s it’s the development of a, a set of virtues, you know, an ability if we go back to the Greek philosophers and how they would have talked about it, it’s helping us. First of all, one thing that breathwork does in general that is so powerful is it creates an Equality between somatic and intelligence and energy, emotional intelligence and energy and cognitive intelligence and energy. And then that leads to what some people might call spiritual or energetic intelligence and energy. And I think that’s that’s a game changer. I mean, we so many people identify only through concept of who they are or what life is. And then because because our educational system, of course, this is just my personal opinion, but I would just offer doesn’t work for everybody’s learning style. You know, there’s an emphasis on a particular learning. I think a lot of people have shame about they don’t even know that they have like reservoirs of wisdom somatically, um, and emotionally. And breathwork just starts to create an equivalence of all of that. So you don’t have to. Even you can connect these virtues to these particular ways of breathing. You can even invoke those virtues and just see how your breathing changes. But one thing that’s going to happen for sure is that you’re going to start to have visceral experiences and emotional connection and appreciation of these capacities, as well as an understanding of why they’re so beneficial to develop. And I’ve really just seen so many people. It sounds so simplistic, Jonathan, but once they’ve been doing this work for even just a few weeks, a few days, a few months, it’s like they can interrupt patterns of dissociation, of separation, feeling separated from parts of themselves, feeling separated from others, of lack of empathy, of lack of focus. They can interrupt those patterns literally by just deciding to breathe deeply, because now all of that has gotten embedded in the muscle memory of breathing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:03] I love this notion of being able to breathe in a certain way, to evoke a particular virtue, and to sort of lead from that place or have it cultivate in you. It’s just really cool.
Jessica Dibb: [00:34:15] It’s really cool.
Jonathan Fields: [00:34:17] Yeah. Talk to me about this fifth category.
Jessica Dibb: [00:34:19] Yeah, the fifth category has so many. I mean, I’m calling it Human Potential Breathwork. And some of the listeners may know this kind of breathwork and names like Integrative Breathing, Therapeutic Breathing, Holotropic breathwork, conscious connected breathing, Liberation, breathing, rebirthing. These are your techniques. They all basically are inviting the same thing. It’s a deep breathing where some of the schools say that you need to breathe faster. And of course that does produce results, no doubt about it. And I’ve done that. I did that in my early days, deeply. Right now, I’m convinced that all someone needs to do is breathe more deeply than normal and with awareness, and be willing to say yes, if you will, to the increased or amplified life force that they will feel viscerally, which begins to open up other kinds of amplifications, too, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But this is a breathing where you’re relaxing your whole body, you’re generally lying down, you’re amplifying physical energy. You’re amplifying your desire to know thyself. You know, you understand from the beginning because hopefully your breathwork worker has been is really well trained, and they’ve laid out for you the kinds of things that can happen. So you know that you’re going to open up your own intrapsychic territory. You’re going to get in touch with emotions, some of which you know you have and some of which have been buried or repressed. You’re going to open up sensations in the body, some of which you’ve known and some of which you haven’t even been aware of. Like maybe you carry chronic tension in your jaw and you don’t become aware of that until you’re in such a sensitized state that now you realize and you might even realize at that point, I’ve had that since I was five years old, and I felt like I couldn’t scream in the house and, you know, and so these things begin to happen where wherever our life force is not flowing freely, physically, emotionally, cognitively or spiritually, these things start making themselves more apparent to us because when we’re breathing deeper with the body totally relaxed, we are going to feel an expanded state of consciousness, usually, or at least an expanded state of presence.
Jessica Dibb: [00:37:00] We are going to be breathing. I would say, underneath our usual conditioning. So, um, you know, we won’t be able to have like, we’re not going to be able to impress anybody, promote an image of who we are. We’re just there. And it’s just the breathing. And us and our most natural, authentic self is what’s going to reveal itself. And now this kind of breathwork, you really do most of the time, especially when you begin, you really need a breath worker to be with you. A therapist breath worker who is able understands this kind of intrapsychic territory, knows how to deal with, you know, memories that you may have from earlier in your life, even if I’m just honest about it. We know that prenatal psychology is real now, and and birth memories that have come through different psychological mediums. Will breathwork can open that up very readily. Deep hopes and dreams and fears and all of that kind of stuff just starts to make itself known. Um, we have access to it.
Jessica Dibb: [00:38:11] One of the beautiful things about this kind of way of doing it is that you’re in total control of your breath. So you can continue or stop at any time, and you have this amazing capacity to learn that you can remain present with whatever is arising in you, whatever condition arises in you. You’re building the capacity to be present with it. You’re building the capacity to respond to it with wisdom. You’re building the capacity to learn that you can heal things that were, you know, wounds, for instance, that might be shame or fear or anger that’s been withheld or grief that hasn’t been felt. You’re learning that there’s a kind of intrinsic life force and joy that we all move to. I mean, we’re all born wired to breathe and wired to love. We will. We will love our parents even when they don’t know how to love us very well. We will love them. So that’s at the base of all of us. That wiring to love and that wiring to breathe. And when we breathe deeply in this relaxed, with this relaxed body, and we’re open to this kind of experience happening in a way we move to be pre-verbal or before the conditioning of our defenses and our adaptations in order to survive, or in order to feel loved or in order to feel safe. We’re starting to just get in touch with that intrinsic life force and so it it can turn out to be I mean, it’s a very enlivening experience and ultimately, I would dare say very ecstatic. And so that’s what that whole realm of breathwork is about.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:07] Yeah. I mean, it sounds like the way you describe these five different categories, groups of breathwork that if you over time develop even sort of a basic command over each one of these, that you can use them in combinations or sometimes in sequence to create an experience. That is what you need when you need it. So I imagine, you know, if you were trying to process some things and you were working with a breath worker and they introduced you to this more human potential, like deep as you described. It comes through all different names. I’ve often heard Holotropic, where it takes you into a state where all these things arise in you that you weren’t even conscious of or aware of. And then, as you described, unlike other, whether it’s pharmaceutical or psychedelics, where you’re kind of like you’re on the ride for like however long it takes, like with the breathwork, you can immediately just decide, okay, I need to actually choose pull a different tool out of my toolbox. Right now I’m feeling these things that are coming up. It’s frightening, but also maybe powerful and important. And now maybe I need to dip back into the therapeutic category to help me be with these things that are coming up, the anxiety that’s coming up in a way that allows me to feel like I’m going to be okay here and not just run away from it, but actually stay with it. But I have now a different tool that I’m bringing from the breathing toolbox. And then as you’re moving through that, you know, pull from something else. Now I want to drop back into more of a a place of self-compassion. So now maybe I’m going to drop back into more of the human development practices where I’m trying to elicit these virtues, in fact, towards my. Sounds like you can once you start to have some fluency with the different types of tools and the categories that you can kind of move through experiences in really powerful, therapeutic way by moving through and choosing different breathing modalities to help you navigate experiences. Does that all make sense?
Jessica Dibb: [00:42:09] Jonathan, you really, totally have it. And for me, I just feel like this is the breathwork of the future. When I really think about, I think breath workers are essential workers. I have a kind of dream that there would be a breathwork or in every emergency room, in hospitals, in every school, universities, government buildings. You know, I mean, really, I don’t think it’s a bombastic dream. I just think that breath works. The awareness of breath work is now on the rise, and it’s going to be critical as we professionalize the field, that breath workers are trained so that they can be disaster relief. You know, sometimes there’s no medicine in a place that’s, you know, gotten a disaster. The one thing we’ll have is breathing. We might not have water and food for a little bit. And even one of my breath workers once went that I trained, had the privilege to train Gretchen Steidle went down to Haiti after that big hurricane that happened, and there were villages that were cut off, and people were literally so anxious they couldn’t sleep for a week. They hadn’t slept. And she just did 20 minutes of breathing with them, coherent breathing, which is the 5 to 6 breaths a minute, which would be in the third category.
Jessica Dibb: [00:43:31] And children that hadn’t slept for a week Fell asleep. Adults did too. So yes, you. You totally have it right. And I do think that breath workers of the future should know every category. They should have mastery in at least one of them. And people ultimately should be empowered to do sessions where they can go very, very deep, especially with the human potential. You’ve heard people say that most wounding happens in relationship and so it will get healed in relationship. So there’s something very potent about having someone who understands these territories, is not afraid of them, is even knows that they’re openings to greater evolution in that person. And also is there to be a mirror, you know, to do the traditional psychotherapeutic kind of mirroring that is so powerful, where a human being feels seen and heard and gotten in these different transcendent states and these different wounds, and ultimately, a breath worker should be able to empower that person to be able to do exactly what you’re talking about, both in sessions, formal sessions, but in their life to to be able to utilize these different groupings of breathwork to really create a pretty cool life out of each. To be honest with you. Yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:44:56] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. One other thing that I’m curious about is the way you’re describing this practice, in the way that I’ve experienced it and also researched it in the past. There’s an interesting tension here, right? Because a lot of people will hear this conversation. Some people will be interested in leaning in, some people rolling their eyes and being like, oh really? Please. And then we have this tension where on the one hand, you can now point to developed research to science that shows when we breathe in a particular way, it affects our physiology in this particular way, you know, and we have we can literally point to science that says this affects our physiology and even our psychology in very specific ways. So we’ve got science we can point to. And at the same time, there is a mystical side to this. And we love to be reductionist. We love to take practices like this and say, okay, I need to understand what is the science. Let me break it down and be able to point to something concrete and research backed and physiological that says, this is what’s making me feel like this. And just like other practices where there is a science that you can point to, but at the same time there’s a piece of this that also feels like it’s beyond quantification, that it feels like it’s important not to write off. Also in the name of trying to have a rational, scientific basis for this.
Jessica Dibb: [00:46:30] That’s so beautiful. What you just brought. Yeah. It’s not just important, as you’re saying, not to write it off. It’s essential that we don’t write it off. I mean, psychology. So first of all, every breath, when you talk about the science, it’s now irrefutable that breathing is a psychophysiological phenomenon. Every breath has a psychological component that affects the physiology. And every breath has a physiological component that affects our psychology. So that’s beyond dispute now. So think about how empowering that could be for an individual like I can. I don’t even need someone else to have an effect on the way that I’m feeling physically and emotionally. The truth is, when I said that we’re all wired. We’re born wired to breathe and wired to love. I’ve had the privilege. Jonathan and I really do. It’s sort of like it’s so sacred to me. I almost want to close my eyes to even talk about it. I’ve had the privilege to be at a lot of birth beds and a lot of deathbeds, and in both of those places, it’s so clear. Everybody knows when that baby is born that that baby deserves the world. You know that baby deserves love. And people rise to their best self. And they do have a spiritual experience. It doesn’t. It’s not about believing in a divinity or not.
Jessica Dibb: [00:48:07] It’s just the felt sense of something that matters in life more than, you know, what we’re going to wear for clothing that day or whatever. And the same thing at a deathbed, except I think in many ways it’s actually more potent because my experience and I worked in a hospital as a nursing assistant when I was getting ready to go to medical school, and I worked in intensive care unit. So I’ve had people die in my arms suddenly. I have also had the privilege of being the designated family member who’s always there when a person has a terminal illness, or my father died at the age of 99 very recently. And then I’ve had a lot of students and clients that have asked me to be there when either they were passing or somebody else was passing and that they loved. And it’s very clear to me, it’s clear to them in that moment that all that really mattered in the end was, did I love enough? Did I give the love that was inside of me? And now you know that love like your love you. Jonathan Fields, it’s so clear is manifesting in this incredible podcast and these books and other projects that you’ve created for people that’s coming from love. You know, so, so loves progeny, if you will, is creativity.
Jessica Dibb: [00:49:32] It’s it’s how we express this love to others. But this felt sense that you can feel at the first breath and the last breath of who we really are. And what really matters is, is a palpable thing at that point. And then I would say that people have these mystical consciousness experiences. We minimize them in our culture. We want to be seen as rational, but how is it not rational to see that the world is so filled with beauty that you go into a state of awe, and that awe inspires you to be a better person? How is that not rational? You know, that’s like, to me, seems like one of the most rational things that could ever happen. And you know the studies, I’m sure that there are so many people that have these mystical experiences of feeling connected to other people, hearing things, you know, knowing things, they’re afraid to talk about them. Well, when you’re breathing and you’ve got somatic emotional cognitive intelligence working together and you’ve got more global neural coherence than ordinary, and you’re not in a place you’re not defending or promoting or manipulating, you’re just contacting your authentic experience. It’s inevitable that you’re going to have contact with these things that you and I were just talking about. It happens readily.
Jonathan Fields: [00:51:04] Yeah. Which makes me curious. Also, you just used the phrase global communal coherence. There is a study. And granted, some people support this study and some people have picked apart the methodology that’s commonly become known as the Maharishi effect, where thousands of people sat in TM like Transcendental Meditation, and apparently while they were meditating, there was a measurable reduction in crime. Again, there are people who support this, and there are people who look at the experimental design and say, like, this is horribly flawed. But I’m curious from your standpoint, are you aware of any experiments where there has been almost like a similar thing where, you know, there’s been an invitation for maybe thousands of people to sit in a particular breathwork state communally, maybe together or maybe distributed, dispersed throughout the world. And whether that leads to anything beyond the individual practice.
Jessica Dibb: [00:52:06] I would say that I’m aware of what we might call epidemiological studies, in the sense that I’ve I’ve been in the experiences that you’re talking about. I know about the studies you’re talking about, and I know about the disputes, too, about them. But it’s provocative. At the very least, we should be like, well, if there’s even a 1% of this, that’s true. We should be. We should care about that because we shouldn’t hang out just in the bell curve. You know, this positive psychology, that’s part of what it tells us, is you need to look at the the very ends of the spectrum, like, why are the 1% or 2% having these experiences? It doesn’t invalidate them. In fact, it offers us an invitation. And so I would say the same thing about those studies. What I can tell you is I have been in groups of people or, you know, had the privilege of guiding groups of people to where we have people who have tension with each other. It might be that they know each other, and there’s an intense personal tension, and maybe they even hate each other. Or it could be cultural. It could have to do with skin color. It could have to do with deeply embedded generational kinds of beliefs.
Jessica Dibb: [00:53:21] And what I can tell you is that when people breathe together, those things readily fall away. I mean, it’s like a miracle. I remember being in a room with the Honorable Elijah Cummings. He was an incredible congressman in my state, very, very inspiring man. And he was very interested in the things that we’re talking about and that what I was doing and I was trying to do a project that would bring leaders in this region greater access and knowledge about the kinds of things you and I are talking about. And he just, you know, called me because I invited him, never expecting to hear from him. And he said, I really want to be involved. And there was this beautiful day where he and Doctor Dan Siegel, the one of the co-founders of Interpersonal Neurobiology, and I were with a group of leaders from this region, and we breathed together in a hugely diverse population of leaders in terms of skin color, in terms of socioeconomic status. We talked about love. We breathed together, and what happened in that room was remarkable. So people said, I’ve never felt safe in a group like this, and I now feel safe. So I’ve had those kinds of experiences. We could just say they’re little pilot studies, you know, or where I, I once had the honor of working with a class of medical school students from the University of Maryland.
Jessica Dibb: [00:54:58] And a very similar thing happened. They experienced shifts in their health literally during the things that that aches and pains in their bodies, headaches that they had, digestive issues, competition with each other, and by the end of a one hour session, they were sharing as if they’d been doing this kind of inner work forever. I would lastly say one time a group of midshipmen from the Annapolis Naval Academy. So best of the best, you know, came up here to do some breath work and do a Native American sweat lodge. And I can tell you that just standing in the circle together, just breathing, they already had such a training for attention. I’ve never been listened to so incredibly in my I mean, I wish all my students could listen that deeply. It was an amazing experience. But just in the listening and then the breathing together, the prayers that came out in that sweat lodge circle were as deep and profound as any mystic I’ve ever been with. So I can tell you that those changes can happen in a group pretty readily.
Jonathan Fields: [00:56:17] It’s a fascinating proposition, especially, you know, when we were living at a time where there’s so much polarization that if a simple shift in breathing, done in community in some way, were to in some way change the way that we experience our own lives or see those around us as maybe less different, um, than. Yeah, it’s a really provocative and interesting thing to explore and imagine at scale when you hear about these. You know, we’ve been talking a lot about the individual impact. But also I’m always curious about communal impact. And, you know, like society wide when things scale.
Jessica Dibb: [00:56:55] May I offer one thing about that? So again, Doctor Dan Siegel, he wrote the foreword for my book. Um, this is not his original thought. And I’m just I apologize that I’m not remembering who it originally came from, but we talk about the fact that the primitive brain, or the brain stem is wired to recognize in-group and outgroup for survival. You know who’s the safe people and who’s not the safe people? So we’re living in a time when we’re so adrenalized and there’s so much cortisol going on that it’s like we’re scanning all the time for who’s the in-group and outgroup, rather than just in times of danger. And I really have thought about this for years. I mean, we’re talking like 15 years. I’ve been thinking about this. And still this holds true for me, that you can create an in-group and an outgroup about anything. Your hair is one way, my hair is another. I speak English, someone else speaks French. Gender, skin color. You know, sexual orientation. Educational status. Socioeconomic conditions, different towns, you know, different clothing. You know, I like red. You like blue. I mean, you can create an in-group and an outgroup about anything. If your nervous system is attenuated in a certain way, it’s going to keep triggering and creating in-group and outgroup and group identity and polarization and all of that. There is only one group of people that I can think of that you cannot create an in-group and an outgroup about, and that’s the group of breathers. There’s not a single of the 8 billion plus, whether they’re on a respirator or they’re an Olympic athlete, and everything in between that isn’t breathing. And the implications of that spiritually, emotionally, physiologically are profound. And that’s what I have experienced when I’ve had people that had widely diverse experiences and belief systems breathed together, they come to care about each other. They love each other. They have compassion for each other.
Jonathan Fields: [00:59:15] Hmm. Powerful. You. In your book, you offer a wide array of practices and even a sort of a kit, a toolbox of practices, and even that you can bring together in daily practice. If somebody is joining us for this conversation, they’re kind of looking for just like, what’s the first step in here? Like, is there a simple first step in is a simple practice that I can dip my toe into to start to experience any of what we’re talking about? What would you say?
Jessica Dibb: [00:59:44] So first I would invite us to, I think, three things I’ll say. I would invite us to actually consider that breath is likely, in the end, our greatest nutrient And medicine and friend. You could even say lover and teacher as well. And so just to make that orientation like, wow, I’ve got this thing that’s I’ve been being breathed, you know, since I was born, and I’ve got this medicine chest inside of me and this garden and let me learn to befriend it. So in other words, we’re not going to look for like, fast results, even though we’re probably going to get fast results. But that wouldn’t be the way to initiate a friendship. That would be very acquisition. You want to get to know the person. You want to learn who they are. So that would be the first thing I would say. Then I would actually invite everyone to feel along the bottom of their ribcage, kind of start in the center and just press in gently. Not to hurt oneself or not to the point of pain, to just feel, because that’s where the diaphragm, you’ve got your ribcage, and then you have the diaphragm that’s like a dome. When you breathe out, it’s like it rests like a dome underneath the rib cage. And when you breathe in, it goes down like, kind of like a balloon is being blown up to pull in air. So you want to be your diaphragm is your most powerful muscle of the body.
Jessica Dibb: [01:01:15] It’s the one that has to keep going no matter what. So you want to become familiar with it, and you also want to give it an optimal condition to do the thing that it can do so well. So just putting your fingers under your rib cage slowly and working your way towards the side and kind of if you feel a point of tension, you know, just stop there and just rub it for a while and then do the other side and then see what happens when you breathe in slowly. Like, do you feel a little more space there? And again, you don’t have to have like, oh, I wasn’t breathing well and now I’m feeling great. It’s a thing that you just do every day for a few minutes. You invite your rib cage to be able to expand in all four directions or circularly all the way around, and you make sure your your chest is also willing to kind of raise up a little bit at the end of your inhalation. And, and when you exhale, you let the chest relax and you let the rib cage relax. And then you let the belly relax. And I think having so first making it your friend that you’re getting to know. Then secondly actually getting the physical sensations of breathing as something that’s like an intimacy, you know, it’s like a it’s a sensuality, really.
Jessica Dibb: [01:02:33] It is. And it’s the senses are so filled with wisdom. So the more we can feel the sensations of breathing, the further we’ll move on the path and our natural ability to heal ourselves and our breaths. Natural ability to know how we should breathe, to come into homeostasis and harmony starts to have more room and more resources to be able to do that. Then third thing I would say is, and this is a really powerful shift, though it sounds very subtle, is that a lot of times when we’re even thinking about taking, you know, about breathing more deeply in order to change our state, like we might realize that we’re holding our breath or we’re barely breathing or something like that, or we’re in a yoga class, or we’re at with a, you know, somebody who’s a friend and they realize we’re upset. And the common phrase is, take a deep breath. And I want to say, that’s beautiful. I mean, there’s powerful things to take a deep breath, but even from the perspective of our physiology and optimizing the breathing, let alone and then emotional regulation and cognitive regulation, even if we went all the way, Jonathan, to, you know, something that we haven’t even quite named right now, but we might call awakening, you know, like, really, what would it be to be awakened completely shifting the orientation to receiving a breath is going to actually be more healthy for us physically.
Jessica Dibb: [01:04:13] And then as we build our breathwork practice and then as we develop our emotional capacities, and then as we move into those higher states of consciousness or expanded states, or just a contact with what I might just call the beloved for everybody, you know, whether you call it the force or the divine. Because we received a breath initially we were breathed. We are being breathed all the time. We don’t have to use any of our volitional conscious energy to breathe. We can scroll on the internet, we can go eat. We can, you know, we can do whatever we want with that energy. We don’t have to do anything. To breathe. We are being breathed. And the physiological implications of that and the sort of spiritual implications and everything in between are profound. So when I really at this point, when I start someone off with breathing, I do exactly the things that I just said about, it’s your friend. We’re going to get to know it. Can we get more sensation about your breathing so we can get a little bit more room? And now, before we start a breathing practice, can you allow yourself to feel how you’re being breathed? And what happens if instead of taking a deep breath, you allow yourself to be breathed and then you allow that breath to get deeper because you’re not resisting it, because you’re allowing yourself to be breathed more.
Jessica Dibb: [01:05:48] And then if you’ve done that now we can say, okay, well, what about lengthening the exhale or, you know, breathing a little faster so you can get that energy thing going, you know, because you need some energy for that meeting you’re about to go into. Or what about if there’s grief and you’ve been crying and you haven’t wanted any, you haven’t felt like you were in a safe place to do that, but now you have some time and you want that grief to be able to let go. Now you can see why. And you know, but those three shifts of it’s our friend and it’s going to take some time. We want to have a sensual relationship with it, that sensation and that we want to be breathed and go with the flow of what’s actually happening, rather than take it over by taking a deep breath, is going to, in the long run, get us much further. Then I would just say that, you know, if you would commit, if everybody would just commit to doing seven minutes of conscious breathing a day, conscious deep breathing, whether it was just awareness practices or just a long, slow inhale followed by a long, slow exhale. If you’ve done those first three things first, you would be surprised after just a week how your life will feel very different.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:11] Beautiful. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
Jessica Dibb: [01:07:22] To love fully. To be unabashed about how much we love to breathe fully. Because that is the engine of our love and creativity.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:34] Hmm. Thank you.
Jessica Dibb: [01:07:36] Thank you.
Jonathan Fields: [01:07:39] Hey, if you love this episode safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with James Nestor about the transformative power of breath. You can find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor a seven-second favor to share it with just one person. And if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.