Michele LeTourneau
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug10/01) - My respiratory system has been doing its business ever since that fateful slice through the umbilical cord that connected my mother and me.

Breath therapist Dan Brule coaches Michele LeTourneau through a breathing exercise. He discovers that she holds all her tension in the jaw area. The next breathing exercise is intended to release that tension. -- Ardith Dean/NNSL photo

Except for a few guilty moments relating to my cigarette addiction, I haven't given it much thought. I breathe. You breathe. We all breathe. Yay.

OK, so I've occasionally dabbled in meditation. Occasionally, when real angry, I've taken a deep breath that would put even a breathing expert to shame.

But on Sunday I had what's called a breath session with a visiting (oh-oh) breathing expert, Dan Brule.

After a series of breathing exercises, I came face to face with everything I fear. Every impossible moment I've spent in a roomful of dying children, which I've conveniently shoved into a corner of my heart. Every angry moment that's clumped up into a tight ball of rage.

What was Brule doing to me, you might ask? Simply, he coached me in breathing.

With Brule, breath is transformed from an automatic and unconscious act into a complex and vital experience, hot with the potential to alter the way one chooses to live one's life.

Brule's fascination with breathing goes way back, to Genesis, when his first-grade teacher read these words from the bible: "The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." (Gen. 2:7)

"I got so excited about it. I couldn't turn the page. I wanted to talk about it. What does this mean? My next breath, is God breathing into me? And finally the nun goes, 'OK, let's turn the page,'" remembers Brule, laughing.

Also, Brule had a near-drowning experience in childhood.

"That woke me up very brutally to the importance of breath. I can remember after finally breathing again how good it felt to breathe. And when I was in the Navy, I had a second near-drowning experience. I was actually resuscitated. I can remember opening my eyes, and trying to catch my breath. And then for the next couple of days every breath I took was just wonderful.

"I was just so happy to be breathing, every breath was like a freaking miracle."

Sitting around chatting with a breathing expert is a bit like smiling at a dentist or trying to act sane around a shrink. I could hear myself breathing. I could hear him breathing. His big, powerful breaths put my pathetic little inhalations and exhalations to shame. And then I took a deep, and yes defensive, breath. Good, he says, nodding. Ugh.

After serving from 1970 to 1976 in the Navy as a deep-sea diver and medical rescue specialist, Brule attended the University of Massachusetts, where he studied philosophy, psychology, education and business.

"I was doing human development and learning and transpersonal education with Milton Young at the university, and I found him floating in the parking lot one morning."

Brule asked his prof what was going on and Young replied that he'd just been rebirthed, adding "it's this breathing thing."

"My ears perked up."

Young offered Brule six credits if he'd learn the technique and write up a paper on it.

"So for a lazy Vietnam vet, six credits just for breathing, I mean ... I went. I did a session. In 15 minutes, every stress, every tension that I'd accumulated in my life just seemed to be pouring out of me, melting and dissolving. All the anger, all the leftover resentment. Memories flashed. I was vibrating, I was tingling, energy was boiling inside of me. I was crying. Something just cracked me open. And it was just rhythmic, conscious breathing."

Brule moved from teacher to teacher and focused entirely on breathing, backing it up with philosophy, religion, psychology and Eastern studies. He designed and completed a master's program in healing arts, specifically focused on breath as a tool for health, growth and change, at Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass.. In China, he studied Qigong, Chinese medical breathing. He's also a trained CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) technician and has trained, in turn, EMT (emergency medical technician), First Aid and CPR instructors in several states.

He now travels all over the world teaching people how to breathe.

"Most people have never really played with the power of breathing. Breathing is the only system in the body that's both totally voluntary and completely involuntary. You can take it over and it responds 100 per cent to your will or you can forget about it and it runs perfectly well on its own.

"As a result, it's like a bridge or a door to all of our states. Emotional states, spiritual states, physiological states. It gives us a handle on those things that there's really no other way to get a handle on. The way you breathe when you're angry is different that the way you breathe when you're afraid. It's different from the way you breathe when you're peaceful. The door swings both ways. You can breathe in certain ways, and actually produce stress in your body. Which is what most people do. And the opposite is true. If you breathe in a certain way, you can trigger very deep and profound peaceful and relaxing states."

So, he says lightly, it's a tool for health, for growth and for change.

"It's intuitively engaged from time to time. Somebody gets home from work after a hard day at work, they give themselves that sigh of relief. But it's not usually applied."

In the East, explains Brule, people have made breathing into an art and a science. In the West it's only in the last 20 years that breathwork has emerged as a therapeutic tool.

"We're just not a contemplative society. From when you're a toddler, people are pulling your attention out of you. 'Hey! Look at this. Go here, go there!' All of our energy is extended in an outward direction. We're taught to look to experts for our solutions, authorities to solve our problems. Drugs. We're not wired in the West to go deep, to look inside."

Agreed. And even though I didn't crack open like Brule did, I achieved a clarity I haven't felt in years. I'm aware of my breathing, no longer at the mercy of it, and I feel calm. That's a pretty cool feeling.