Please read this page before you try anything on this site or in the book.
I’m a professional studio singer, whistler, and voice actor, and separately a certified breathwork, meditation, and yin yoga teacher, and a former certified personal trainer. I am not a physician, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or any other kind of licensed medical or mental health professional, and nothing in this book is medical advice, mental health treatment, or a diagnosis of anything. Everything here is one performer’s craft, built over thirty years of daily practice and the teaching I’ve done along the way, with the research cited where it exists and the rest labeled as craft. It is not a substitute for professional care.
Talk to a doctor before starting any breathing practice in this book, and especially before trying any of the more vigorous ones, if any of the following apply to you: you are pregnant; you have a cardiovascular condition, high or low blood pressure, or a history of stroke; you have a respiratory condition such as asthma or COPD; you have epilepsy or a seizure disorder; you have glaucoma; you have a panic disorder or a diagnosed anxiety disorder; you have PTSD or a trauma history that makes turning attention inward difficult; you have a history of fainting; you are recovering from a recent surgery; or you have any condition where a change in blood pressure, heart rate, or blood oxygen or carbon dioxide levels could affect your health. This book flags the specific techniques these cautions apply to most directly (chapters seven and eight above all), but the caution belongs over the whole book, not just those two chapters.
Two rules apply without exception, everywhere in this book:
Never practice a breath-hold, bellows breath, or any vigorous or rapid breathing technique in or near water: not swimming, not bathing, not floating. Combining breath-holding or hyperventilation-style breathing with water has caused real, documented drownings, because it blunts the exact alarm that would otherwise tell you to surface. The slow, gentle techniques that make up most of this book are not the drowning concern here; the one rapid-breathing technique and the handful of breath-holds are, and they are named clearly wherever they appear. The gentle ones carry a smaller version of the same rule: because they can bring on sleep, the bedtime sequences in chapter eleven should not be practiced in a bath.
Never practice any technique in this book, gentle or vigorous, while you are actually driving, operating machinery, or doing anything else that requires your full attention and quick reaction time. Wait until you’re stopped. This includes the slow techniques too, for two reasons. The first is attention: it is not safe to practice any of this behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. The second is that these techniques are effective. Deliberate slow breathing can make you drowsy faster and deeper than you’d expect, particularly in the early weeks, and particularly if you have never before put your own nervous system into its rest state on purpose. Feeling suddenly heavy, warm, and distant means the practice is doing its job. It can pose a serious danger behind the wheel.
If you are in a mental health crisis, having thoughts of harming yourself, or in an unsafe situation, please contact a crisis line (in the U.S., call or text 988, any hour), emergency services, or a trusted person immediately. This book was never built for that moment, and no breathing technique is a substitute for it.
None of this is to frighten you away from a book that is, for nearly everyone doing nearly everything in it, gentle by design. It’s here because I’d rather you read one careful page now than skip the caution that matters later, buried in a chapter you got to at 11 p.m.