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LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE
BREATH ITSELF

- Two Excerpts -

Prologue
You can only learn to breathe from the breath itself.
Leonard D. Orr

A mystery lies hidden in these words.

Leonard Orr, who discovered rebirthing-breathwork in the 1960s and 1970s, uses
this sentence with an ease that belies its depth. Several teachers of rebirthing-
breathwork use the phrase routinely when explaining conscious intuitive breathing
to their clients and students. It might seem obvious that for the novice breather,
anxious to have his first rebirthing session, this sentence doesn’t really explain much
(nor does it help to calm his nerves).
It is as when, at the beginning of your first driving lesson, your driving instructor
hands you the keys of her car saying: “here you go, you can only learn to drive from
the car itself” and then sits back, leaving you to it...
- Or is it?
LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE BREATH ITSELF

2 Learning to Breathe?
Intuitive, conscious, connected breathing
Having set a historical and a personal context, I will now move on in search of a
deeper understanding of the rebirthing-breathwork process. At the same time I will
describe and try to explain the most common experiences and phenomena
involved.
Based on personal experience I believe that rebirthing-breathwork is not unique in
producing many of the results it produces and that a strong focus by
breathworkers on specific methods, desired outcomes and on the uniqueness of
breathwork as a tool might be over-rated at best and misguided at worst. At the
same time I hope to show that rebirthing-breathwork is definitely “on to
something”. There are elements in rebirthing-breathwork that I haven’t found in
any other path of personal or spiritual development. I hope that what I write here
will contribute to the realization, at least in some of my readers, that rebirthing-
breathwork is well worth closer consideration, both by the interested individual as
by science and society in general.
A very good way to explore rebirthing-breathwork is by turning to one of the
alternative terms for it: intuitive, conscious, connected breathing. To my experience this
sums up the most important aspects of the process our breathing-experience goes
through during rebirthing-breathwork. We connect our breathing - initially consciously,
by putting our attention to it - and after a while we learn to trust our breathing and
to breathe intuitively.
Let’s explore that further.
But before we do that, I first want to consider some epistemological concerns. I
want to look at the habitual relationship most of us have with our breathing and I
want to reflect briefly on the general understanding of how learning happens.

Waking up in the breathing

Most modern-day humans do not breathe consciously. Experienced breathworkers
don’t manage to stay conscious in their breathing all of the time either, but they
have usually mastered a higher level of breath-awareness. Normally our awareness
of our breathing is at a similar level as our awareness during our dreams: we are not
totally unaware of our breathing, but we aren’t really awake in it either. It is not
impossible to become more conscious in one’s breathing (or in one’s dreams for
that matter), but there is a threshold.
I’m using the preposition in on purpose here to distinguish being conscious in the
breathing from being conscious of the breathing.
Having said that, the process of awakening in one’s breathing usually starts by
increasing one’s awareness of one’s breathing. It is absolutely normal for
inexperienced clients to want to know how they should breathe. For many people
their first approach towards breathwork is: teach me the technique and I will learn

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how to apply it. They start paying attention to their way of breathing and attempt
to change it according the breathwork teacher’s instructions. In short: they start to
become (more) aware of their breathing. This level of being aware of one’s
breathing arises from a perspective that is often related to beginning body-
awareness. There are two aspects to it: 1) observing what is going on in one’s body as
if being an outsider; and 2) assuming control by making the body do a certain thing - in
this case a certain way of breathing.
There are many breathing techniques that reinforce this perspective (not only in
rebirthing-breathwork). In fact the very word technique implies a method of
control. Most rebirthers embrace one or more techniques and teach them to their
clients. Learning a technique makes use of being conscious of the body. A
breathwork technique objectifies the breathing - with or without the help of a
breathworker you look at it as if from the outside and you try to change it consciously.
There is a ‘me’, the controller, and there is the breathing body, being controlled. Often
when we start to become conscious of our breathing in this way, we don’t even
realize that we try to control the breathing body: we think we do the breathing, not
for a moment wondering what does the breathing when we don’t pay attention to
it. As soon as we become conscious of our breathing and start applying a
technique, we think that the breathing is ours and that we make the breathing
happen: I breathe in - pulling in air by pulling down my diaphragm and expanding
the chest up- and outward; I breathe out -... oh I don’t need to do much for that, I
can just let it happen (... or maybe I could push it a little by contracting my
abdominal muscles).
On a slightly more experiential level, but still being conscious of the breathing (i.e.
still looking at it as an outsider and as something mechanical), it might feel
somewhat like this: expanding the lungs I feel the breath coming in through my
nose and enter my throat, then it spreads out, filling my lungs... and: letting go, I
feel my chest returning to its ‘starting position’ while the breath, the air, leaves my
body.
“Okay”, you might say, having tried it, “that was not so difficult, I am
conscious of my breathing.”
“Now, how exactly should I breathe using this technique you are teaching?”
“Pull on the inhale and completely let go on the exhale...? Hmm, okay.”
“No pauses between the inhale and the exhale? Hmm, alright.”
“Yes. It’s actually quite easy to be conscious of my breathing and to change
the way in which I’m doing it, see? (It’s easier than I thought!)”
“Now what do I need to do to get all these spectacular results everybody is
talking about?”...
I hope this little discourse is beginning to clarify what I mean with being conscious
of the breathing. We separate ourselves from the actual lived experience of our
breathing by engaging in a mental dialogue about breathing as a mechanical
process - mistaking the inner dialogue for the experience - and we initiate changes
in our behavior from the same mental perspective. We perceive ourselves as

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LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE BREATH ITSELF

separated from our bodily experience. We either observe it or engage in changing

our behavior, but both from a separated mental perspective.
It is much more difficult to explain what I mean with being conscious in the
breathing.
However, although it is difficult to explain, it is not so difficult to experience: it is not
difficult to actually wake up in your breathing. In fact it is much easier to wake up
in your breathing than it is to become a lucid dreamer1 - at least that has been my
personal experience. All it takes to wake up in the breathing is practice and a relatively open
mind.
Another way of saying this is that the practice has to be mindful. Mindful as
opposed to the type of mindless practice that can for example be witnessed in
modern-day gyms, where people run on treadmills while watching TV. The body is
being ‘practiced’, while the mind is engaged in something else. This way of
separating our mind from our body has to be a symbol of our time.
Actually - going back to the breathing - all that it really takes to wake up in your
breathing is mindfulness: being there with the mind; being in the breathing.
For reasons that may become evident further on, this is often easier said than
done. Nevertheless, consistent practice is what gets us there. Practice that goes
beyond the stage where we experience ourselves as being divided into a controlling
mind and a reluctant body. To challenge you (the reader) in another way, let me
put it like this: you will not wake up in your breathing by reading this book and
following the discourse mentally - you will have to practice being mindful of your
breathing.
For beginners as well as more experienced conscious breathers, practice in the
form of breathing exercises can be very beneficial. One reason specific breathing
exercises are helpful is because we are so used to distracting our mind, that it has
become difficult to keep our attention with something that is actually happening in
real time. And breathing is something that is happening in real time. So, instead of
distracting our minds with something unrelated, something that is not actually
happening now, we start by ‘distracting’ it with something related: we modify our
breathing rhythm and pay attention to what we experience.
Many meditation practices are based on being mindful of the breathing - especially
in Buddhism2. A well-known benefit of being mindful of one’s breathing is that,
after an initial stage of increased mental activity, focusing one’s attention on the
breathing has a quieting effect on the mind. It facilitates the expansion of one’s
awareness of the present moment.
In rebirthing-breathwork the act of bringing consciousness into one’s breathing
ultimately goes beyond any form of mental control. The act of being mindful of
one’s breathing strengthens consciousness. Consciousness gradually becomes able to
1
Lucid dreaming means being conscious that one is dreaming while one is dreaming - conscious
on a similar level to normal waking consciousness.
2
I’m referring to Vipassana and related practices. The first stage of Vipassana focuses on the
breathing-process.

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sustain itself and it starts to expand into areas that were heretofore unconscious. To put
it differently: consciousness starts to obtain a kind of buoyancy, or levity and it
spreads out, obtaining a field-like character. From this widened perspective it can
still witness the unfolding of the breath, but it no longer interferes with it and is no
longer constrained by it. Hand-in-hand with this expansion of consciousness, our
breathing becomes free. Liberated from the (mostly) unconscious constraints of the
mind, breathing now spontaneously assumes its own natural rhythm and starts to
take care of itself. From the moment of the breathing release breathing regains its
inherent capacity to assume the rhythm that best supports the present state of
body and mind. Where before mind and breath were subtly shackled to one-
another, they now become detached. Detached, not in the sense of becoming
separated, but in the sense of being liberated and starting to coexist supportively -
sustaining, not interfering in each other’s functioning. This is what I call intuitive
breathing.
But before we can reach this state of breath-fluency and expanded consciousness,
we need to work more consciously with our breathing and we need to come to
terms with the way breath and mind have been interacting in inhibitive ways. Doing
breathing exercises is a good way to start.
When starting to do breathing exercises, it can be helpful to make them more
interesting for the mind. Engaging the mind helps to focus its attention. One way to
accomplish this is by turning the breathing exercises into personal experiments. We
make certain changes in our breathing process and then observe what happens in
our body and our mind as a consequence of these changes.
The Appendix has a number of breathing exercises that are ideal for this purpose.
They suggest deliberate changes to the breathing process - some of them for just
twenty breaths, others for a longer period of time. The twenty connected breaths
exercises can be practiced several times per day. They will help you to relax when
you are stressed and they boost your energy when you feel tired. The expanded
breathing exercise can be done weekly or every few days. (The other three exercises
are a little more advanced and should only be tried when one feels up to it). With
dedicated daily practice, mindfulness will expands and the breathing mechanism
will start to become freer. The exercises help you to awaken your consciousness in
your breathing. I suggest you get acquainted with the first six exercises right now.
I’m not trying to trick you, the reader, into letting me off the hook for not being
able to convey to you in words exactly how to become conscious in the breathing;
by suggesting that you try it for yourself. Waking up in your breathing is something
you can only accomplish yourself - there is no way around it. It is purely a first-
person experience.
So you may as well get started.
As I stated above, waking up in the breathing is not difficult - definitely not as
difficult as learning to drive a car - but, similar to learning to drive, it needs practice.
In the next chapters I will describe some of my own experiences and give you a
general outline of what you may expect to experience in the process, but this can
never be a substitute for actually engaging in the process yourself.

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LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE BREATH ITSELF

Now, before getting into a description of conscious breathing, and perhaps parallel
to starting to do the exercises for yourself, it may be beneficial to draw your
attention to some deep-seated erroneous concepts that may act as obstacles on the
way to waking up in your breathing. To be more specific: I want to take a closer
look at some of our common concepts of time and the present moment, and at
some concepts related to learning skills.

Time and the present moment

I was saying in the previous section: “we are so used to distracting our mind, that it
has become difficult to pay attention to something that is actually happening in real
time”. Mindfulness reveals that real time is in fact an oxymoron. The only real
‘time’ that exists is the present moment: now. And now is time-less.
The following realization is fundamental to waking up in your breathing: as it
happens (pun intended), the present moment - now - is the only moment where your
breathing can be experienced.
Time, as normally ‘experienced’, is an effect of our mind not being mindful, being
distracted. Time is never really an actual experience; I’d rather like to call it a pseudo-
experience. Our thinking tricks us into believing that we experience time - for this
reason you could call time an illusion.
When closely observed it turns out that most of our thinking, especially our day-to-
day thinking, has an intimate relationship with time. Our thoughts, which mostly
take us all over the place in a rather haphazard way, are almost always entangled
with the past or the future. We are often thinking about past or future events -
reflecting on past experiences and deeds, planning future actions, or worrying
about envisioned aspects of the future. Even when it appears that we are thinking
about what is happening in the present moment we do so from the perspective of
our past experiences and in ways in which we have learned to think previously. In
fact, all our ordinary thoughts are based in the past. They are mental
representations that - like the words that we speak - we have learned in the past
and apply to identify aspects of our present experience. Strictly speaking: mentally
we are always comparing the present moment to thoughts that represent past
experiences. I invite you to observe your own thoughts for a while to confirm
whether this is true.
This day-to-day thinking actually prevents us from being mindful, from experiencing
the present moment3. It gets in the way of experiencing the present, because it
hijacks our attention and we get carried away - or distracted - by its contents:
thoughts.

3
An exception occurs when we are able to be mindful of our thinking and our thoughts - when
we are able to experience them without getting carried away by them.

6
 PAULUS DE WIT

When we turn our attention to the content of our thinking, we discover that
distraction turns into distortion. When contemplating on our mental constructs4 of
time and of the present moment, we realize that these constructs (i.e. what we
think about time and the present moment) state the exact opposite of what direct
experience teaches us. For example: when we think in an abstract way about the
present moment we tend to define it as a singular point on an ever-proceeding
continuous line of time. Our abstract concept of the present moment is that it is
infinitesimally short, having zero dimensions in time. Time itself, on the other
hand, seems to be going on indefinitely and comes close to being infinite5.
Eternity, to this way of thinking, is an infinite ‘amount’ of time - while the present
moment takes no amount of time at all.
Our actual direct experience of both time and the present moment are exactly the
opposite. Time cannot really be experienced at all (resembling the zero dimensions of
the infinitesimal point). It can be thought about, but it lies forever outside our
ordinary lived experience. On the other hand: to our direct experience the present
moment is all there ever is. And, as indicated earlier, a common experience of those
who practice mindfulness is that the more we are mindful, the more the present
moment expands into a spacious field. It might come as no surprise then that more
enlightened minds talk about the present moment as the eternal now.
To summarize: first, by distracting our attention into mental constructs, our own
thinking prevents us from consciously experiencing the present moment - in its
place it gives rise to a pseudo-experience of time. Secondly: when contemplating
on how our thoughts or mental constructs about time and the present moment
have evolved, we realize that the more abstract our thinking about them becomes,
the more it contradicts our actual experience of them.

Mental constructs versus lived experience

The distraction or confusion created by the hijacking of our attention by our
ordinary thinking also lies at the root of how we normally relate to our body and
how we believe that we can control it. Essentially it is the confusion between actual
experience and the mental representations of aspects of that experience.

4
This is an alternative term for thoughts, frequently used in psychology. It indicates that our
thoughts and beliefs are mental constructions, partly created by ourselves or others.
5
I’m referring to the abstract representation of time as a continuous line (think for instance of the
so-called timeline often used in history classes). Mathematically a line consists of an infinite amount
of points. When a line represents our mental construct of time the points that make up the line
either have been or will be the present moment, depending on whether they are on the past side
or the future side of the present moment. From an imaginary bird’s eye point-of-view the present
moment can be imagined as ‘traveling’ from point to point along that line. Every point ‘is’ the
present moment for an infinitesimal short ‘amount’ of time: ‘now’ it is, and ‘now’ it isn’t anymore.
Thus, in this abstract image of linear time, the present moment is represented by a point and the
mathematical definition of a point is that it has zero dimensions in space, it has no size (in this
case no length).

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LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE BREATH ITSELF

In order to understand this, it is perhaps helpful to imagine how this confusion

may have come about. It may well have been the constant naming of parts of our
experience by others (our parents or primary caregivers) that started the confusion
between actual lived experience and its mental representation through names (or
labels). As infants we were embedded in an environment in which names for parts of
our experience were continuously communicated. They were not just limited to
objects around us, they also included for instance inferences by our caregivers about
our emotional states. For example that we were “sad” or “hungry” when we were
crying and “happy” when we were smiling or laughing. By the time we attained self-
awareness we had already absorbed a considerable repertoire of such labels and
symbols; and the habit to associate these with parts of our actual experience had
become well established and was continuously reinforced. Imitating the use of
these symbols and labels and later learning to use them independently helped us to
make rational sense of salient aspects of our experience.
We also learned to recognize the words our parents used to modify or control our
behavior. Upon heeding these words we learned to react in a more consciously controlled
way to our parents’ perceived intentions - instead of merely reacting instinctively to
their approval or disapproval of our behavior. Gradually we internalized this way of
control as we became able to self-regulate our behavior.
Simultaneously we learned to use labels and symbols (words, mental constructs) in
our own interaction with the environment and for having our needs and desires met.
As a consequence, to our perception, labels and symbols - again: mental constructs -
became powerful tools for establishing control over our environment and for
getting what we wanted. We learned to value them more and more. By now our
attention oscillated rapidly between our actual experience and our mental collections
of constructs and labels, and we were constantly establishing and reinforcing links
between them. (We would see something and immediately name it mentally, we
would feel something and immediately associate it with a word or idea linked to a
past experience)
As we learned to consciously infer causality, our thinking became progressively
abstract. And, as our abstract thinking developed further, we became able to
establish links between different mental constructs, independent of any direct
experience. Through this process we gradually learned to value our abstract
thinking above our actual experience. Our abstract thinking seemed to offer us a
level of control that could not be matched by our actual lived experience. In our
lived experience we seemed at the mercy of our inner and outer environment; in
our abstract thinking we reigned sovereignly.
From the separated6, but mentally awake perspective of our individualized thinking
we also learned to connect mental representations of past bodily experience (or what
we normally call memories) with actual physical sensations. We were able to represent
previous experiences mentally and extrapolate them into a sequence, thus creating
a time-related abstract mental model of - for example - our breathing. Alternatively,
6
Separated from our lived experience.

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 PAULUS DE WIT

and perhaps more likely, we might not have actively constructed such models all by
ourselves. Instead we may have accepted them partly from others who explained
them to us - teachers for instance. We decided the models they presented made
sense - or at least that they must be knowing what they were talking about, after all:
they were the authority - and we accepted their ideas.
To stay with the example of breathing, at our adult stage of mental development
the process of connecting a mental construct of breathing to the actual experience
of breathing has developed into something like this: projecting our mental
construction of breathing onto superficial sensations of our actual breathing we: 1)
briefly dip into or touch on direct experience, 2) we recognize the sensations, 3) we
instantly apply the labels we learned that represent them and 4) we mistakenly
substitute recognition and subsequent representation for direct, lived experience. So:
we merely skim the surface of the actual experience and habitually confuse
recognition and labeling (e.g. the mental constructs inhale, exhale etc.) for actual lived
experience.
This confusion between mental recognition of a sensation and abiding in the actual
experience can be a serious obstacle to waking up in our breathing. We never
learned to keep our attention with the actual experience because of our habit to focus
our attention on the mental construct instead. We are so used to engage our mind
with mental constructs that we are hardly conscious of anything beyond them.
Since the root of this habit originates from before the dawn of our self-
consciousness, we are not even aware that it is a learned habit. For this reason we
can often hardly believe that a more intimate level of awareness of our experiences
is possible. I hope it is at least intellectually clear that our (or someone else’s) mental
construct of breathing, and superimposing or projecting it onto our bodily
sensations, is not an actual lived experience of our breathing. Yet this is what most
people have come to believe. Furthermore, since the mental constructs related to
our breathing are extremely simple - they are not much more then inhale and exhale
- extended focus on our breathing appears quite futile and rather boring. Normally
we are engaged in much more complex constructs.

Learning skills: attunement versus control

Distraction and confusion also turn to distortion in our mistaken belief that we can
master our breathing from this level of separated mental consciousness, governed
by mental constructions. We start to fall prey to this mistaken belief when we
believe that someone can teach us to breathe ‘better’ and when we believe that all
we have to do is to force our body to do what they tell us to do - to force a mental
construct on (or into) our body. This belief is a second obstacle to waking up in our
breathing - it also reinforces the first obstacle (mistaking a time-related mental
construct of breathing for the lived experience of breathing in the present moment).
Let’s take a closer look at this second obstacle by looking at the way in which most
of us believe we learn skills in the modern world - at least as adults. As mentioned
in the previous paragraph, superficially we might believe it works like this: we seek

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LEARNING TO BREATHE FROM THE BREATH ITSELF

someone we believe is an expert. This expert tells us what we need to do and how
we need to do it (often by pointing out to us what we do wrong). We apply what the
expert teaches us by adapting our behavior and as a consequence we learn the skill.
Now, if we think a little harder we might come up with a slightly more elaborate
alternative for this oversimplified model. Let’s imagine that certain people have
analyzed the skill we want to learn and created a mental construct of the skill.
From this mental construct they (or others) develop a procedure for competent
performance of the skill. In this procedure the skill is broken down into segments that are
manageable for our cognitive capacity: segments that we can grasp mentally and
practice physically. During the primary learning phase we practice the segments
physically while receiving feedback on our performance and we progress until we
are able to perform them adequately. In the secondary learning phase we integrate
the learned segments into the overall skill we wanted to master.
This model of learning is often considered a predominantly top-down learning model.
It moves from mental mastery (represented by the head - the top) through training
to physical mastery (represented by the body - the bottom).
Now, when you really think about this model and compare it to actual or imagined
learning situations (without letting them become too abstract!), the strictly top-
down orientation might not hold up - especially during the actual learning phase.
Let’s take a closer look.

Learning to drive - an example

Remember our first appointment with our driving instructor from the prologue?
Let’s use this imaginary appointment to expand on the above. Let’s presume we
want to learn to drive a car and have no previous experience. (Note that in this
case the word experience has a different meaning than the one I used before: here it
implies familiarity or previously acquired procedural knowledge: skill). When we
enter the car and for the first time take our place in the driver’s seat, we aren’t able
to drive - even despite the fact that we might have witnessed experienced drivers
handle their cars thousands of times before. In fact, because of these previous
observations and because of the apparent ease with which these drivers seemed to
handle their cars, we might have come to the conclusion that it must be very easy to
learn to drive a car. At this moment we are what we could call unconsciously
incompetent7 (we can’t drive, but we don’t think it’s a big deal).
After introducing herself and asking us a few reassuring questions, our driving
instructor starts breaking down what we need to do into what she calls ‘baby
steps’. Now, let’s say we start feeling a little embarrassed - after all, we’ve seen the
sequence she’s talking us through being performed so many times before that we
feel we should know what to do. We think: “I’m not stupid!”; become impatient; say:
“yea, yea, I know all that”; and want to try it for ourselves. While a faint smile briefly
travels across her face, our instructor hands us the key of the car and invites us to

7
This description is partly based on the four stages of competence learning model, originally
developed by Noel Burch for Gordon Training International in the 1970s

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try it for ourselves. She starts talking us through the procedure while we try to keep
up with her instructions and do our best to perform the sequence that just a
moment ago seemed so easy. Very quickly we discover that driving a car is definitely
not as easy as we imagined. We have arrived at a new stage in our learning process:
we are now consciously incompetent (we know that we can’t drive).
The next stage of learning is what driving lessons are all about. We may have
mental knowledge of how it works, of what we need to do, but unfortunately, that
doesn’t really help us to drive the car. We know for instance that we have to: push
down the clutch with our left foot, then put the car into gear and slowly take our
left foot off the clutch while at the same time slowly pushing down the accelerator
with our right foot and disengaging the handbrake with our hand... But, how on
earth do we do all that in one smooth move while at the same time: watching the road,
steering the car and maintaining an overall sense of the size of the moving vehicle
in relation to everything else on the road? The first times we try this procedure our
cognitive capacities are instantly overloaded and if it weren’t for the now patient
and encouraging words of our driving instructor we might fall into a deep despair,
thinking, sobbing or screaming: “how am I ever going to learn this? it’s impossible
- I CAN’T DO IT!” By breaking down the procedures into small steps (yes, baby
steps - and we don’t protest anymore), by patiently explaining what we need to do
and by letting us practice each step over and over again our driving instructor helps us to
get it down into our “system” - she helps us to acquire what psychologists call
procedural knowledge8. If we’re lucky, she is able to identify exactly where we need to
practice more and which steps we have already mastered. Step by step we succeed
and eventually we become able to perform all the separate operations adequately.
By the time we pass our driving test we have integrated them at a fundamental
level and have become consciously competent. We’re now well able to drive the
car, but most of the time we still need to stay very conscious of what we are doing
- especially in more complicated traffic situations. When we drive with passengers
we may notice that in more complicated traffic situations we are no longer able to
pay attention to what they are saying, we need all our attention for driving.
Finally, after weeks, months or even years of actual driving we realize that
something magical has happened: we don’t have to pay conscious attention to our
driving skills anymore. Somewhere along the road they have become second nature
to us - we have become unconsciously competent.
Perhaps the ultimate example of a top-down learning model is portrayed in the
movie The Matrix (1999). Reminiscent of Alice (of Alice in Wonderland), the
protagonist - Neo - has chosen to follow the white rabbit and to swallow the red
pill which subsequently shows him that his reality is not what he had been let to
believe it was. For the first time in his life he wakes up to his physical body and
realizes that he is being held captive by machines that harvest the energy they need

8
This is a term used by psychologists to indicate the type of knowledge they presume is at the
basis of the ability to perform a skill - it means “knowing how” and is distinguished from
declarative knowledge, which means “knowing that”.

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from human bodies. The bodies are kept asleep while the minds of the
unconscious prisoners are engaged in a machine-programmed virtual world: the
matrix. Neo manages to free his body, but loses consciousness in the process. His
body is then recovered by his revolutionary friends and the second time he truly
wakes up he finds himself on the rebel vessel Nebuchadnezzar. Onboard
Nebuchadnezzar procedural knowledge - especially procedural knowledge of the
martial arts - is downloaded directly into his brain by use of a computer, and Neo is
instantly able to use it in the virtual world of the matrix. Thus he becomes able to
kick the hell out of it. (As an aside: interestingly, in the movie, Neo’s newly
discovered physical experience is held quite separate from the experiences that are
supposedly happening in his mind - in the virtual world of the matrix).
Contemplating on what was happening between the stages of conscious incompetence
and conscious competence in the example of learning to drive, one may realize that
there was actually more going on than a simple downloading of procedural knowledge.
The most essential part in this learning stage is to be allowed to practice over and
over. Until we ‘get’ it. In fact, this is the part where the actual learning takes place.
If you look at this from the perspective of the top-down learning model you might
interpret this stage as the actual downloading stage. What it may look like from this
point of view is that the driving instructor makes the ‘knowledge’ available to us in
the form of mental constructs. Following her instructions we put this ‘knowledge’
into practice and during the practice it slowly ‘sinks’ down into our body and is
transformed into bodily performance.
But is that really what is going on? It should at least be clear by this example that
the transfer from mental knowledge to procedural knowledge (knowledge that is
transformed into bodily performance) is not as easy as a simple download into our
brain/body system. Is it perhaps not such a smooth download because of a certain
awkwardness, reluctance or rigidity on the part of our body and its ability to
perform? Hmm. It is clear that even when we ‘know’ what to do intellectually such
knowledge doesn’t automatically translate to competent performance at a physical
level. It is quite clear here: mental constructs about skilled driving are by no means the
same as the lived experience of skilled driving.

Feedback loops
Let us look at another aspect of the same learning stage to see if it can shed a
different light on what might be going on. This aspect of learning is what I would
like to call a feedback loop.
A good teacher is able to help us become aware of how we are performing: of
what we are doing well and where we need to improve. Again, from the point of
view of the top-down model of learning we might think that what is going on here
is that our body, or the performance-related parts of our brain, are slowly
conditioned to perform according to the knowledge that is made available to us
mentally, perhaps by being rewarded for good performance or by being punished
for bad performance - but is that really how it works?

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First of all it is important to point out that feedback doesn’t necessarily have to come
from someone else (such as the driving instructor in the example of learning to
drive). The feedback loop can be an entirely internal procedure. But external
feedback does help our internal feedback system.
How does a feedback loop work? Instead of directly answering this question with
another theory I want to look at some personal examples. I recall learning to shoot
at a target with a gun when I was a teenager. It started with air guns of friends
when I was 14-15 years old. We would use targets printed on cardboard cards.
We'd take several shots, then walk up to the target card and see how we had done.
The target card would show a few little holes, where the lead pellets had gone
through. The challenge was to correlate the specific holes to the specific shots. In
fact that was not really possible, we only got feedback on our overall performance.
Now, when I was 18, I was drafted into the army. There target practice was quite
different. To begin with, the emotional atmosphere on the firing range was rather
tense. It was abusive in the same way that the army overall can be an abusive
environment (starting with the complete absence of respect from higher ranks for
lower ranks). But on the shooting range there was an added edge of nervousness
or stress brought on by the fact that we were using potentially lethal equipment.
This seemed to make the officers in charge of our training even more abusive than
usual - I guess it was their way of trying to make clear to us that this was serious
stuff9... Anyway, what is important about the target practice on the army firing
range was that the feedback was immediate. Whenever my shot hit the target, the
target went down. This meant instant feedback, during every shot fired. It was a huge
improvement on the feedback system my friends and I had used a few years earlier.
Back then we never really knew which shot had made which little hole in the target
card. Since we only checked the score after a series of shots, we weren’t really able
to relate every shot to its result and learning was slow. With the feedback system in
the army my performance improved rapidly and I quickly became a first-class
marksman.
What actually happens during feedback? Here’s my own tentative suggestion:
Feedback systems help us to focus our awareness.
A feedback system helps us to focus our attention on the relationship between: the
way we perform an action and the immediate outcome of that action. It evaluates the
appropriateness of that outcome.
Now, we only really know in which way we perform an action by being aware of what
is happening in the present moment, by being aware of the lived experience of our
action. When our performance produces the desired result the lived experience of the
action results in (or flows into) the lived experience of the desired result. In other words: the
result we desired becomes our lived experience.
We have a mental idea about the result we want, but that mental idea is not what
causes our performance to bring about the actual experience of that result. This

9
Alternatively it may have been their task to teach us to perform those tasks under stressful
circumstances, in order to prepare us for the truly stressful circumstances of an actual war.

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happens on a much deeper and far more mysterious level. The feedback system
helps us to align the lived experience of the performed action with the lived experience of the
desired result. When they become one experience it feels ‘right’ - there is harmony or
resonance between them, they belong to each other. I shoot - the target goes
down. Cool.
My suggestion is that the following is a much better description of what actually
happens during learning:

Practice and feedback help us to enter with our awareness in the lived
experience of the physical performance and to bring it in line with - or
attune it to - the lived experience of the desired result.

To be clear: the awareness I am talking about here isn’t necessarily totally

conscious in a cognitive way - in fact, it usually isn’t. It is intimately related to our
body, to our experience as an embodied being. Perhaps it would be better to call this
awareness a form of deep devotion. To a superficial perception it might seem that
all I had to do during my target practice was to learn to properly line up the target
on the reticle of my Uzi and squeeze the trigger. Although initially this approach
did seem to play a part in becoming a first-class marksman, I suspect that in reality
something else was going on. I will try to explain this by giving another example, a
little further down.
We might think that conscious mental evaluation of performance is important in the
learning process, but contemplating on some of my own experiences I believe that
it is often not necessary. Mental evaluation can be helpful as a stimulant to focus
our awareness on the way we experience both our performance and the desired
result, but our (conscious) mental processes are not the key to the actual attuning
of the two. What conscious feedback does is that it translates the direct, lived
experience of both the performance and the outcome into mental constructs. This
can be helpful to focus our attention, but we need to realize that the mental
constructs are only a reflection or representation of the actual experience; they
have no power in themselves to influence or modify the experience. The strength
of external feedback stands or falls with the sensitivity and awareness of the
teacher (this may be our inner teacher) and with her ability to relay her perceptions
to us in an understandable way.
Often we notice that we have to calm down our mental processes and our emotions
in order to be able to practice properly. Mental processes and emotions actually
interfere with our awareness of the lived experience. I mentioned the stressful
atmosphere on the firing range: in order for me to be able to focus properly on
hitting the target I had to: calm my mind, forget about my emotional environment
and become one with my target. Later my ability to attune the experience of firing
with the experience of hitting the target became second nature and I was able to run
4 miles with full equipment, lay down for firing and hit the target 10 out of 10
times in less than 20 seconds - the level of extended focused attention I previously
needed to attune action to outcome was no longer required.

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Breaking the procedure into small segments has a purpose similar to feedback: it
also supports our ability to focus our full attention on the experiences of performance
and outcome and to align them.
Now, here is my other example, another personal experience - you could call it an
advanced form of ‘target practice’...
Twenty years ago I took part in a weeklong drama course. Every day we did the
following exercise twice - mornings and evenings:
• all participants gathered in a large circle;
• one of the trainers walked up to the middle of the circle and dropped his set
of keys on the floor.
Then: after the trainer had returned to his own place in the circle, taking turns,
each participant had to:
• close their eyes (and keep them closed!);
• walk up to the middle of the circle;
• stop;
• reach down by bending their knees and then put their hand on the set of
keys in only one move.
• Only then was the participant allowed to open the eyes.
To mostly everyone’s amazement, after only three days of doing this exercise twice a
day, all participants were able to perform it with almost 100% accuracy.
Contemplating on this exercise has shattered all my beliefs in top-down learning
models. Doing the exercise, the first thing everybody learned was that it would not
go well when we tried to accompany and control the actual performance of the
exercise mentally, (e.g.: estimate the distance to the center of the circle before
closing our eyes; then, while closing our eyes and starting to walk: remain
conscious of the direction and count our steps in an attempt to match them to the
estimated distance to the target). The less we let our mental representations
interfere with the exercise, the better the results would be! Secondly, the better we
were able to keep our emotions at bay, the better the results would be. The more we
did this exercise (and other, similar ones, like running blindfolded across a soccer
field to a point at the other side), the more we learned to trust in and surrender to a
hidden ability that lay beyond our direct, conscious awareness and definitely beyond
our mental capacities.
This example is perhaps the clearest illustration of the points I am trying to make
here: the less mental and emotional processes interfere, the easier attunement
becomes. And, most importantly: there exists a mysterious faculty in our being that is
able to perform such tasks flawlessly. This ‘faculty’ appears to be completely one - or
in tune - with what we normally perceive to be our outer environment. I suspect it
plays a major part in acquiring new skills. The secret of getting in touch with this
faculty can be expressed in three words: attunement, trust and surrender. Not: control.
My conclusion is that learning a skill is definitely not equal to ‘downloading’ or
‘installing’ mental knowledge related to the performance of the skill into the
procedural parts of the brain or into procedural memory. I think that somehow
direct, undisturbed experience is the key. Focused attention is a tool we use to hone

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in on this experience and to align it to the desired result. I think that, ultimately,
learning a skill is an act of allowing the experience of performance and the
experience of the desired result to align until the alignment becomes effortless. We
focus our attention on the experience of our performance and adjust or tune it until it
‘hits’ the target. The more we do it, the more we are able to embrace the whole
experience with our conscious awareness and the easier it becomes to match the
experience of the performance with the experience of the desired result - until the
point where they effortlessly blend into one. Once we have mastered the skill we no
longer need the same focused attention to attune to the right experience. In many
cases we can henceforth perform the skill while our mind is engaged in something
else.
Once we have learned a skill we know on an intuitive level that the learning didn’t
really involve forcing our body into a certain set of actions and rehearsing that set until
it became a habit (although we may think it did, as the top-down learning model
suggests). We know we are not robots running a program. The experience of
performing a mastered skill doesn’t feel mechanic; it feels smooth, rich and harmonious
- it feels natural and right. It feels in tune. Although we might not be conscious in it,
it doesn’t feel as something that is separate from us, we feel it is part of us, or that
we are one with it. In fact it feels as if the ability to perform this skill has always
been there, although perhaps dormant, and that all we needed to do was allowing
ourselves to attune to it. And perhaps this intuitive understanding ultimately says
more about learning than most of our rational concepts about it do.
This doesn’t mean that the process of learning is always easy - remember the shock
of despair we experienced when we tried to drive that car for the very first time
and found out that it wasn’t at all as easy as we thought it would be. Often -
particularly in the case of more complex skills - the process of silencing10 (or tuning)
the body’s learned reflexes, overcoming adverse emotional reactions and using our
rational mind constructively, rather than counter-productively11 is time-consuming and
requires a considerable amount of focused attention.

Learning to breathe from the breath itself

Breathing is not exactly a skill; it is a natural process intimately engaging many
aspects of our being. We are breathing air since the day we were born, so we might
say that we have a certain expertise! Yet, breathing mostly happens without our
conscious awareness and, unlike the process we go through when learning a new
skill, we never went through a conscious learning cycle. From the moment of our
first breath our breathing was affected by unconscious reflex mechanisms and by a
multitude of emotional reactions. These reflexes and reactions left intimate but

10
This silencing is also called inhibiting. This is in fact a form of control, but not a form of mentally
induced control. It is a form of taking hold of our body with our ‘higher being’ - this process will
be explored more in depth elsewhere.
11
Either destructively or chaotically (in the meaning of not in an organized manner).

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considerable imprints in our way of breathing - imprints that interfered with our
natural ability to breathe. In addition, we also acquired mental concepts about
breathing that prevented us from appreciating the full purpose and potential of our
breathing. We started exploring a few of these mental concepts already.
We don’t need to learn to breathe in the traditional sense of learning. Rather there
exists a natural, uninhibited, living breathing that wants to happen - that is our
natural inheritance as embodied beings. But this natural, uninhibited breathing is
hindered by the imprints that early reflexes and emotional reactions have left on
our breathing. This is also true if our physical body is in some way preventing us to
breathe fully and freely; physical disabilities are almost always augmented by
restricting attitudinal and emotional habits. The mental concepts about breathing
we have acquired compound the effects of early imprints further. The superficial
relationship with our breathing advocated by these widely accepted concepts
prevents us from becoming aware of the previously formed, preconscious imprints
and it precludes the realization that a natural, uninhibited, living breath could even
exist.
Attuning to the living breath requires that we become aware of these early imprints
and release them. This process can be supported by a constructive use of the rational
mind in the form of external or internal feedback. However, mental concepts can
never replace this process of attunement, the main part has to be experiential.
Therefore mindfulness is a better approach. We need to wake up in, to become
consciously aware in our breathing in order to be able to attune it fully to the living
breath. At some stage this process leads to the direct experience of the living
breath itself and when this happens all mental concepts become unimportant - for
the length of the experience they no longer matter. From then on it is no longer a
question whether the living breath exists. The mind will gradually open up to it and
our body welcomes it. Our being starts to attune to the uninhibited living breath - if
we let it. When this happens we no longer only perceive ourselves as ‘the breather’.
We start to perceive ourselves also as ‘the breathed’. We become aware that the
breath actually wants to breathe us. And more and more we allow it to do just that.

This is learning to breathe from the breath itself. It is the core of rebirthing-breathwork.

From: De Wit, P. (2016). Learning to Breathe from the Breath Itself: An Introduction to
Rebirthing-Breathwork and a Phenomenological Exploration of Breathing. Florianópolis:
Author. (Available at Amazon as Printed book and in Kindle version)

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