The Healing Power of the Breath: Simple Techniques to Reduce Stress and Anxiety, Enhance Concentration, and Balance Your Emotions by Brown MD Richard & Patricia MD Gerbarg

Author:Brown MD, Richard & Patricia, MD Gerbarg [Patricia, MD Gerbarg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Published: 2012-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

COHERENT BREATHING IN SUDAN

Ellen Ratner, the host on the Talk Radio News Service who is experienced in mental health care, attended many of our workshops and practiced breathwork regularly. She had been working with Dr. Luka Deng in a rural clinic in South Sudan, about thirty miles from Darfur, with genocide survivors and with women and children recently rescued from years of slavery in North Sudan. Believing that breath practices would relieve their symptoms of depression and trauma, she invited us to participate in helping them by creating a breathwork practice that she could teach; she pointed out that there were no mental health treatments or services in that area and that training in breathwork would be the only psychological intervention they were likely to receive. Assuming that these survivors had complex trauma and that some of them probably needed to use suppression (blocking out their thoughts and feelings about the traumas), we did not want to teach any practices that might trigger trauma memories. Therefore, we suggested a few simple qigong movements and Coherent Breathing, followed by rest. Ellen returned from Sudan reporting very positive responses to the program; she saw improvements in levels of worry, fear, jumpiness, mood, and physical pain. One of the village matrons had taken over the task of ringing a chime bowl to lead the breathing. Ellen asked us to evaluate the effectiveness of the program with her next group of survivors.

When Dr. Luka Deng and Ellen decided to evaluate the effects of the breathwork program, we sent two psychological scales to assess levels of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. These tests were given to nineteen Sudanese women who were survivors of war and genocide traumas. Five days a week the women came to the clinic, where the staff led them in three qigong movements and twenty minutes of Coherent Breathing. The tests of mood and PTSD were repeated after six and eighteen weeks. The results after eighteen weeks of practice showed a 66 percent improvement in mood scores and a 71 percent improvement in PTSD symptom scores. While this was not a controlled study, it suggested that even in extremely traumatized disaster survivors, a simple twenty-minute practice of movement and breathing could significantly relieve symptoms of depression and PTSD.8

In July 2011, Ellen Ratner and Dr. Brown traveled to Dr. Luka Deng’s clinic during the week prior to South Sudan’s declaration of independence from the North; the intent was to provide stress and trauma relief using Breath~Body~Mind practices for six hundred recently liberated slaves, mostly women and children. The former slaves walked for seven days with bare feet or flip-flops through jungle and desert in extreme heat to reach the clinic in South Sudan before returning to their home villages.

Working through a translator, Dr. Brown led the first group of two hundred former slaves in simple qigong movements and breathing practices. Within about fifteen minutes, the grim, frozen faces with vacant stares transformed, as the Sudanese began smiling, laughing, breathing, and eventually dancing. It was as though they could finally unfreeze their emotions and feel some joy and hope.

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