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Rebirthing-Breathwork, also called "Conscious Breathing", is a branch of alternative medicine which postulates that specialized breathing techniques may have theraputic benefits. In Rebirthing-Breathwork, the client makes a connected breath without a pause between inhale and exhale or between the exhale and inhale. According to practitioners, this causes a build up of prana or life energy. A state of deep peace & relaxation is achieved fairly easily by most. Breathing sessions are done lying down and usually last one to two hours.


Development of Rebirthing as a therapeutic modality in its own right peaked in 1974, and has been extended from that point since. Orr, accompanied by fellow researchers, refined it into a system that can be practised in the context of a professional therapy session and taught to clients over a series of sessions, ten being the recommended minimum.


Orr's work was influential in the development of the more general topic of Rebirthing. In contrast to the narrow definition of Orr's "Rebirthing-Breathwork", the term "rebirthing", is now often used to refer to any therapy that postulates that human birth is a traumatic event. Therapies associated with the more general "rebirthing" can include breathing sessions such as are discussed here, but also often including "add-ons" other than breathwork in a session. No such "add-ons" are taught in the narrower treatment of "rebirthing-breathwork" sessions.


The philosophies which accompany Rebirthing appear to be a loose, intuitive mix of western metaphysics, gnosticism, hinduism, buddhism, and (what some may argue to be) original Christian teaching. Many are immortalists


The theories and assumptions behind rebirthing-breathwork include:

  1. Humans never forget their birth - they just suppress the memory. Proponents posit that humans often access memories from prior lives as well as from the Collective consciousness through this process.
  2. In addition to cerebral memory (based in the brain), humans also possess 'cellular memory', which is distributed amongst the body's cells, tissues, organs etc
  3. The trauma suffered during birth, and the specific nature of this trauma, has a deep effect on one's psyche and shapes one's perception and experience of life, self and the world in ways which one is mostly unaware of. This is referred to as Birth Trauma, one of the 5 major trauma's that Leonard Orr describes as contributing to negative experiences in this lifetime. The other four are: Unconscious Death Urge, Past Lives, Specific Negative Experiences (in this lifetime), and Parental Disapproval Syndrome. All of these can be cleared through Conscious Breathing, although birth issues tend to surface first.
  4. It is possible to gain recall of aspects of birth (also gestation and early childhood) and to release the accompanying emotions; such release usually becomes a decisive, influential and positive 'paradigm shift', often referred to as a 'breakthrough'.
  5. Human breathing is almost universally inadequate; virtually all people are suppressing large amounts of emotional, physical and mental "tensions" and require relatively high levels of CO2 in their blood to keep these tensions suppressed
  9. Rebirthing provides a direct, replicatable, physical experience of Divine Love through the saturation of the body with prana
  10. Conscious breathing releases physical toxins that are stored at a cellular level.

Claimed benefitsEdit

Rebirthing advocates claim that those practicing rebirthing have experienced

  • Deep and lasting inner peace
  • Heightened mental clarity
  • Greater insight into the human condition
  • Significant improvements in relationships - intimate, family, social and professional
  • Elimination of negative patterns which had been limiting one's success in life
  • Significant and lasting benefits to health and general well-being
  • A sense of deeper insight into the purpose of one's existence; a greater sense of one's personal relevance to the world
  • Permanent physical healings
  • Direct connection with God-energy or Divine Love
  • Memories of past lives
  • Can lead to physical immortality. Many rebirthers are immortalists.


  1. There is no scientific evidence to support the idea of cellular or other "non-cerebral" memory
  2. There is no scientific evidence that any birth memories can be recovered. In fact, the available research strongly indicates that the human brain is unable to form conscious memories until approximately the age of two. There is, however, strong evidence that false memories can be planted (either inadvertently or deliberately).
  3. There is little consensus for the position that normal breathing in a healthy human is inadequate.
  4. There is no evidence that maintaining high levels of O2 has any effect on the suppression of tension.
  5. No well-controlled studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique.

See alsoEdit

Leonard Orr

External referencesEdit

This article is part of the branches of CAM series.
Complementary and alternative medicine Classifications
NCCAM:Mind-Body Intervention

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