Breathwork for Transformational Healing

What is Pranayama Breathwork therapy?

Villa Kali Ma’s signature approach to working with women to heal their trauma, addiction, and mental health challenges is to integrate the very best methods and mindsets of healing practices from around the world.

We’re open to the insights, wisdom, and techniques offered by any and all traditions that have been proven to work, through scientific testing and/or anecdotal evidence preserved in collective memory over generations.

In many cases, the methods we weave into our treatment have been working well for thousands of years. This is the case when it comes to Pranayama breathwork therapy.

As everyone knows, breath is the core of all animal life, and as long as we’re alive, we breathe. How we breathe relates deeply to whether we are experiencing our life as optimal, balanced, and full, or as burdened, suppressed, and restricted.

All illness relates to constrictions to the breath in one way or another, and health blossoms alongside the full and balanced breath.

Once we understand how breath relates not just to physical health, but also to the flourishing of our nervous system (and therefore our emotions and perceptions), it is obvious we would all benefit from remembering how to breathe as nature intended us to.

It is more about remembering rather than learning because as babies we breathed perfectly. Restriction of our vital life force is a learned behavior. The good news is, we can unlearn bad breathing the same we way we learned it – through repetition.

Pranayama teaches several different breathing patterns, all of which affect the body in specific ways according to variations made to the pattern of inhalation, retention of in-breath, exhalation, and the pause at the end of the out-breath.

The ultimate goal of all breathwork is to gradually empower the individual with choice when it comes to what state of being our body is in, including which emotions we feel in response to events of our lives.

How Pranayama Breathwork helps

The Sanskrit word prana means universal life force energy, that which circulates in all living beings and causes them to be alive. By definition, all living natural beings (including plants) are filled with prana, whereas inanimate, synthetic, expired, or artificial beings are not.

The word root -ayama means to lengthen and regulate. Pranayama, therefore, is the science and practice of lengthening and regulating our vital life force through the breath.

Literally speaking, pranayama is not breath control, but rather control of the vital life force through the pathway of the breath.

It’s important to understand the intimate connection between breath and vital life force to understand how and why Pranayama works.

From the Western scientific lens with which most of us are relatively familiar, Pranayama works because the breath is in a direct and causal relationship with our nervous system. When our nervous system shifts from one state to another, for example from agitation to a state of peace, our breath naturally reflects this change in terms of its shape and length.

The reverse is also true, that we change the breath, we change our nervous system to reflect the shape and pattern of the breath. We can reverse-engineer states of peace by simulating peaceful body states.

By practicing breathing patterns that support a healthy, relaxed state, our body follows suit and creates this state for us. Our brainwaves shift, changing wavelength and frequency. We downshift to more pleasant states, where healing, reverie, and creativity can best take place.

At the body level, our muscular tension, heartbeat, blood flow, hormonal releases, and neurotransmitter functions all cooperate with the breath. We feel it in the body as mild, positive sensations of peace, safety, and balance.

Our emotions, which can be thought of as bridging the world of our mental experience with our body sensations, likewise align and attune to the program of “all is well”.

The Benefits of Pranayama Breathwork

Pranayama has many benefits for the mind, body, and soul.

At the mental level, Pranayama brings clarity, focus, and calm. It gently brings on the state of present-moment awareness. This peaceful state of presence happens naturally as a consequence of following structured breathing patterns, rather than being the product of striving or effort.

In addition to being a pleasurable state of mind, now-moment presence increases mental focus and clarity, so that we are able to experience concentration and flow states.

From the Western scientific lens with which most of us are relatively familiar, Pranayama works because the breath is in a direct and causal relationship with our nervous system. When our nervous system shifts from one state to another, for example from agitation to a state of peace, our breath naturally reflects this change in terms of its shape and length.

The reverse is also true, that we change the breath, we change our nervous system to reflect the shape and pattern of the breath. We can reverse-engineer states of peace by simulating peaceful body states.

By practicing breathing patterns that support a healthy, relaxed state, our body follows suit and creates this state for us. Our brainwaves shift, changing wavelength and frequency. We downshift to more pleasant states, where healing, reverie, and creativity can best take place.

At the body level, our muscular tension, heartbeat, blood flow, hormonal releases, and neurotransmitter functions all cooperate with the breath. We feel it in the body as mild, positive sensations of peace, safety, and balance.

Our emotions, which can be thought of as bridging the world of our mental experience with our body sensations, likewise align and attune to the program of “all is well”.

The Role of Pranayama Breathwork during recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, Pranayama is used in all of our yoga, breathwork, and meditation modalities. We also integrate some form of breathwork into nearly all of our psychoeducation, therapy, and skills practicing groups, as a support for inducing a state of relaxation and calm.

The balancing, soothing effects of Pranayama make it easier to be receptive and open to learning, connecting with others, and looking inwards to see the contents of our minds without becoming triggered by what we find there.

Pranayama opens up our social engagement pathways, making it possible to co-regulate our nervous systems through the power of the group, and through the healing environments we create for our participants.

The clarifying effects of healthy deep breathing assist also in fostering mental alertness, eliminating brain fog and headaches. It’s no secret that when we’re making deep changes in our lives, we need to go through stages of not feeling particularly well, temporarily, whether that’s because we are detoxing from substances, repatterning trauma pathways, or working with our psyche’s oldest habits of negative thought and painful emotion. The pain that can accompany the early stages of getting better is cleared, supported, and tolerated through the breath.

Pranayama has an extraordinary ability to detoxify and restore the body, again and again. When breath is stimulated to circulate through the body it whisks out debris and dust that the body no longer needs, allowing residual chemicals and waste to be better metabolized and to ultimately exit the body in its right time.

All portions of the body respond well to the presence of sufficient oxygen, as well, so airing out all of the body systems through deeper and more energetic breath has beneficial health impacts.

All in all, Pranayama helps through the mechanism of making deliberate alterations to the breath pattern. Depending on the desired result, Pranayama typically stimulates and energizes the body through the increase in the amount of oxygen circulating, or on the other hand stimulates greater release and relaxation through the prolonging and intensification of the out-breath.

Pranayama Breathwork programs

Women who are seeking to recover from mental health problems, trauma, and/or substance addiction can benefit greatly from the tools and techniques offered by Pranayama, and at Villa Kali Ma make we sure that women who come through our doors get to experience the transformational effects of breathwork while they work with us, for that very reason.

At Villa Kali Ma our Pranayama breathwork programs teach the ancient, powerfully transformational tools of this millennia-old tradition in practical, easy ways so that anyone encountering our treatment offerings learns to use these skills and apply them in multiple areas of her life.

There are many different Pranayama sequences, but the three techniques you are likely to come across at Villa Kali Ma are:

• Abdominal breathing, also called Diaphragmatic Breathing. Learning to breathe like a newborn baby or a soft puppy is one of the most accessible and helpful changes to our breath.
• Ujjayi Breath, sometimes likened to an “ocean sound” breath because of the soft, whispery sound it makes. This form of Pranayama involves slow, smooth breathing that equalizes the in- and the outbreath. Ujayii breath is soothing and works to regulate the vagus nerve within just a few breaths, helping us to calm down after a trauma trigger.
• Nadi Shodhana or Alternate Nostril Breath, which calms and balances both components of the nervous system. Nadi Shodhana has an enormously beneficial effect on multiple body systems, and it’s a surefire way to get back to balance after anything that has thrown you off.

Villa Kali Ma offers deep, holistic, revolutionarily compassionate treatment for women recovering from addiction, mental health struggles, trauma, and any combination of these. Throughout our modalities, education programs, treatment, and hands on practitioner work, Pranayama breathwork programs are integrated into our offerings.