November/December 2006

Changing the World, One Breath at a Time

An interview with Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D.

By Ravi Dykema

In the mid-80s, at the height of the “me” generation, one couple began their bold and visionary efforts to change the way our culture viewed relationships. Thus began Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks’ self-proclaimed mission to change the world. Their efforts would eventually lead them to create the Spiritual Cinema Circle and the Transformational Book Circle, and to use their healing work with individuals and couples as agents for global transformation.

Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., is a consultant and educator in the field of body-mind and relationship transformation. She has explored the power of movement, breath and the creative arts in psychology for more than 30 years. She and her husband, Gay Hendricks, Ph.D.—one of the leading theorists in the field of body-mind integration—have worked with more than 20,000 people and 3,000 couples. Together, they have authored Conscious Living, The Conscious Heart and other books about relationships and conscious living, and have appeared on more than 500 television and radio programs. Here, Hendricks talks to Nexus publisher Ravi Dykema about the power of breath, the principals of a healthy relationship, and the magic that arises from authentic communication.

RD: How did you and Gay become involved in what, at the time, was the new field of somatic or body-centered psychology?

KH: I had always been fascinated by the potential of movement to create transformation, and I discovered the field of dance movement therapy in 1970. I started working with a woman named Joan Chodorow in Santa Barbara, who was a student of Mary Whitehouse—one of the founders of dance therapy —and became a dance movement therapist. That’s how I first got interested in the language of the body, the idea that what’s going on internally is expressed through people’s postures and gestures and mannerisms. I began to realize that what goes on in a person’s mind and their whole body might influence their relationships, how they move through problems.

I got my Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology in 1982. When I met Gay, he had two doctorates from Stanford, but was always more interested in how to create the most change in the friendliest possible way for everyday people, rather than creating research that would end up in some library somewhere. He’s always been interested in finding ways to help people create the kind of lives they want. So when we got together in 1980, we combined his passion for breath work with my passion for movement and both of our backgrounds in psychology, and saw what we could invent. And that’s what we’ve been up to for the last 26 years.

RD: In what discipline was his breath work training?

KH: He worked with a few people. But basically, both he and I have invented our own discipline. Our whole body-centered approach is best laid out in our book At the Speed of Life, which we wrote in the mid ‘90s. It includes nine strategies to help people uncover who they really are, what they call their essence. Though we’re much more known for our relationship work, both individual transformation and the relationship transformation come from a whole-body learning approach.

RD: Let’s talk about that for a moment. Psychology, as most people understand it, looks into the mind and emotions and thought-flow, the self that appears to us in our mental space. And conventional psychology has a different view of what constitutes a healthy person, and how one gets from a state of psychological pain to a state of health. But this body-centered, dance-therapy psychology has a different view. Could you outline for us how those two might be contrasted?

KH: The field of psychology is extremely broad, so I don’t want to attempt to condense the vast amount of exploration into a few simple phrases. But I do think psychology has been looking at the perennial questions for many years, the questions of why am I here, and what is life about, and how can I create a meaningful life. I think one of the places we’ve expanded is that psychology has taken a look at personalities as a kind of an end-point. Up until about the 1930s or 1940s, the framework of psychology has really been focused on the intra-personal and inter-personal aspects—what’s going on inside my own mind and what’s going on between my mind and another person’s mind, and how can I change that.

Then psychologists began to explore the question, ‘Is there something beyond the personality?’ That’s where transpersonal psychology comes from. It’s beyond the personality. It’s starting to consider much more of what is it that really creates a satisfying life, and what is there beyond getting the fundamental needs met, like the need for survival and belonging. There’s also a need for creative expression for people to really have full lives, in the sense of a connection to something larger than yourself.

The field of transpersonal psychology has looked at those issues more directly and has developed into what is now called somatic psychology, which is a relatively recent term. It really has to do with what’s going on in a person’s body that is a hologram for their lives. Their mind and spirit show up in their body, because that’s where people live. That’s the medium of our lives. So everything that’s important will be evident in the person’s experience of their body — the experience of their breathing, the experience of their moment-to-moment movement, the rhythm of their speech. There’s so much going on in your body from moment-to-moment; once you become aware of it, you can really expand your vitality and vibrance.
Another change in recent years in both somatic psychology and the relationship field has been a movement away from a coping or problem-solving approach; now, we’re starting to focus more on the question, “What would you do if all your problems were solved?” What would you do with all that extra time and energy? We really focus on that at the beginning of our work with people, so that they can look at solving problems in the bigger context of what they really want to do with their lives, what they want their lives to be about. We focus on dealing with the obstacles that come up along the way, so people can move toward a future they’ve chosen, rather than a future that they just fell into or inherited from their parents.

RD: That’s a wonderful description.

KH: Thank you. We have been thinking about this for a long time. Also, my focus for many years has been, how can people create the lives that they want in the simplest and the easiest way? One thing that we are absolutely convinced of is contained in another trend in psychology called positive psychology. Some transpersonal psychologists have been focusing on the idea that it is actually possible for people to be happy. It’s not a frivolous or a selfish goal; people are much more productive, creative and make a better contribution to the world if they’re happy. In our training, we’ve found that people only learn when they’re having a good time, when they’re engaged and relaxed and open to exploring.

Real learning occurs when people are in the kind of state that babies are in after they’ve nursed, a relaxed, alert state. We try to train people how to increase what we call ease and flow in their minds; and the easiest way to change your mind is to change your body. For example, if you breathe less than 12 breaths per minute, you turn off your anxiety mechanisms. You cannot be anxious if you’re breathing slowly, into your belly.

RD: Can you give me an example of how you might use this knowledge, that taking fewer than 12 breaths per minute disconnects the anxiety mechanism?

KH: I can give you a couple of examples. The first is in public speaking. We work a lot with people in organizations and people who make presentations, as well as folks who just want to explain something more clearly to another person. Most people are more scared of public speaking than they are of dying—it’s a really big fear. We teach people how to notice where their breathing is, to give some sensitive awareness to it. It’s usually up in the chest.

Then we have a whole technique we call the “yes breath,” in which we teach people how to shift their breathing. Once they’ve learned this technique, they can shift their breathing in about a minute. And once the breathing shifts, their whole physiology shifts; they’re more available for interacting and being interested in the audience, and they think more clearly. You can’t think creatively or interactively if you’re not breathing correctly. You only think in a kind of a stress-related, robotic way.
So, for example, a person who is not breathing deeply may have a fear of being criticized, so they’ll go into a situation leading with that fear, and they’ll create the very thing they’re afraid of. I’ve seen this happen over and over. On the other hand, if they take a moment to shift their breathing and come into their body, they become not only more aware of themselves, but also more aware of the audience, and so they connect. There’s a sense of being available, which is engaging, and they get to use the energy of the audience, rather than feeling like the audience is their enemy.

When you breathe, you open up your whole world. If you’re not breathing, the world gets very small. We also teach people that breathing is not just a lung mechanism. It’s a whole-body activity; it allows your whole body to relax and to become available. All those incredible resources that each of us carry—being able to respond in the moment, being able to be aware of other people’s feelings, accessing intuition—all come from inside. They come from the larger mind.

The research is also really clear that when you’re thinking, you use only a tiny part of your brain. But when you’re moving, every part of your brain is activated. When people get scared, they often freeze. When you’re frozen, everything looks like it’s going to attack, every problem seems insurmountable. So we teach people gentle, specific ways to move that helps them experience the flow of aliveness in their bodies. They feel the pleasure of moving, and they drop back into their bodies. It’s like they come home.

RD: I don’t think most people have an idea of what breathing really is and what it entails. We know it’s involuntary—it happens by itself, and if it stops, we die. But most of us don’t even pay attention to our breath, let alone take voluntary control of it. Tell us how it works and why conscious breathing is so potent.

KH: The value of breathing in a relaxed and open way is that it allows you to make use of all of your resources. First, it allows you to be present, to be where you are in the moment. If you’re not breathing, the fight or flight mechanism, where you’re either breathing in a shallow manner or breathing up into your chest, can suffocate you. When you’re breathing, you’re moving oxygen into your bloodstream, and the first place it goes is to your brain. If you’re not breathing fully and deeply, the first thing that drops out is your ability to think and respond to your environment in an effective and powerful way. When people learn how to breathe, the first thing they’re going to notice is that their lives work better.

RD: Are you saying that most people aren’t breathing in a natural and relaxed way normally? Because I think most people think they are.

KH: Most people are not. In fact, there’s been some fascinating research about that. The gist of it is that when people go to the doctor, no matter what the diagnosis is, 80 percent of their complaints are also involved with faulty breathing. In other words, breathing incorrectly creates physiological disease, because you are not circulating oxygen through your body, through your organs, through your limbs, through your muscles, through your neurons. You’re not using your maximum capacity; it’s an 8-cylinder car working on 4 cylinders.

RD: But breathing is controlled from birth by the respiratory center in the brain; isn’t that designed to provide people with the capacity to live 80 years and function well?

KH: No. We’ve also done a huge amount on pre- and perinatal psychology—that is, the psychology of the birth experience. And it’s pretty clear now that the birth experience, and the experience of our first breaths, for many of us, is compromised. There’s a lot of literature now about oxygen deprivation at birth. There are 14 listed reasons, including everything from mechanical interventions to the mother receiving some kind of anesthesia to the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck.

Additionally, the emotional issues of the parents are transferred to the child. The child experiences those issues and they compromise the breathing experience. Also, people don’t realize that babies learn to breathe from their parents; the breathing style of the parent is passed on to the child by being in proximity. So even if a baby is born with his or her mechanisms fully intact, he or she can then be compromised by being around parents who don’t breathe fully.

This doesn’t happen so much in cultures that are considered “less evolved” than ours, like in India, because the children are immediately held and they‘re massaged every day. In our country, the baby may be immediately separated from the parent, and not massaged nor carried around close to the parents’ bodies. That’s one reason why many adults have breathing problems; these problems can be addressed very easily.

RD; How? How do you take a person with a compromised pattern that started at birth and was exacerbated by life experiences, and change it?

KH: Over the last 30 years, Gay has looked at all of the literature and research, as well as doing a huge amount of independent observation by watching 100 healthy babies breathe to find out what healthy breathing looks like. Through that, we’ve developed the breathing that we describe in many of our books. In some of our books it’s called life stream breathing, and in some it’s called the yes breath. They’re basically the same. Both move your spine in a way that opens up the natural, organic breathing that everybody knows, because it’s the way you were moving your body when you were inside your mother, sort of making a C of your body and then releasing it.

As people recover that movement in their spine, which is a gentle process, their breathing naturally and easily opens up. We used to use a more vigorous, emotional-release type breathwork, and what we found is that people learn more and sustain their learning when the breathing is gentle. When we had people do accelerated breathing, like they do in re-birthing, we found that they were re-traumatized. At the very least, they might have a big adrenalin experience that doesn’t lead to long-term sustained change.

The yes breath is something that people can do and increase their capacity and ease of flow while still having a life. They don’t have to go somewhere to recover from the work that they’ve done. And all of our work, particularly these days, has that in common: we want people to be able to be fully in their lives while expanding their capacity to handle more and more positive energy, more and more flow in their bodies, more flow of love between them and other people.

RD: Do people who undergo training in this sort of breath transformation end up with a different autonomic breathing pattern?

KH: Yes. I can give you a very vivid illustration of the difference it makes, with my own experience with flying on airplanes. When I first met Gay, I was terrified of flying. I would start worrying days ahead of time; I would be sure that this was the flight that was going to crash, and I would be anxious, nauseous, sweaty through the whole flight. Then when we would finally land, I’d give myself about two minutes of “Whew,” and then I’d start worrying about the return flight. It was a significant problem for me, because it kept me from being present; it kept me from enjoying the flight. And it also kept me from being present wherever I was traveling; if I were giving a seminar or a presentation, I wouldn’t be fully there enjoying the experience. I’d be worrying about the flight.

As a result of doing the breathing, I have flown close to 900,000 air miles in the last 20 years, and I can easily get on a flight; I’m totally relaxed, I can meditate, I can go to sleep, I can get work done or talk to the people next to me. I have no fear of flying. That’s an example of what can happen with this work.

RD: How did you incorporate this breathwork into your work with couples?

KH: Breathing is one aspect out of many that we use in our trainings; every time you take a breath, you’re not just breathing; you’re moving. If a couple is having a conflict, the one thing I can guarantee them is that they’re not breathing and they’re not moving. We help people notice what kinds of habits they’re repeating when they get into the conflict, and what happens when they open up their moving and breathing and kind of un-kink and un-freeze.

Another aspect of our work, that is actually a body-centered aspect, is the commitment to and the expression of authenticity, what is actually happening. What are you actually fearing? What is the feeling that you are aware of and how can you communicate that in a straightforward way? What body sensations are you noticing?

RD: Could you give me an example?

KH: Suppose I’m in a conflict with my partner and I’m blaming him for something. If I give myself a moment of sensitive awareness, I may realize “Oh, I’m actually scared right now. And I just had the thought that I’m afraid you’re going to leave.” That kind of communication is very powerful and very healing for people, rather than being stuck in the power struggle or the blaming or criticizing. The moment someone is able to make an authentic communication, the conflicts stop.

RD: And they get to that authentic communication by paying attention to what’s happening in their bodies?

KH: Yes. If you’re in the middle of a conflict with your partner, you may say “My face feels hot. My hands feel prickly.” Those are authentic communications. And not only are they authentic communications, but they are descriptions of what’s going on in your own body, and they’re unarguable. It’s very unlikely the other person’s going to say, “No, your hands aren’t prickly.”

RD: Does one authentic communication lead to another authentic communication?

KH: Actually, it does. What thousands of people who have done our work have found is that the moment that someone in the argument says something that’s authentic, it shifts the whole context. Since we know feelings are contagious, rather than spreading blame and anger, what they begin to do is spread curiosity and intimate connection. We see it happen over and over again. We call it the shift from blame talk to conscious heart talk. We’re interested in what we call practical magic; it looks magical, but the steps to create the magic are doable for anyone who simply practices them.

RD: So you’re working with couples to help them get to a state of happiness and intimacy?

KH: That’s right. We see everything within a relationship field as a possibility to expand a person’s ability to give and receive love. We call this the upper-limits problem. The one problem everybody has is a thermostat setting for how much love and positive energy they can give and receive. When the heat between two exceeds that thermostat setting, people do something unconscious to bring themselves back to a more familiar level.

One of the easiest ways to reduce the love you are exchanging is by criticizing your partner or blaming your partner or breaking an agreement. When you do that, you return to a more familiar but miserable level. So you have the illusion of safety, but it doesn’t really express the potential of your relationship, which is to enhance your own and your partner’s creativity and the co-creativity between the two of you. It’s relatively new in human history that we have the possibility of turning our attention to expanding our capacity to give and receive love.

RD: How is it new?

KH: For many thousands of years, life was all about survival. In some parts of the world, that’s still the primary focus. But we think there’s a much more interesting problem. Human beings have only just begun to explore their ability to create and co-create. That path is only possible when you have retired the problems you spend most of your time on, along with the power struggles, the blaming, concealing, coming from a false front, keeping secrets, and so on. When people resolve those problems, they have a huge amount of free energy that they can turn toward creativity.

RD: Creativity?

KH: Yes, your work in the world, your expression of your unique genius. There’s something innately unique to each person, something you can contribute that no one else can. It gives you a huge amount of satisfaction and makes a tremendous contribution to the community and to society. That energy is drained away and wasted in conflict and power struggles. I think that’s the main problem that faces the world today.

RD: It seems to me that a lot of people experience conflict, anxiety and frustration in relationships. I imagine that it appears to many people that a relationship will get in the way of their creativity or personal growth.

KH: That’s true. Many people think relationship limits your creativity and growth, rather than expanding it. We focus on finding out how to best use the enhanced energy that a close relationship provides. As a couple, you have more energy than either individual has on his or her own. That increased energy is what brings up the issues; it shines the light on the issues that you can avoid on your own.

RD: We all yearn to be with someone, but if we’re in a difficult relationship, or have a history of difficult relationships, it seems impossible to find happiness and peace in a relationship. We have these patterns that seem so entrenched; how can we get past that?

KH: Body awareness and breathing are crucial, but the key move is to learn to love in yourself what you’re trying to get someone else to love. In relationship, we attack the other person when they love the things in us that we find unlovable. It’s like the old Groucho Marx saying: “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.” A close relationship is an invitation to explore our issues; it’s a learning opportunity. A vast number of relationships are what we call learning relationships, where someone selects a partner from whom they can learn something that they couldn’t learn in any other way, and then they resist that learning when it comes up. We can be in our bodies and open ourselves to wonder and discovery and curiosity. We can learn to appreciate, which is a whole body experience.

RD: “Appreciate” sounds like a mental thing, not a body experience.

KH: But it’s not mental. There are several definitions of “appreciate.” The first one, which I really love, is “to give sensitive awareness to.” We teach people how to give sensitive awareness to what they are experiencing in the moment—to appreciate tension, or to appreciate the quality of their breathing, or to appreciate the thoughts that are going on in their mind. When you appreciate, a visible and tangible shift occurs. You feel more at home in your body; you feel more expanded, more relaxed and more available. You feel more of a sense of internal space.

Another definition of “appreciate” is “to focus primarily on the positive.” One thing that psychology has let us know over the last 100 years—you can see examples of it in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?”—is that what you focus on grows. If you focus on your complaints and you focus on what’s wrong, you get to be really good at noticing what’s wrong. But if you focus on what’s right, what you genuinely like and admire about your partner, that grows. It’s not so much that you’re ignoring other things; it’s that you’re giving more weight to appreciating. Our bodies are set up with a default; most of what the brain does is say “no,” to keep us from taking in too much stimulation.

RD: Is that a survival mechanism?

KH: Yes. It keeps you from having to pay attention to every one of your 20,000 breaths and all of the things that your eyes are taking in every second. Your brain does that for you; it sorts and filters. But people don’t realize that they have much more control over the filtering than they think. You can choose your filters, and choose your focus. We encourage people to focus on what’s possible and positive, rather than what’s wrong. When you do that, you break up old patterns and you create the possibility for solutions, for invention and creativity.

RD: You and Gay, with others, created the Spiritual Cinema Circle, a subscription service that offers visionary, inspiring movies on a monthly basis. How does this relate to your work?

KH: We’ve used film clips on our work for years and years as a powerful method of communicating to the whole person. Seeing a film stimulates all parts of your being. Years ago, we noticed that we had stopped going to the movies because there wasn’t anything we wanted to see, or that we want to take our grandchildren to see. They are now 8 and 10. They were one of the influences that lead to the Spiritual Cinema Circle.

We’re interested in changing the world. One of the best ways to do that is through films. They’re seen around the world, and everybody loves to go to the movies. We wanted to create an alternative system for making films that would speak to the vital issues people are exploring now: How to create a relationship that really works. How to negotiate the passages of birth and marriage and community and death that everyone experiences. And how to use those as ways to evolve and grow spiritually as well as to entertain.

We’re not interested in preachy movies. We’re interested in entertainment. We’ve seen the most creative, brilliant, entertaining documentaries and feature films through the Spiritual Cinema Circle group. We’re thrilled that people are really making use of it. We now have more than 20,000 members in 70 countries, and we just formed an alliance with Gaiam, in Broomfield, Colorado, so we’re expecting a big surge in our subscriptions and also our possibilities for influencing both the way that movies are made and the way they are funded. One of our long-terms goals is to create kind of a Sundance (the influential film festival in Park City, Utah) for independent filmmakers to learn the craft and to make the kinds of films that can illuminate the lives of people around the world.

RD: You have also created the Transformational Book Circle.

KH: Yes, that features the books that transformational leaders have found to be the most influential in their lives. We asked people like Deepak Chopra, Louise Hay and Neale Donald Walsch “What books changed your life profoundly?”
Members of the Circle get one book a month for 12 months; each book also comes with a CD that gives experiential excercises. Members also get web seminars and teleconferences with transformational leaders. Both the cinema circle and the book circle are part of our efforts to change the world for the better.

The books are sent in sequence as a complete program, in three waves. The first wave, which includes books one, two and three, is called “Liberating the Power of Your Mind.” The second wave, which includes books four, five and six, is called “Living From Your Heart and Soul.” The third, which includes books seven through 12, is called “Integrating Heart, Mind and Soul To Free Your Creative Potential.” The first book readers receive is called The Book of Life, and is our personal recommendation. The second book you get is Neale Donald Walsch’s personal selection, called The Power of a Single Thought, which he credits with opening his heart and preparing his soul for his conversations with God. The circle is completely different from book clubs, where you end up with books you don’t want or will never read. It can really make an amazing difference in people’s lives.

For more information on the Spiritual Cinema Circle, visit www.spiritualcinemacircle.com. For information on the Transformational Book Circle, visit www.transformationalbookcircle.com.