Bo-Tau: Breathe Your Way to Calm

By Lara Endreszl

Stress seems to be the number one complaint among adults nowadays trying to juggle too many things at once: job, marriage, kids, relatives, and various social responsibilities. Although there are many natural ways to combat stress, including yoga techniques, bubble baths, burning calories at the gym, or going to the movies to take your mind off your many stressors, there’s a new technique in town. Bo-Tau (also known as Breath Optimised Transformational Unblocking) uses centuries-old Eastern tips with new-age modern science from the West.

The experts behind Bo-Tau believe that practicing this new breathing technique will provide a calm, motivational, and extremely focused attitude in as little as a week of practice. Use Bo-Tau to get rid of your fatigue, boost confidence, energy, concentration, and increase the power of your memory.

Designed by a neuro-phychologist Dr. David Lewis out of the University of Sussex in Britain, breathing has been found to directly correlate to our overall health. When you are stressed or under extreme anxiety, you breathe quicker and ultimately change chemicals in your blood causing carbon dioxide levels to alter and your mood to worsen. After the pulse quickens, a faster heartbeat can cause sweating, chest pain, distractions, panic attacks, vision problems, and the inability to concentrate which would often result in more stress.

With over twenty years of experience working with connections between breathing and stressors, Dr. Lewis first came across this link while working with Buddhist monks and meditation techniques in Thailand. Breath therapy, however, has been around for thousands of years as spiritualists, yogis, and healers have tried to focus on the incredible healing energies created by the simplest of movements: breathing. While lung function is the main priority of healthy breathing for scientists, spiritualists would also like to see a consistent pattern of breathing with a clear mind and stress-free brain.

While the idea of training yourself to breathe is not new, Dr. Lewis has been honing his strategy for decades and hopes that his method can help people to eradicate their everyday anxieties. Dr. Lewis has helped people deal with a magnitude of conditions aside from stress like insomnia and tension by using a grouping of specific breaths:

•Energising – for vitality
•Relaxing – for calming and to help center the patient
•Focused – for concentration
•Diaphragmatic – used by singers to pull from your diaphragm to oxygenate your blood
•Deep Sensualisation – to help unwind
As each cleansing breath provides an individual goal to conquer, Dr. Lewis’s approach is to teach the brain to breathe better when put in stressful situations and to avoid what is called a ‘breath lock.’ A ‘breath lock’ is a little bit like triggering a memory, but uses the action of breathing with a connection to a negative event someone has experienced in the past. Being a performance enhancement specialist, Dr. Lewis helps patients break down the psychological barriers that exist between the physical and the mental world.

Bo-Tau is being taught across the world in workshops led by trained technicians and can also be purchased on DVD for home practice and regular use. If stress can be banished by breathing and anxieties can be erased through retraining the brain to energize instead of breakdown in crisis, Bo-Tau may just be the answer to a lot of internal problems. Next time you are trying to juggle work, school, kids, relatives, family events, or social responsibilities, take a step back and a deep breath.