“Sit in a quiet room and listen carefully. What you will hear is the sound of life itself - the slow and measured rhythms of your breathing.

Focus for a moment on your nostrils and notice the coolness of the air flowing into your body and compare it to the warm moistness you can feel as it is exhaled.  

Observe the rise and fall of your chest as you inhale and exhale, an action you will repeat between 12 and 14 times per minute if a male and 14 to 16 times a minute if a female – amounting to some 20,000 breaths per day or around half a billion in the average lifetime. 

While we work and play, eat and drink, sleep and dream, exercise and relax the air will flow into and away from your body entirely automatically and without any need for conscious awareness or intervention.  

Because breathing is such a routine we tend to take it for granted. 

Yet research has shown that even minor changes in the way we breathe can exert a significant influence, for good or ill, over the way in which we think, feel and behave. 

As breathing specialist Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, says in her book Sensing, Feeling and Action ‘Breathing … lays down the foundation for all the other succeeding patterns. Whenever the breathing is blocked in the body, future patterns will be blocked; whenever the breathing is free, the future patterns will develop efficiently.”  

In former times breathing held far greater significance than it does for most people today.  

In Greek, psyche pneuma translates both as breath and as soul or spirit while in Latin the phrase anima spiritus has a similar dual meaning. Japanese express the same idea with their word ki which translates, as air spirit while in Sanskrit breath is “prana” signifying the vital energy of the universe. According to the Upanishads, ancient yogic texts, prana represents the link between mind and body. 

I first became aware of the role of breathing in ensuring a balanced or unbalanced state of mind and body some thirty years ago while undertaking research amongst Buddhist meditators in Thailand.  

To investigate the neuroscience of this ancient tradition, I measured electrical activity in the brains and bodies of those experienced in the practice as they achieved a state of transcendent awareness, sometimes described as the peak moment of meditation.

 Later, when conducting research into forms of treatment for anxiety, stress and phobias at the University of Sussex, I was able to combine my findings from Eastern meditative traditions with modern neuroscientific insights into brain function in order to develop a variety of breathing techniques based on changes to the rate, depth and frequency of inhalation and exhalation.

I also came to realise that, making these changes brought about more than merely a relaxed mental state, however beneficial that might prove. 

An invitation from the BBC to present a series of sports programmes, under the title Sporting Partnerships, provided with a golden opportunity to interview many of the UK’s foremost sportsmen and women about their approach to the challenge of such a highly competitive career and the techniques they used to maintain themselves at peak mental and physical condition.

Their experiences and knowledge enabled me to further develop and refine many of the breathing procedures that I was using in clinical practice. I should like to extend a personal thanks to those individuals, together with their coaches, trainers and mentors (see box) for the invaluable insights that my conversations with them provided.

David Lewis with Jonah Lomu & his mentor Phil Kingsley Jones    David Lewis with Colin Mongomerie and caddie Alastair McLean

David Lewis with Dame Tani Grey and her trainer

David Lewis with the late Colin McRae and Derek Rager

I soon found that it was possible to enhance focus and improve concentration, to refresh and energise the brain and to bring about an altered state of consciousness in which it became easier to break free from restricting patterns of thought and behaviour.

Some twenty years ago, I published the initial findings of my researches in best selling book The Alpha Plan that became the subject of a BBC TV documentary. 

Since then I have continued with my research and training programmes, both in the UK and continental Europe, aimed at exploring and harnessing the power of the human breath to influence performance via its effects on electrical activity in the brain. During lectures around the world I have been able to teach international audiences some of the breathing techniques that you can now find on my Bo-Tau Home Training Course.

David Lewis while lecturing on Bo-Tau in Vienna*

Over the past two decades I have developed and refined these insights and discoveries into the new self-help procedure called Bo-Tau.

It is based on the simple but powerful idea that the starting point for bringing about beneficial life changes in order to achieve our true potential and enhancing our mental and physical well being, requires us to alter the way we breathe! 

Learn how to do so and you will be astonished at how powerful and potentially life changing these simple changes can prove.”

* Dr David Lewis is available to run workshops and make presentations on many aspects of stress, anxiety and maximising performance, at your next conference or company training day. Please e-mail for details.