Margot's photoAbout Margot Biestman

Margot Biestman, M.A., is a certified practitioner of Middendorf Breathexperience™, and member of the training and teaching staff of the Middendorf Institute for Breathexperience™. She has a private practice in Sausalito and Sonoma, CA. She is also an author and artist, and has extensive experience in education for 40 years with people of all ages. Currently she offers weekly classes in “Breathexperience™ in Everyday Life” and workshops in “Breathexperience in Relationship™: Clearing, Clarifying, Resolving Conflicts, and Restoring and Transforming Relationships”. She has just opened a Marin/Sonoma Center for Breathexperience™ in Sausalito and Sonoma, where she plans to offer a one-year training program for those interested in breathexperience™ for personal growth. Jeffrey Crockett, certified breath practitioner, will be part of the program’s teaching team.

Margot, together with other members of the teacher-training team at the Middendorf Institute for Breathexperience™ in Berkeley, have participated as breath therapists in a research study at the Osher Clinic for Integrative Medicine at UCSF, San Francisco, for patients with chronic low back pain. She was a founding member and past president of the Board of Directors of The Breath Center of San Francisco (BCSF), a non-profit organization for the advancement of The Experience of Breath, and is currently serving as a member of the Advisory Board. She was a presenter at the 2005 Association for Body Psychotherapists national conference in Tucson, Arizona, and has appeared on NBC and CBS Television news programs on Breathexperience™ in treating back pain, and how breath includes and supports the whole person in healing, rather than just a part.

For information, literature, and videos, contact: 415-332-0279, Fax: 415-332-5588;

e-mail: margot@breathexperience.com

The U.S. Middendorf Breath Institute

830 Bancroft Way, Suite 104, Berkeley, CA 94710
Tel and Fax: 510-981-1710, www.breathexperience.com.

Margot Biestman holds a B.A. degree from Stanford University, 1953 and M.A. from Sonoma State University in Early Childhood Education, 1978. She also has a life-time teaching credential in elementary schools in California and a life-time junior college credential for nursery school and professional education. She studied dance movement as a child and young adult and explored dance and movement from 1946-1970 with Anna Halprin, Welland Lathrop, A.A. Leath, and John Graham. For more than 20 years she studied and taught Creative Behavior, an integrated psychology-educational work using movement, art, theater, writing, and interaction skills, developed by Eugene Sagan, Ph.D., Gestalt therapist, and his wife, Juanita Sagan, educator.

After exploring various body and psychotherapeutic works for over 30 years, she entered the 3 ½ year training program in Middendorf Breathwork, The Experience of Breath. She was trained by Juerg Roffler in San Francisco, Prof. Ilse Middendorf, and other directors of Middendorf Institutes from Germany and Switzerland, and was certified as a practitioner/teacher in 1995. She has written several articles on The Experience of Breath, and has co-produced a video, “An Interview with Ilse Middendorf and Juerg Roffler.

Acknowledgments

I always wanted to dance and now breath is dancing me.

I am grateful to Professor Ilse Middendorf of Berlin Germany, founder and teacher of The Experience of Breath. A special thank you to Juerg Roffler, for bringing this work to the U.S., training me as a teacher, and inviting me to join the teaching/training staff. Juerg is Director of the U.S. Middendorf Breath Institute, in Berkeley, California. Thank you also to my present colleagues on the teaching team, Juerg Roffler, Faith Hornbacher, Nell Smyth, and Marty Barclay, who is now President of The Breath Center of San Francisco. And my thanks to Gryta Coates, a former member of the teaching/training team, and to members of the Board of Directors of BCSF, my fellow practitioners, and students in the community of breath experience.

My thanks for the photos on the main menu pages by Annie Carofanello, Margot Biestman, and istockphoto.com.

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