Connect
To Top

Meet Daniel Hirtz of Breathe Peace Int. LLC in Scottsdale

Avatar photo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Hirtz.

Daniel, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My life story
1. The Call
For as long as I can remember, I felt an overwhelming sense that something is missing in my life and in the life of the people around me. I was born with that sense; I don’t remember a time without that feeling. In fact, my dad told me that as soon as I could think and speak well enough that I came into his library and asked him something like this: “Dad, tell me what’s actually going on? What are you not telling me? Because there is something missing. What’s missing?” And of course, he couldn’t tell me, but for as long as he was around we would engage in these conversations that were all about seeking for the truth.

For as long as I can remember, I had this raging hunger in me to find the truth that would never calm down… and as noble as that may sound for me, it was very difficult and often deeply disturbing. It messed with my ability to connect with others, it would express itself with unusual levels of energy flowing through me so that my mother never knew how to handle me, it made me a loud and uncontrollable student at school that almost got me fired from my school, a Waldorf school that had a policy to never fire any student but as the only student was made an example that came very close to it. This unquenchable hunger for real life made me engage in stupid, dangerous adventures that left me bruised and gained me consequences that I really didn’t want to go through.

I still have that hunger in me, but while I’m now able to channel it into meaningful actions, it expressed itself in my youth i.e., through an inability to sleep in ever or to sleep more than 6 hours or through a form of being so wild and extrovert that people around me retracted from me.

2. The Pit
That hunger drove me eventually at the age of barely 13 to build fireworks that would be legendary loud and gave me an experience of explosive power that seemed to match the intensity of feelings in me. I got into it and wanted it to go bigger and louder. I was thrilled that our neighbors would complain about the loud booms that were shaking the neighborhood.

And here I am building my sevenths “bomb” that I am making with enhanced power for greater impact when it blows up in my left hand with this incredibly loud noise that is putting me into this bubble of head-spinning ringing ears and as I am looking down I see a bloody mess in place of my left hand. Just the image shocks me so much that my entire left side of my body is cringing together, and I run into the house, screaming my head off.

Our nanny said that the first thing I said was: “now I can no longer play the piano” which I had started at the age of 6, and I just started to really get into it.

And overnight I had to grow up, I skipped the teenage years and became serious to the degree that I could hardly smile for many years. I simply didn’t know if I would ever feel whole, especially now that I even lost a piece of me.

Whatever I was seeking to find through making the firework I, of course, couldn’t find there and this lowest point in my life made the hunger for the truth grow even bigger.

3. The searches
After this life-changing event, my hunger only grew, and I started to search for some way for me to be whole again this time much more on the inside.

I got into alcohol and drugs which became an obsession for a while because they seem to give me at least some relief from my neverending dread for being handicapped and in my mind very unattractive to anybody (especially women).

During one LSD trips, my whole world collapsed, and I entered a realm that was completely outside of my normal awareness… like an ocean of color and flow… and even though it was beautiful in its appearance, I was scared out of my mind. The fact that I came out of that from one moment to another told me that there was some sort of switch in my awareness that was independent of any substance I ingested. Even though I felt that my search had temporarily shown me something, it was fleeting, unhealthy, and I really didn’t understand what just happened to me.

Another place I always was going back to was (and still is) music. Music was a big refuge to me, and while listening to music was an essential part of my everyday life, I was still looking for a way for me to play music, to be part of it. I had stopped studying piano since I had only seven fingers, but after a few years, I got myself a piano after I discovered that I was able to play improvised music and that I didn’t need all ten fingers for that.

This started me on my search for the truth in forms of music that I could participate outside of the mainstream music culture. I started to ask the question of why I wanted to play music so much and what the power of music really was all about.

The easiest starting point turned out to be drumming, and over my teenage years, I became quite good at it even though I was handicapped. At one point while I was living in Vienna, a friend of mine asked me if I could teach him drumming and if I would be willing to start a class. That was the beginning of my teaching career – I started this “rhythm” class, and without any advertising, my first weekly class filled up by itself and ran for more than a couple years. During that time, I started to experiment with all kinds of modalities that got the group into a groove. I had the chance to try and play with all kinds of training that allowed me to eventually find what soon became my most treasured passion: conscious breathing.

While that was going on, I also started to learn table – a classical, highly sophisticated Indian percussion instrument. Even before I had lost my fingers, I saw Alla Rakha – a famous, amazing tabla player – on TV and something in me reacted so strongly that I now went on a search for tables and a teacher… I wanted to play that instrument so badly that I kept on searching.

Only more than a decade later, my search was finally answered, and even though I am handicapped, I got accepted by a teacher at the age of 24, which is very late in starting any instrument.

I started to practice on a daily basis and have been at it almost daily ever since. I had found what I thought was simply therapy for my left hand – little did I know how profoundly this would influence my whole life.

4. The breakthrough moment
While I was teaching my weekly class, I started to experiment with using breath and rhythm to both get a group into coherence and to build the energy to such a level that the participants could feel a tangible new level of aliveness. That worked so well that I realized I need to get as much training as I could get around the topic of conscious breathing.

Exactly at that time, my girlfriend Ingrid – today, my wife of almost 40 years – started to take rebirthing sessions. Rebirthing is a form conscious, connected breathing that got its name from the feeling of being reborn after a good session.

I also did a series of sessions and decided that I wanted to get trained because I loved the directness of that technique… this was no guessing, visualizing or in my way mentally rooted path, it was a clear energetic experience that opened the door to a more direct experience of aliveness that felt so much like a step in the right direction of my search.

During my training to become a qualified rebirthing breathwork coach, I experienced the most profound breakthrough moment of my life that temporarily quenched my hunger and brought to me a moment of deep inner peace.

I am lying on my back in the beautiful Coleman seminar center in Bavaria, Germany relaxing after a powerful breathing session when from one moment to another the birds that are chirping deep in the forest around me feel like they are chirping inside of me… I am not only feeling a sense of wholeness and oneness inside of me, but that sense of oneness is expanding and starts to include the people that I feel around me, the house, the forest and just keeps going. For the first time in my life, I am completely content, I feel completely at peace, the sense of seeking is gone, and all I want to do is let myself fall deeper and deeper into it. From that moment on, I knew that I had found what I had been seeking all my life.

5. Inner breakthrough
From that moment on, I knew that I wanted to not only do this training for my personal benefit but that I wanted to make this a career. I imagined accepting rebirthing clients as well as continue to develop my work with rhythm and breath on a group level. I felt like I’m already pushed that way by the way, my life was unfolding.

6. Outer breakthrough
I immediately started to accept clients after I was done with my training and ended up helping hundreds of people with single sessions which I gave in the thousands. I also continued to work in groups added to the weekly groups one day and weekend seminars, which at this time, I have given hundreds of.

7. What are my extended credibility breakthroughs? (Not just for me individually, but for my relationships, for my groups, for mankind, for the planet.)
Even though I found what I wanted to do in life, I realized that not many others had that defining moment of wholeness, that deep sense of oneness that I had experienced. In fact, even my teachers didn’t quite know what I was talking about. Many people listened to my story, but I could see in their eyes that they only understood the words I was saying, but they had no inner experience that matched my description.
On top of that, I wasn’t able to access that state of being deliberately most of the time, and it took many more years of trial and error before I developed an understanding and a sequence of actions that I today call “Holistic Tuning.”

For that, I had to question everything I had learned both in the area of conscious breathing and rhythm and drumming. That never meant that I rejected the teaching of my teachers, but it was more a process of transcending and include all those teachings in the method I was developing.

Today I have developed a path into conscious breathing that allows anybody to introduce it into their lives in such a way that it is easy, makes an almost immediate difference and becomes something that they with a little bit of training can use any time they need it for the rest of their lives.

I also have found what rhythm really is and how we can use it to charge our inner batteries, feel a deep sense of connection, and reset ourselves during what I call ‘communal music making”. But it doesn’t stop there because once we understand rhythm, we can use it to increase our productivity, build personal strength, synchronize our inner and outer world and free ourselves from repetitive behavior patterns that make us do things that we later regret.

It is especially the combination of breath and rhythm that is so amazingly powerful that it liberates the next area that became increasingly my passion besides breath and music: the flow of living energy in us.

When we liberate the energy flow in our body and our nervous system, we gradually become aware of a new self that wants to be born in us. A radiant fully turned on human being that integrates all levels of our existence into one so that our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations all speak of one story in which our inner and outer world are in harmony.

Whenever I had moments or extended periods of that harmony flowing through me, I felt a strong urge to share this with the world and to contribute to an emergence of a world in which all people live in peace. During some of my seminar work, I had heard the sound of people breathing together in rhythm, and that sound always touched me deeply. During one seminar in Israel, I had about 400 people in the room, and that sound became life-changing. It was as if I hear another being breathe, a bigger being, a collective being.

Out of that, I created the “Breathe for Peace” project which is an audio album in which you hear the sound of hundreds of people breathing for peace set to healing music in a ten-part, one-hour long meditation on peace. The flow is designed based on decades of my experience and can help a person to experience a deep sense of peace and heal some of the persistent tensions that most of us carry around with us.

My goal is to distribute this album to millions of people to help make a real step toward world peace, and my goal is also to breathe with tens of thousands of people in stadiums for peace and to have the United Nations assembly breathe for peace with me.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I think I covered quite a bit in the last module, but the gist of the challenges I experienced and am experiencing is that what I am called to do is so outside of the mainstream culture that I felt like an outsider… a lot. Fortunately, I started to find more and more people who feel like me: that we are all one and that this reality of oneness is not just a “spiritual hobby” but the chance for humanity to transform into a positive, helpful presence on this earth.

So no, it has not been smooth.

Right now, my biggest struggle is to get my message out there and to finish some of my offerings and courses. It’s a lot of work, and I have come to the point where I need help with it. One of my problems is that I can do many things and that I have talents in many areas, but it’s not possible to do it by myself any longer, so my current challenge is to find people that share my vision and are willing to help.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I have worked with individuals and groups in the broad context of healing all of my career.

My three favorite topics are Breath, Music, and Energy as in conscious breathing, communal music, and energy awareness. I developed a method that utilizes the synergistic power of the three forces I call “Holistic Tuning.”

I am about to release a music album with the title: “Breathe for Peace – The Sound of Oneness” which I have worked on for almost 20 years – I recorded 220 people breathing sounds, combined them and set them to music. This is my proudest accomplishment as a creator, musician, social activist, artist, shaman.

I teach drumming and making music together for over 30 years. I have developed several classes that open up drumming for all people, and my “Drum and Rhythm Basics” course has been taken by now by over 200 people in the Phoenix area since 2012. I have about 15 individual tabla students, and I’m proud to be part of my teacher’s faculty at Dhwani Academy for Percussion music. I developed a way of teaching drums that fully opens the therapeutic power of drumming together and helps people to reset themselves and experience the beauty of community through making music. There is so much more to say about that…!

I am an expert on conscious breathing as a tool for stress relief, tension management, and trauma integration. The amazing thing about breath is that once you learned to use it, it will be there for you for the rest of your life. So I’m not a therapist but a coach that teaches and practices conscious breathing with my clients.

In holistic tuning sessions not only is the energy of individuals activated in a way that many have never felt before but we also activate our collective energy, so we have a visceral experience of the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Through that collective energy, healing is possible that otherwise is difficult to get to. Through educating people on how to perceive the energy flow in their system, they open the door for a new awareness of themselves as energetic being with a vibrant nervous system.

And I do infrequent concerts and events from small to large – my reputation is stellar!

When you look back, what are you most proud of?
Right now, I feel the proudest about the changes I have seen in the people that have worked with me. When a person that has an inner world that makes it almost impossible to function in the world (because of anxiety, depression, suicide feeling, stress, tensions… there are more and more people struggling with that kind of inner world) comes out of that and starts to feel a form of inner agency because of what they learned and practiced I feel a very deep sense of accomplishment.

Now I want to go big doing that same thing for large groups and collectives.

Contact Info:

Getting in touch: VoyagePhoenix is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition, please let us know here.

Related Items

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More in