Prototype of Mendek’s last invention, “The Breather-Relaxer”

My father, Mendek Rubin, was a brilliant inventor. Starting in the 1950s, he helped revolutionize the jewelry industry by inventing numerous types of ingenious clasps and manufacturing methods that received many patents. When he retired in the mid-1980s, my dad helped my husband and me launch our business, Earthbound Farm, by inventing and constructing the initial equipment and assembly lines we used to wash and package our delicate organic baby salad greens (using almost exclusively odds and ends he scavenged at a local junk yard for pennies). That initial support, and the education in efficient production he provided, helped us become the very first company in the United States to successfully market packaged salads for retail sales, enabling us to quickly grow from a tiny road-side farm stand into the largest grower of organic produce in the world.

The very last invention my father created to share with the world was the only one that directly related to his personal journey of healing and awakening. It was a tool to help people re-learn how to breathe as we did when we were children. He called it the “Breather-Relaxer” and described it as a “therapeutic breathing and relaxation tool whose purpose is to restore to the user the natural method of abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing and reduce stress.”

The Breather-Relaxer was basically a marble held inside a metal track made out of four thin metal poles mounted on a piece of Plexiglas. Lying flat, you would place the device vertically just above your navel. With each inhale, the bottom end would rise, causing the marble to roll to the other side and make a “click” noise as it hit the end of the track. On your exhale, the marble would roll in the opposite direction. For the Breather-Relaxer to work (for the “clicks” to sound), you had to take full belly breaths. The instructions stated: “Guided by the childlike simplicity of the ball rolling back and forth, the Breather-Relaxer soothes our brain while it encourages us to breathe deeply.”

My father believed that shallow breathing was “endemic to our day and age”—an indication of how much tension we hold in our bodies and how often we routinely suppress our feelings. He observed that infants and young children breathe with full belly breaths, but as we get older we “unlearn” how to breathe naturally, which he attributed to conditioning that teaches us to feel fear, shame and guilt—emotions that cause us to “hold our breath.” My dad was convinced that changing how we breathe can lead directly to deep relaxation and profound healing.

In the early 1990s, my dad had a batch of Breather-Relaxers professionally produced, and he sold them at “New Age” gift shops and bookstores in California and Kauai. Sadly, only the prototype pictured above remains. The prototype includes three set of exercises ("Focus,” “Growth,” and “The In-Gathering of Spirit”), an overview of my father’s philosophy about happiness, and five guided visualizations to use in coordination with deep breathing.

In the happiness section, my father wrote that we all have long “happiness-shopping-lists” — ideas, beliefs, and expectations that we think will make us happy, and also prevent us from being unhappy. He explained that much of this “happiness list” comes from outside of ourselves, having been adopted from what society tell us we should want. My dad was delighted to discover that when he accepted as truth that he need not always be happy or avoid being unhappy, his “happiness-shopping-list” got shorter and his life became simpler and more joyful.

In his “Growth” exercise, Mendek asked people to repeat lines such as these in coordination with deep breathing:

I say OK when I succeed or when I fail. Always, I breathe deeply, relax and let it go.

I say OK to my joys and my sorrows. Always, I breathe deeply, relax and let it go.

The lines my father wrote that move me most are these:

Life is like a river, it flows on its own.

Every time we hold our breath, we dam up the river.

When we are gentle with ourselves and others, we let the river flow.

Our body has an agenda, wisdom and poetry of its own.