Elijah Nisenboim, founder of Effiji Breath, teacher, and musician, learned a style of breathwork in 1991 in Toronto, Canada, from a man named Tom Lodge, who had spent much of the 1970s studying in an ashram in India. The following year, Elijah followed Tom to San Francisco where he participated in his training of Breatherapy. 

In 1994, Elijah moved to San Francisco where he opened a breath center called The Grove Center for Health and Creativity, located in the heart of San Francisco a block from the Fillmore Theatre offering 2 groups a week for 5 years keeping the The Grove Center until 2000.

During that time, Tom had a business called the International Breaththerapy Association and Elijah became its organizer and creator of trainings from 1995-2000. After a spiritual awakening at the Chalice Well in Glastonbury in 1997, Tom left much of the public breathwork sessions and trainings to Elijah to facilitate. Elijah experimented with the breatherapy technique, developing a modified approach that eventually became Effiji Breath.

After parting ways with Tom, it became obvious to Elijah that a name other than Breatherapy was needed to reflect the changes in the technique he had been cultivating. In 2001, EFFIJI BREATH was born. “Effiji” comes from the word ‘effigy’, which is a mask that represents something else, and ‘Ji’, which is a term of endearment in India – like papaji or guruji. So EFFIJI became a loving way of taking off that mask. (“Effiji” is pronounced by saying the letter ‘F’, then a hard ‘i’, followed by the sound ‘jee’.)

Just prior to his parting with Tom, Elijah began practicing Tai Chi and Qigong with Master George Xu in San Francisco eventually traveling to China in 2014 and studying Sacred Taoist internal Martial Arts with many different masters, learning Mandarin and slowly integrating it with Effiji Breathwork to add actualizing to the realization achieved through breathwork. 

Throughout the 2000s, Elijah traveled extensively, facilitating thousands of private sessions, groups, workshops and facilitator trainings. After Covid, Elijah began working more online, traveling less often, but seeing more people utilizing the power of the technology to share the technique with people around the world.