Sondra Ray

Sondra Ray is an American author and teacher who became internationally known in the 1970s as one of the foremost pioneers of the Rebirthing Experience, working alongside its founder, Leonard Orr.

Trained as a nurse with backgrounds in public health and obstetrics, and an early Peace Corps volunteer, she brought a practical, body-aware sensibility to the emerging breathwork field. She has taught conscious connected breathing to large numbers of people worldwide and is regarded as a leading authority on how birth trauma and early conditioning shape adult relationships, body, and life.

(Her birth year is not reliably documented in available sources and is therefore left unstated.) Ray matters to the mind-power lineage chiefly for marrying breathwork to the disciplined use of affirmations. Her book I Deserve Love (1976) presented affirmations as a structured means of replacing self-defeating beliefs with empowering ones, a clear inheritance from the New Thought affirmation tradition applied to love and self-worth.

She went on to create the Loving Relationships Training, a seminar system that identifies recurring negative family patterns and works to dissolve them through breath and affirmation. Her sincere contribution is a repeatable practice in which feeling-charged, repeated statements are used deliberately to re-pattern the subconscious.