If Whole Body Breathing is difficult for you, either in general or in specific areas, it can be helpful to start by reverse engineering the process.

That is: rather than inhaling and exhaling through your hand (for example), you can simply calm yourself and breathe—and attend to how your hand naturally responds to the inbreath and outbreath.

What does a hand (or foot or knee or chest) feel like on the inhale? What does it feel like on the exhale?

Even on a literal-material level, your breath is bringing in oxygen that circulates to all the tissue of your body. Your tissues are extremely grateful to be receiving that oxygen, and you can feel their response quite vividly if you allow the body to show you.

From there, simply spend more and more time noting and amplifying that feeling, part by part.

What is the feeling of an inhaling hand? An exhaling hand? An inhaling thigh? An exhaling thigh? An inhaling body? An exhaling body?

After some time, when this has become quite vivid, try nudging that feeling even further—letting go of any sense of the breath coming in through the air entering your mouth and nose, but instead coming in and going out directly through the hand itself, the thigh itself, the body itself.

This process may take a month for some people, a week for others, 20 minutes for others, and be unnecessary for still others. Follow your own pace, your own comfort and awareness.

When all of the above feel quite natural, return to Whole Body Breathing, and from Whole Body Breathing continue on to exercises like Somatic Animism, Haling, or Somatic Meditation.