I arrive at Alan Dolan's house in the village of Oasis de Nazaret, in the north of Lanzarote, in time for lunch. I've been up since 4.30am for an uncomfortably early flight from Gatwick. Alan steers me to my room: it's spacious, furnished with quiet taste, with patio doors giving onto a pool area. After showering off some of my torpor, I sit on the bed and wonder what I'm letting myself in for. I'm starving, but I'm travelling light so haven't been able to smuggle in a hock of ham (this is a vegetarian house). My sole emergency provision is a small packet of chocolate-covered raisins. I unpack – a few light clothes, a bikini, a sweater for the cooler evenings, walking boots, and two misgivings, size Large.
First, Lanzarote exists in my imagination as "Lanzagrotty", the island of Little Britain at play, a bordello of fish and chip shops and cavernous pubs. Second, I can't unpack the phrase "transformational breath guru" – which is how my host describes himself – without, well, hyperventilating. This is why I'm here, to learn from Alan how to flood my body with oxygen by harnessing the whole range of my breathing apparatus (apparently most of us only use a paltry 25% of it). I'm cynical – advocates of "conscious medicine" make some pretty wild claims – but then so was Diogenes the Cynic, who was so cynical he reportedly held his breath until he died.
This thought propels me off the bed and into the kitchen, where Alan greets me with lunch: beetroot and carrot salad and coleslaw, the perfect accompaniment to that ham hock I haven't got. Actually, the meal is cold, delicious, and the beginning of a new infatuation with the Lanzarote vegetable. (I soon discover that all the island's produce is packed with flavour, thanks to the pulverised lava rock, picón, that is thinly spread across the rocky topsoil. Rainfall is scarce – this black gravel traps the morning dew and reduces evaporation.)
After lunch, Alan sprawls barefoot in shorts and frayed T-shirt on a sofa, and briefs me on transformational breath. Unlike many yogic techniques, which use the nose, it's an open-mouth breath that draws a greater volume of air in and encourages the lower levels of the lungs, where blood cells absorb the most oxygen, to inflate. This involves enlisting the primary respiratory muscles – lower abdomen, abdomen and diaphragm – instead of the intercostal and back muscles that we tend to rely on. Clinical evidence and anecdotal reports (I've checked) demonstrate the positive impact of diaphragmatic breath on immune response and stress, which presents as a shallower breath in the upper chest.
The other significant feature of transformational breath, Alan says, is that it's "connected", meaning there are no pauses between inhaling and exhaling. This is how animals breathe, and Alan's enthusiastic Spanish water dog is on hand to demonstrate. It's also how we breathe as babies, but somehow life imposes its freight of demands and bad habits, and we forget what once came so naturally.
The first session starts with me lying on my back as Alan instructs me to breathe normally through the nose. He sits next to me in the lotus position and starts to murmur a brief invocation. I have a finely tuned bullshit detector, the result of a Catholic schooling which proposed, among other things, that I inhale the Holy Ghost on a regular basis. But Alan is simply welcoming me, inviting me to trust in the healing power of my own body, and it's easy to settle on this bandwidth.
He then shows me how to take a "conscious breath" – my first – by opening my mouth and inflating my abdomen. It's not a huge breath, more one on top of the other, and the release, which Alan signals by clicking his fingers, is quick and short – just enough to mist a mirror – before the next intake.
It doesn't feel right. I can't do it without pauses, I'm exhaling like a bellows and my mouth is dry. Alan adjusts my position. I'm now lying on my front, with my head to one side. He pushes gently on my lower back so I can better feel my abdomen as it rises. Ah, now I'm doing it, though not very consistently. He changes my position again, this time to sitting with my knees drawn up. Click, go his fingers, drop the breath, pick it up, keep it going. Meanwhile he's doing acupressure, probing my meridian lines (lymphatic system, if you prefer western) for stress points, most of which occur at the cross-sections of muscles.
My eyes are shut but I'm not asleep – keep it going, I hear Alan saying when I start to drift. I have no idea how long we've been doing this, or of the moment at which my mind ceases its agitational whirr and just folds into the contours of my breathing. At the end of the one-hour session, Alan leaves me lying wrapped in a blanket, breathing normally. I feel a great stillness, aware only of a gentle vibration in my chest, as if my capillaries are opening up like a network of sluice gates. (They are: this is the effect of the blood receiving a richer oxygen supply.)
Over the next two days I have four more sessions, and each time it's the same: shifting and stalling until a rhythm is established, followed by an enveloping calmness and the light effervescence of oxygen finding its way into newly mapped routes in my body. I have also booked a couple of slots with Isabel Salzmann, who is trained in massage, reflexology and osteopathy. Isabel, with an unerring sense for physiological imbalance or misalignment, works wonders on my hips (now unskewed) and lower back.
Between sessions, I eat my way through the island's vegetables, variously prepared by Alan's excellent cook, Rebecca Mason, who runs a local restaurant called Blooming Cactus. I drink a lot of water. I practise the breathing technique (Alan recommends 10 minutes a day).
And I walk. A short distance away is Famara beach, a 7km stretch of broiling Atlantic surf, at one end of which is the massif that dominates this part of the island. Sheer, wind-corrugated, it boasts every colour in the Lanzarote palette: black, brown, saffron, ochre, yellow, purple, green.
Further away, in the south of the island, I find a track that carves through the vast lava fields of the Timanfaya national park, an area of 32 volcanoes that appeared after six years of explosions in the 1730s. (A few feet below ground the temperature is 40C, and Timanfaya's El Diablo restaurant barbecues food using a grill placed over a hole in the ground.) Wherever Lanzagrotty is, it's not here in the volcanoes and their lichen-covered craters where kestrels and hoopoes fly, or in the canyons, drifts and oases of date palms, or the near-empty beaches with white or red or black sand. Misgivings abandoned, I leave Lanzarote carrying what I arrived with, including the chocolate raisins. But I bring something back that I can honestly say is up there as my personal moon-walk. I've discovered something amazing, and it's right under my nose.
• Three-night full board Breathing Intensive breaks cost from £530pp (+34 690 162426, breathguru.com/breath-retreat.html). Yoga, massage, personal fitness training, walks and volcano climbs are also offered from £75 a session. EasyJet flies to Lanzarote from Gatwick from £88 return. Car hire (arranged through the villa) costs from £110 a week
