Welcome to the wonderful world of Breathwork

Breathing is so simple.  We do it every day without having to think about it, yet it is one of the few physiological processes that we can also have control over to improve our physical and emotional health and wellbeing.

Growing in popularity

Most people look at me with confusion when I say I’m a Breathwork coach; some admit they think I’ve said ‘breastwork coach’ and we laugh together, while others are trying politely to hide the fact they have no idea what I’m talking about.  I love it!  Most people are curious and some have read the informative book Breath by James Nestor or the Wim Hof Method by the Ice Man. And most people think it’s the same as meditation but it’s very different. Breathwork begins with breath awareness which then allows us to alter our breathing pattern to achieve our aim - perhaps we want to feel less anxious, sleep better, have more energy, alleviate pain, improve sports performance or look at transforming our habits, belief systems and thought patterns.   

Functional Breathwork

It seems that many adults have a dysfunctional breathing pattern. We start life using our diaphragm beautifully to breathe - watch a baby sleeping in its cot and see its belly rise and fall effortlessly.  But for many of us, the stresses and strains of modern life mean that our diaphragm functions less effectively than it could.  I invite you to stop for a moment and notice your belly (easier to see than your diaphragm) as you breathe. Hopefully it’s a puring engine, or maybe it’s stationary and the chest is doing all the work. Just notice. This is the first stage of Breathwork; connecting back in with your breathing and your body. 

Once you improve your breathing by using your diaphragm effectively, you can begin to manipulate your breathing to bring huge benefits in your physical and emotional health:

- calm the nervous system to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety

- improve sleep

- reduce pain

- reduce blood pressure

- strengthen your immune system

- boost memory

- support athletic performance and recovery

- lower inflammatory markers

For me, taking some time in the day to focus on my breathing has helped me feel calmer and more able to quickly deal with worrying thoughts. I can exercise more easily, I sleep better, I can reflect on my behaviours and change my thought patterns, and I use it often to release emotional holding in my body.

Conscious Connected Breathwork

For me, the real gem about Breathwork is its ability to help us integrate or release trauma or emotional holding. The word trauma used to make me feel uncomfortable and I see that same reaction in some people too but the reality is we all experience trauma in our lives.  MIND (the mental health charity) describes trauma as any situation that is stressful, frightening or distressing. I like to think of trauma as any ‘challenging life experience’ that, at some point down the line, affects the way we feel or behave, mostly in a way that we don’t really want to.  The reason that this happens can be because we are not able to deal with the emotional energy that is released at the time of the event and so we hold it in our bodies. 

I trained with the amazing Nicola Price of Inspirational Breathing and learned how to access and release trauma through Breathwork. Nicola’s rigorous reading list as part of her graduation programme, includes Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, in which we learn that trauma is held in the body on a cellular level. This blew my mind!! As an ex-primary school teacher, I’ll give you my ‘explaining it to a 5 year old version’: imagine experiencing a challening situation and shortly afterwards someone says to you, "OK, now you have to wear this very heavy hat all the time because of this experience." After a while you get a headache cause it’s a really heavy hat but you can’t take it off. Then you start to feel really tired, irritable and down but you still can’t take it off. So you talk about it to anyone who will listen but it’s still there and it won’t come off. That’s what carrying trauma around can feel like.

Breathwork allows you to find where the hat is (obviously it’s on your head but sometimes we’re carrying something different but equally as heavy somewhere else in the body) and take it off. The breathing techniques and tools I have learnt and continue to learn allow the held emotions or trauma to be integrated or leave the body so that we can enjoy life more.  We can experince more joy, feel lighter, calmer and more present in this beautiful world.

My passion is to continue learning and sharing this amazing work with you.  Join my newsletter to receive information about Breathwork and find out about my 1:1, group and school sessions.  And if you have any questions, please do get in touch x