Why nobody can teach you breathwork better than you can.
At the heart of breathwork sits a longstanding debate.
Should we seek to drive the breath, or let it drive us?
One half sees breath-work as something to master, drive and force, in order for us to transform.
The other half sees it as a natural developmental process. Something to embody, to befriend, and to guide us towards transcendence.
Two philosophies. Two physiologies. One breath.
As a trauma-informed facilitator, I prefer the more subtle approach.
Let’s breathe some life into the debate.
The body-mind is where every human experience is housed.
It breathes us.
And we breathe it.
No one can teach you to breathe.
Not me. Not an app. Not even a master facilitator.
Why?
Because your breath is a natural response to your psychological state. There are as many breathing patterns as people on the planet. Each of us carries our own blueprint.
To the trained eye, every breath you take reveals the state of your nervous system.
The depth, rhythm, sighs and holds. Together they tell the story of every experience you’ve lived through. Push beyond this wisdom and you miss a valuable life lesson.
The good news?
Your blueprint is as adaptable as you are. It’s always evolving to meet life’s demands, right up until your very last exhale.
Being able to adapt starts with accepting your current state of play. This is quite different from building resilience, which suggests we keep moving towards a goal and often involves striving.
In order to maintain the buoyancy of acceptance, we must learn to harmonise the body-mind and breath with whatever our environment presents.
The anatomy of breathwork
If you’re familiar with any form of breathing exercise, you will have heard of the diaphragm: a dome-shaped, muscular membrane that sits below your lungs and heart.
We actually have three diaphragms.
The vocal diaphragm, in your throat.
The respiratory diaphragm, under your ribs.
The pelvic diaphragm, at the base of your body (sometimes referred to as the pelvic bowl).
Unspent emotion, in the form of tension, can accumulate in all three, which often destabilises the breath. However, with deep inquiry, each diaphragm can be located and worked upon separately.
But let’s be clear: only you can breathe new life into each one, with clear intention and purposeful awareness.
Many people think of the heart as a separate organ and the diaphragm as simply a breathing muscle.
But the body doesn’t work in isolation.
Every breath you take influences the movement of the diaphragm, which impacts the tissues surrounding the heart.
As your breathing apparatus becomes finely tuned, it sends ripples across the fascia, this web of interconnected tissue, flooding the brain with signals of safety that rewire your experience. However, if they are ill-prepared or overstretched, these pathways send signals of danger.
Breath as a recovery vehicle
Mainstream medicine thrives on the concept of ‘recovery’, which is usually framed as a goal.
But a nervous system in crisis rarely has the capacity to meet the stress of goal setting.
To recover something is to get it back.
But trauma survivors don’t always get back what they lost.
Emotional ruptures can take parts of us that never quite return. This is why recovery can seem out of reach for many.
Restoration, however, is different.
To restore means survivors get to repaint their story. And quite often, this opens the door to new kinds of fulfilment.
Ironically, it is this fulfilment that primes the body-mind for its best hope of recovery!
This is where breath-work as therapy comes into play. You can’t allow your mind to give up on your body, and your breath is what improves the body-mind relationship.
To tame your breath is to practise reciprocity.
Want your daily life to take on a more grounded presence?
By connecting more deeply with your breath, you can improve the way you read the bodily cues that regulate your emotions. Here, the nervous system learns to better adapt to environmental stimuli as they are presented.
Getting to know your breath can improve your circadian biology: the body’s in-built clock, driven by genes such as BMAL1 that seek to align with the rotation of the Earth. Pushing the breath beyond your capacity, however, can dysregulate this.
These ‘push and pull’ cycles run our sleep-wake patterns, our hormones, body temperature and digestion. They are crucial for our longevity. Get them right and you reap the rewards; get them wrong and it’s costly to your health.
One thing is for sure: through reciprocity, yielding to the breath and receiving from it, your body-mind will experience new ways of being.
Expand your life through contraction
As your body-mind-breath connects, you will begin to awaken dormant areas of your torso. Layers of old, emotionally starved tissue will begin to shift.
Such inner work comes with a sense of coherence, as the web of fascia starts to loosen its grip and the body-mind becomes more pliable.
Your posture, temperament and whole-body functioning will begin to improve.
What this means is that breathwork is not another exercise on your to-do list. You don’t have to strive to master it!
Take your time. Titrate slowly. Five minutes, ten minutes and so on.
Find your own way of connecting more deeply through compassionate inquiry. This sets the stage for developing greater range.
We heal through relationship what was damaged in relationship
Breathwork is deeply personal. It must first be seen as an interoceptive journey, or we risk overriding its subtle nuances. As we learn to feel and balance what’s going on inside us, we become more aware of life’s intricacies. This type of self-regulation leads to improved co-regulation with others.
Once a platform for co-regulation is established through compassionate inquiry, you may consider a trained facilitator to help you navigate any deeper emotional content harboured in your body-mind. This emotional terrain is the second part of the journey.
Guidance is required to explore the parts of the body that have been neglected and to restore ‘justice’ to the body-mind. However, at best, a facilitator can only set the stage for you; they cannot play your role. That’s where you call upon your previous inner work.
Never stray from your awareness.
A good breathwork facilitator will teach you to adapt while maintaining your capacity, but never force you to ‘be’ or ‘do’ more.
Their role is to introduce you to the anatomy of breathing. To hold space and guide you towards finer potential, as oxygen travels into your lungs.
All the while, you maintain your own pace.
Through this co-regulation process, your body-mind may safely release any stored emotional charge. Here, you will meet any negative habit patterns and rediscover how to live in the home of your body again, under a new roof, with a new mindset.
With this sense of purpose, you can begin to ride and develop deeper rhythms of your nervous system.
You may still not fully recover what was lost, but you will certainly be primed to meet whatever your practice (and life) throws at you.
So what does this mean in everyday life?
Because almost everybody has some form of access to movement, such somatic exploration is available to everyone.
Along the transformational path of getting to know, making peace with, and later developing your breath, you can expect:
1. Emotional steadiness to return.
You’ll be able to better navigate and adapt to the stresses of daily life.
2. Your body to become easier to read and regulate.
With time, you’ll be able to regulate your blood pressure, calm a racing heart and improve your heart rate variability.
3. Your awareness to deepen.
As you learn to better read inner cues of safety and danger, you’ll be able to spot imbalances before they turn into burnout.
The final piece
How we live in our body-mind depends on what we have lived through. And how we move through it depends on our approach. So choose wisely.
The most fundamental tool we have for regulating the body-mind is our breath.
Breathwork wisdom is knowing the answers to these three questions:
What is your breath telling you?
How can you support it?
And how do both change the world you ‘love’ in?