Conscious breathing for healing and transformation

The Power of Breathing for Healing and Transformation

In today’s fast-paced world, the increasing pressures of rapid change, global challenges, and relentless technological demands often leave us feeling stressed, anxious, burnt out, or stuck. Breathing for healing and transformation becomes essential in such times, as this unrest and lack of balance play out at the global, macro level and in our personal lives, affecting our relationships, work, and sense of purpose. All that’s happening in the global consciousness impacts the whole, triggering our unhealed wounds and bringing buried emotions and unresolved traumas to the surface.

You could look on this time as one of suffering and struggle and feel like a victim of circumstances, or you could see this period as an opportunity to meet those parts within that feel powerless, lost, hurt, ashamed, angry, and afraid, and through compassion and self-awareness, transform them into sources of strength, resilience, and empowerment.

One powerful, gentle, and highly effective method to navigate these turbulent times, deepen your self-awareness and achieve profound healing is through breathwork.

What is Breathwork?

There are various types of breathwork, but generally it involves different conscious breathing techniques designed to help you reconnect with your body, disconnect from the overactive mind, balance hormones and your nervous system, tap into your heart’s wisdom and connect to the intelligent life force that flows through all life via the breath.

Unlike typical breathing, breathwork practices have a variety of beneficial effects:

• Mindfulness breathing practices develop a sense of presence and inner calm that helps you to respond rather than react to situations.
• Regulation breathing practices will help you balance your hormones and your nervous system to release stress and the build up of emotional fight/flight charge in the body, as well as stimulate the rest and digest response, helping you to relax and recover.
• Conscious Connected Breathing – or Rebirthing – is a practice that engages the deep subconscious through the body to gently release emotional debris, stress, and resistance, thereby facilitating profound personal growth and inner change. It helps to process and integrate unprocessed feelings and emotions from the past – often without the need to go into any story. It frees you from unconscious limiting patterns of behaviour and thinking, revealing more of your authentic self,  unlocking your true power, and allowing you to experience more ease and flow in life.

Why is Breathwork considered a powerful practice or healing modality?

Breathwork is essential because it addresses the root causes of stress and emotional blockages. When life becomes overwhelming, we unconsciously tense up and restrict our breath, which traps unprocessed emotions within our bodies. This begins early in our childhood once we learn that it’s not safe or acceptable to express certain emotions or behaviours, or when we experience trauma – big or small.

Unconscious patterns of breathing get laid down in our neurology as a result, and when we encounter similar events through life, we unconsciously react by contracting our breath, further reinforcing the unconscious pattern, keeping the emotions suppressed and causing us to get stuck in a loop of unconscious self-sabotage and avoidance.

This can lead to various forms of dis-ease, weakened resilience, and an inability to access our full potential. By practising conscious breathwork, you can safely bring suppressed emotions and memories to the surface, process them, and release energetic blocks, paving the way for healing and transformation.

To find out more about the fascinating topic of breath, check out ‘Breath’ by James Nestor – you’ll never think about breathing in the same way again!

What to Expect During a Conscious Connected Breathwork Session

No breathwork experience will be the same twice because it depends on what you are showing up with at the session.

To begin with, set a very clear intention. This can be something specific that you wish to experience in your life – eg find resolution about something, clarity or insight about an issue, greater focus and concentration, confidence and strength to achieve something, acceptance of a situation, let something go, work through a problem in your personal or professional life… or it can be more general, such as feel more energised, sleep better, feel more relaxed, connect to yourself, your body or your spirit, breathe better, feel more positive, etc…

Or you could just be curious and ask what wants to be known. There’s really no limit.

The key thing about the practice is that whatever you are experiencing in any moment in your body, mind, emotions or energy during the breathe is 100% welcome. This is about trusting that the intelligent breath will bring to the surface exactly what you need.

It can evoke a wide range of experiences. Some common experiences include:

• Emotional Release: Cathartic tears, powerful healing, deep joy, and laughter.
• Physical Sensations: Tingling, tension, energy movement, and urges to move or vocalise.
• Deep Relaxation: Blissful states of pure relaxation and profound connection to self.
• Spiritual Insights: Peak spiritual experiences, inspiration, clarity, and deep insights.
• Subtle Shifts: Even if you don’t consciously feel changes, you might notice shifts in your life, such as improved responses to challenges and new opportunities arising.

Breathwork is a safe, non-judgemental practice that never brings up more than you can handle. Each session is unique, helping you to reframe past traumas, cut cords to unhealthy situations, and establish healthy boundaries.

The Lasting Impact of Conscious Connected Breathwork

Humans often “check out” of their bodies when approaching unresolved emotions. This unconscious avoidance leads to the suppression of feelings, perpetuating anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms. Conscious Connected Breathing counters this by actively engaging with these suppressed emotions, enabling their release and integration. This practice restores your natural state of flowing, connected breathing, similar to how we breathe as infants before life’s stresses take their toll.

Breathwork is not just a healing tool; it’s a creative force. In many cultures, the words for “breath” and “spirit” are synonymous. Life force energy, or prana, is carried through our breath, guiding us toward our potential and bringing us joy, abundance, and satisfaction. By harnessing the power of conscious breathing, you can align your heart’s intentions with the universal flow, manifesting your desires and stepping into your true self.

My introduction to breathwork began over thirty years ago through yoga, meditation and pranayama practices. These early experiences piqued my interest in the transformative power of breath, leading me to explore various breathwork styles, including kundalini and Vipassana.

I’ve been offering healing and transformational coaching sessions with breath playing a big part for 25 years, but I wasn’t aware of quite how central the role of the breath was for guiding one’s authentic alignment in those sessions until recently.

In 2021, my journey took a pivotal turn when I discovered Wim Hof’s breathwork method and cold water therapy. I started practising regularly during the Pandemic, when, as a highly sensitive empath, I was often knocked for six because I was unconsciously picking up on everyone else’s energy. However, it was Conscious Connected Breathwork that truly resonated with me, and I knew I had to train in it. 

I was intuitively led to join a training programme with a small, intimate group of experienced coaches, counsellors and therapists run by Breathing Journeys. Once I started practicing Conscious Connected Breathwork on a daily basis so much shifted in my life. It helped me navigate anxiety, manage burnout and deal with all the inevitable ups and downs of the last few years with much more ease and grace.

Over time I’ve experienced remarkable personal growth, greater self-awareness, improved sleep, and greater peace and acceptance. It’s helped me to feel much more resourced, embodied, grounded, aligned and fulfilled, with a deep trust in life’s flow, no matter what’s happening. I still get triggered by stressful events and the usual annoyances, but I’ve noticed how much easier it has become to get back to centre and restore my equilibrium.

The training I found really couldn’t have suited me better. As it went on month by month, I discovered so much overlap with the creative ways I’ve already been working with the breath, intuitively blending my trainings and experience in EFT, NLP, Journeywork, somatic healing, Reiki and Energy Psychology into bespoke transformational coaching sessions. 

I’d been a breath worker for 25 years and never realised it! 

But now I know WHY the breath is so powerful.

There’s so much science to back its claims for improving physical health. It helps us breathe properly, increasing oxygen supply to cells, raising energy levels, reducing stress hormones, lowering blood pressure, improving digestion, and enhancing immune function, to name a few benefits.

But the breath is also intelligent. It’s directly connected to the Life Force that keeps everything alive on this planet. When we work with it consciously we experience this profound interconnectedness.

It can reveal, process and integrate strong emotions, memories, limiting beliefs and unhealed traumas right back from childhood, from birth, from being in the womb, ancestral traumas and even from past lives. It enables emotional freedom and helps us connect with our authentic identity, which empowers us to show up in our lives with more confidence, feeling more true to ourselves and trusting in life.

It’s been such a transformative journey for me and it really feels like my true calling, and I am extremely passionate about sharing the benefits of breathwork with others.

Now I offer group journeys on and offline, I give talks on how to use breathwork to find relief from stress and from menopausal symptoms, I’ve started leading breathwork sessions for singers to learn how to improve how they sing and perform without letting nerves negatively affect their voices, and I offer 121 breathwork programmes via Zoom and in-person.