As a trauma-informed Breathwork facilitator and teacher, I wholeheartedly endorse the inherent wisdom within each breather and encourage participants to let their inner guidance lead the way. This approach empowers individuals to become their own healers, and teaches them that everything they need and all the answers they seek are already within them. Rather than imposing directives, a facilitator’s role is to artfully hold space for the wondrous unfolding of the breath.
While I deeply believe in this philosophy, certain factors can sometimes hinder the Breathwork journey. Below, I’ll outline some common obstacles and provide recommendations to help you fully experience the healing and transformative potential of Breathwork.
Optimizing Your Breathwork Journey: 5 Key Recommendations
- Release Expectations and Conditions
A common mistake in Breathwork is arriving with preconceived expectations or conditions rather than embracing unconditionality. Entering a Breathwork journey with expectations can limit the potential for genuine expansion. While setting intentions is encouraged, rigidly adhering to them or forcing their realization is counterproductive.
Recommendation:
Arriving with an open mind, free from expectations, allows a cosmic code to unfold. It’s like tending to a garden – removing weeds (conditions/expectations) creates fertile ground for miracles. Showing up without conditions requires letting go, and this opens the door to profound healing and awakening. During your Breathwork journey, just breathe; release resistance and expectations, let the breath be your guide and surrender to whatever wants to unfold. - Avoid a Forceful Exhalation:
The exhale in Breathwork serves as a symbolic release – letting go of control, resistance, and forcefulness, freeing oneself from what no longer serves. However, forcing the exhale counteracts this purpose by fueling resistance and the urge to control.
This approach is also problematic because of the physiological changes brought about by Breathwork. Breathwork increases pH levels and lowers CO2 levels in the body. Forcing the exhale may exacerbate this by further reducing CO2 levels, intensifying a common Breathwork phenomenon called tetany. When the exhale is forced, this cramping sensation can become physically painful, shifting the breather’s focus away from the transformative journey.
Recommendation:
Keep the exhale passive, envisioning it as a gentle release. Picture the breath as the cycle of life – inhaling to claim life and exhaling to gently let it go. It’s also crucial to note that tetany is a safe and normal process during Breathwork. Instead of resisting it, breathe into it and reflect on what it may symbolize on a psycho-spiritual level. Tetany often signals a need to let go of or release something, or an inability to reach out for help. - Insufficient Breathing or Losing Focus on the Breath:
In Breathwork, deeper and slightly faster connected breathing are essential elements for charging the system with awareness and allowing the breath to act as both the guide and the medicine. Shallow breaths, an overly slow breathing pace, and gaps between inhales and exhales can all diminish the physiological changes crucial for a transformative journey.
Losing the breath during the session is another issue, often occurring after the peak (midway point of the session). Breathers may shift to extremely slow or shallow breaths or even stop breathing through the mouth entirely. While a slower pace is acceptable after the peak, maintaining a connected and deep breath, no slower than normal, is vital. Forgetting to carry the conscious, connected breath throughout the journey will return you to a normal consciousness and you will miss out on the benefits of the journey.
Recommendation:
Maximize the physiological changes that support deep breathwork journeys by keeping your mouth wide open – like you’re biting into a fruit. Make sure to breathe deep into the belly – you can place a hand on your belly at the begining to ensure that it is moving up and down. Also, keep your inhales and exhales equal in length and avoid make your exhales longer then your inhales. Finally, ensure a continuous, connected breath with no pause between the inhales and exhales. And remember to carry this breathing technique throughout the ENTIRE journey. - Beginning Your Breathwork Journey with Rapid Breathing
While it might seem contradictory to the recommendation discussed in point #3, it’s crucial to recognize that Breathwork is a gradual journey lasting an hour or more. Initiating the session with overly forceful or rapid breathing (instead of starting gently and progressing toward the peak), is unsustainable for most participants. Rather than adjusting the pace slightly when they tire from the rapid breathing, many individuals adopt an all-or-nothing approach, eventually resorting to barely breathing during the session. Unfortunately, this diminishes the breather’s ability to access and sustain a heightened state of consciousness. And for those few who maintain a rapid pace throughout, it often leads to significantly lower CO2 levels and painful tetany which distracts from the breathwork journey.
Recommendation:
While Breathwork should feel like ‘work’, especially during the beginning stages of the session when resistance is common, it’s essential to find your own personal edge. If you tend to approach everything with a 200% attitude, consider experimenting with a gentler approach in your next session. Begin with a softer, slower breath and gradually build towards the peak, avoiding the urge to force or hyperventilate. You may be surprised by the profound inner journey this gentler approach can offer you. - Not Allowing Yourself to Fully Feel or Judging Your Feelings as ‘Good or Bad’
In Connected Breathwork journeys, we often affirm, ‘It is safe to breathe, it is safe to feel.’ However, beyond safety, we actively encourage embracing and experiencing your feelings. Allowing yourself to fully feel every sensation and emotion, devoid of resistance, judgment, or the need to attach a narrative, and refraining from labeling them as good or bad, is a crucial aspect of the healing process with Breathwork.
When you permit yourself to experience the entirety of your emotions and sensations, breathing into them without reservation (even those that may feel heavy or ‘dark’), you open the door to release them from your body. This process enables you to walk away from the Breathwork journey having shed something that may have unknowingly lingered in your body for years or decades.
Recommendation:
Running from your feelings only strengthens them. To truly find yourself, confront the darkness within. Face your emotions and shadows directly, whether they manifest as sadness, depression, fear, rage, anger, hurt, or feeling stuck – simply accept them.
During your Breathwork journey, delve into your emotions as deeply as possible, then tap into your intuition and heed what these feelings are attempting to communicate. Repetitive negative emotions often serve as a red flag, indicating that something in your life—be it a job, a person, an addiction, a habit, or a mindset—is not serving you. Acknowledge and release it to step fully into your light.
Closing Thoughts
My initial recommendation for optimizing your Breathwork Journey benefits was to arrive with unconditionality, and I want to underscore its paramount importance. Nothing can unfold until you show up for it, and without your presence, it remains unrealized. Entering with conditions can obscure your vision from what truly needs to be seen, felt, discovered, or released. Conversely, arriving unconditionally removes the blinders, signifying your openness to whatever may arise. This unconditionality serves as an invitation for the divine wisdom of the universe, your inner wisdom, or any higher power you believe in, to gracefully do its work.
Want to experience a deep and transformative Breathwork Journey for yourself? Join an upcoming group breathwork class in Sayulita or Whitby, or book a private online or in-person one.
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