Thinking About Joining a Breathwork Session?

Here’s Your Beginner-Friendly Guide. Helpful Even If You’re a Seasoned Breather.

You’ve seen breathwork circles popping up everywhere.
You’ve heard friends talk about “that one session that shifted everything.”
You’ve maybe felt a quiet curiosity inside you…
but also a small voice asking:

“What actually happens there? How do I breathe? What if I do it wrong?”

You’re not alone.
Every single person - even the most experienced breathers, started exactly where you are now:
with questions, uncertainty, and a desire to understand the process before surrendering into it.

This post is your soft landing.
A simple, clear, no-nonsense guide to what breathwork - specifically Conscious Connected Breath, (CCB) looks like, how to prepare, and what you can expect.

And truthfully?
Even if you’ve been breathing for years, repetition of the basics is never wasted.
The foundations always matter.

Let’s begin.

1. First Things First: What Even Is Breathwork?

CCB (Conscious Connected Breath) is a somatic, circular breathing technique.
It looks simple on the outside, but it works deeply with your nervous system.

Think of it as:

A conversation between you and your body
that doesn’t require words.

It’s not hyperventilation.
It’s not mystical.
It’s not about “achieving” anything.

It’s about creating a safe level of activation so your body can release tension, emotions, and old patterns that may be ready to move.

Every person’s experience is different.
Every session is different - even for the same person.

2. How Do You Actually Breathe? (Beginner-Friendly + Trauma-Informed approach)

The breath pattern is continuous, circular, and intentional.

Here’s the simplest version:

1) Active Inhale

A fuller, intentional breath, but not forced.
You can inhale through the mouth or the nose, depending on what your body needs:

• Mouth breathing = more emotional access, more expression

• Nose breathing = more grounding, softer, gentler

You can switch at any time.

2) Passive Exhale

Let the breath fall out naturally - no control, no pushing.

Most people exhale through the mouth, but nose exhale is welcome too.

3) No Pauses

The inhale connects directly into the exhale.
Think circle, not step-step-step.

If things feel too intense?
Slow down. Return to the nose.
Gentle is always an option.

You lead the experience - your breathworker only guides.

3. What Might You Feel? (Spoiler: You’re Not Doing It Wrong)

Because breathwork works with the nervous system, many different sensations can appear.
Here are some completely normal ones:

Physical sensations

• tingling in hands or face

• warmth or cold

• trembling or shaking

• tightness in hands or jaw

• waves of energy

Emotional responses

• sadness

• tears

• anger

• laughter

• relief

• deep calm

Inner experiences

• clarity

• memories

• symbolic images

• big or small “aha” moments

There is no correct or incorrect experience.
Your body decides what’s ready.

4. How to Prepare (So You Feel Grounded Before You Begin)

You don’t need anything fancy - just presence.

Your space (if online from the comfort of your home):

• quiet, private, safe

• yoga mat, bed, or couch

• pillows + blanket

• no sharp corners nearby

Your setup:

• headphones if possible

• water

• comfy clothes

• light meal 2–3 hours before

• phone on silent

Your mindset:

• set an intention (highly recommended)

• then let it go

• stay curious

• no expectations required

This is not for performance.
You can show up exactly as you are.

5. Who Should Avoid Intense Breathwork? (Safety First)

Breathwork is powerful - and not recommended for everyone.

Avoid deep, intense CCB if you have:

• pregnancy (1st + 2nd trimester; 3rd = only gentle breathing)

• major heart conditions

• uncontrolled high blood pressure

• epilepsy / seizures

• recent surgery

• active psychosis or schizophrenia

• overwhelming anxiety without therapeutic support

If you’re unsure, ask your facilitator.
There’s always a way to adapt.

6. After the Session: What Now?

You might feel:

• peaceful

• tired

• open

• emotional

• spacious

• grounded

Your system has just done a lot.
Give it what it needs.

Support your integration:

• drink water

• rest

• move slowly

• journal a few sentences

• take a gentle walk

• avoid overwhelming conversations

The real magic often unfolds after the session.

7. Final Thoughts: You Can’t Do It Wrong

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be this:

Breathwork meets you exactly where you are.
Your body sets the pace.
You cannot fail.

Whether it’s your very first session or your fiftieth,
the same principles apply:

• breathe consciously

• move gently

• stay curious

• trust your body

And come back to this guide anytime.
Repetition is not boring - it’s regulating.
It’s the foundation of safe, meaningful breathwork.

If you’re ready, your breath is ready too.

The Animal Under My Ribs

A truth with a heartbeat. A creature you haven’t looked in the eyes for years.

And yes. Sometimes it’s your heart.

Sometimes it’s the little girl still hiding.

And sometimes it’s something much older than both.

There is a place under your ribs that you do not touch.
Not physically.
Not mentally.
Not even in dreams.

You may rest your palms on your chest when you breathe.
You may stretch your arms in yoga.
You may open your ribs when someone tells you to “take a deep breath.”

But the place under your ribs - that soft cave where instinct meets memory -
that is a story you haven’t finished reading.

Because something lives there.
Something you trained.
Something you silenced.
Something you sent to its room decades ago and never let out again.

And it’s been scratching at the inside of your bones ever since.

MAYBE ITS YOUR HEART.

The version that beats differently when you stop pretending.
The one that has opinions you don’t voice.
Desires you don’t allow.
Boundaries you don’t set.
And grief you’re too adult to admit.

A heart can only be polite for so long.
It can only whisper “it’s okay” so many times before the whisper becomes a bruise.

Sometimes the animal under your ribs is the part of your heart
that refuses to keep participating in your self-abandonment.

MAYBE IT’S THE LITTLE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND.

Not the inner child from therapy worksheets.
Not the “go hug her” cliché.

I mean the actual girl.
The one who hid under the table when people yelled.
The one who held her breath when adults argued.
The one who learned that smallness is safer than truth.

She’s still there.
Not frozen. Just tired.
She’s been holding your fear for decades, quietly,
like a secret animal that curls into itself when the world gets loud.

Sometimes the animal under your ribs is the child
who never got the chance to grow up into her full size.

BUT SOMETIMES, ITS NOT HUMAN AT ALL.

Sometimes what lives under your ribs
is older than your childhood
and wilder than your personality.

A instinct.
A pulse.
A creature.
A knowing.

Something that existed in your body before your story did.

A kind of prehistoric clarity.
A primal intelligence.
A soft, warm, animal truth that once guided your whole life
before you traded instinct for manners
and accuracy for acceptance.

This isn’t the “wild woman” archetype.
This is not fantasy.
This is biology, somatics, evolution, an acient memory.

WHAT DOES THE ANIMAL WANT?

Not to roar.
Not to break things.
Not to run barefoot into the forest
and start howling at the moon.

Your animal is quieter than that.
More honest. (did you ever notice, how hones animals are….?)
More subtle.
More sacred.

It wants:

• a breath that actually reaches the back of your ribs
• a truth that is not edited for likability
• a boundary that does not tremble
• a pace that does not betray your nervous system
• a life that fits your real shape

Your ribs are not there to protect your niceness.
They are there to protect your truth.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THE ANIMAL UNDER YOUR RIBS IS WAKING UP?

You start sighing without meaning to.
You start wanting to be alone more.
You get impatient with conversations that aren’t real.
You lose the capacity to tolerate half-truths.
You feel a movement rising from inside that is not your personality.

You stop apologising.
You start pausing.
You breathe deeper.
You choose differently.
Something in you says:

No more shrinking.
No more performing.
No more negotiating with my own aliveness.

It’s not rebellion.
t’s accuracy.

WHAT IF THE ANILAM UNDER YOUR RIBS COULD SPEAK?

It wouldn’t tell you to be fearless.
It wouldn’t tell you to be fierce.
It wouldn’t tell you to be powerful.

It would say something much simpler:

Let me out.
Let me breathe.
Let me move the way your soul was meant to move.

It would say:

I remember who you were before you learned to behave.

And maybe that’s what this whole life is about?
Not becoming someone new,
but becoming someone ancient
that you abandoned along the way.

THE ANIMAL UNDER YOUR RIBS IS NOT ASKING YOU TO BE WILD.

It’s asking you to be true.

To live in a body that no longer apologizes for existing.
To breathe in a way that doesn’t betray your nervous system.
To move like someone who has nothing left to prove.

To stop bending your skeleton around the expectations of others.

To remember
that you were never meant to be polite
with your own life.

When Grief Breathes: How Conscious Breathwork Helps Us Live with Loss

When Grief Breathes

Grief is not just a feeling.
It’s an imprint.
A vibration that settles somewhere between the lungs and the heart — in the pauses we take before we dare to feel again.

Most of us imagine grief as a wave of sadness that eventually fades away.
But the truth is, loss doesn’t vanish with time.
It changes shape.
It hides in the way we breathe, in how tightly we hold our shoulders, in the places our voice hesitates to reach.

How the Body Holds Loss

When something dear to us disappears - a person, a relationship, health, safety, a dream, the body doesn’t simply “move on.”
It protects us.
It holds the pain inside like a fragile glass — hoping it won’t spill.
We freeze.
We go numb.
We breathe less, trying to feel less.

And yet, every shallow inhale is a reminder of what hasn’t been released.
Every held breath is an unfinished story of love.

The nervous system registers loss as a threat, not only to our heart, but to our very survival.
That’s why grief isn’t only emotional. It’s physical.
We may feel pressure in the chest, a lump in the throat, exhaustion that no sleep can fix.
It’s the body saying: I’ve been holding too much for too long.

What Breathwork Offers

Breathwork doesn’t erase grief.
It invites it to move.
Through conscious breathing, we begin to create a bridge between what is frozen and what is still alive within us.

When we breathe with awareness, something softens.
Tears start to flow, not as breakdown, but as release.
The heart begins to beat with a little more space.
Grief stops being a heavy stone we drag through life, and becomes a quiet companion, a sign of how deeply we have loved.

There’s a moment, often subtle, when the exhale carries a sense of permission:
to feel, to remember, to live again.
In that moment, the body starts to trust life once more.

Love and Loss Can Coexist

Healing doesn’t mean “getting over it.”
It means learning to breathe with it, to make space for both the ache and the aliveness.
To allow love and loss to coexist in the same heart, without one erasing the other.

Because grief, when met with breath, becomes less about what we’ve lost and more about what remains, our capacity to love, to connect, to stay open even when it hurts.

An Invitation

If you could breathe today as if your heart could hold both love and longing,
what would change inside you?

What if, instead of pushing the pain away, you allowed your breath to cradle it,
like a tide that knows exactly how to return everything to the shore?

Because sometimes healing doesn’t mean moving forward.
It means moving with, one conscious breath at a time.

The Language of Somatic Breathwork

HOW THE BODY SPEAKS TROUGH BREATH, SENSATION, AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

As I prepare to enter another year of Somatic Experiencing training, I find myself rereading old notes - pages filled with underlines, arrows, and small sentences that landed in the body more than in the mind.
Each time I return to them, I feel how beautifully this approach weaves with what I’ve been practicing and teaching for years: breathwork.
Different languages, one nervous system.

Because healing, real healing - is not only about releasing what hurts.
It’s about building the capacity to live well.
To feel safe enough to enjoy, to rest, to love, to create.
To be in the world with both roots and breath.

The Language Beneath Words

The body speaks long before the mind forms a sentence.
It speaks through contraction and release, trembling, warmth, breath.
It speaks in sighs, in stillness, in the subtle shifts that happen when we finally feel safe.

Both Somatic Experiencing and breathwork are, in essence, about learning to understand that language.
About learning to listen.
Because every sensation, every pattern of breath, every tension held under the skin - is the body trying to communicate something.

In SE we talk about titration, meeting just as much experience as the system can safely hold - and pendulation, moving gently between activation and rest.
These are not only therapeutic principles; they are the same rhythms that guide a conscious breathing session. We don’t force the body open.
We offer space, rhythm, and trust - and the body does the rest.

Seeing Safety

We often imagine breathwork as something done with eyes closed, turned inward.
But one of the simplest ways to regulate the nervous system begins not inside, but through the eyes, through orientation.
Up to 80% of the sensory data that helps our brain decide whether we are safe comes through vision.
The eyes are the body’s first messengers of safety - we experience that in Forest Therapy, when we immerse outselves in Nature.

That’s why I love starting breathwork sessions by inviting people to simply look around.
To soften the gaze, to notice light and shadow, color and distance.
To let the eyes find the horizon.
When we widen our field of vision, the vagus nerve softens, the breath deepens, the system remembers: I am safe. I can stay.

Touch as Remembering

Even online, touch can be a powerful bridge back to the body.
Placing a hand on the chest, feeling the warmth and weight of your own palm, pressing the soles of your feet into the floor, these are small gestures of regulation.

Touch tells the nervous system: I exist. I have boundaries. I’m here now.
It’s not just a technique; it’s a form of listening.

In person, touch can be co-regulating - the meeting of two systems in safety.
But even self-touch, when guided with awareness, becomes a dialogue with the body’s intelligence.

The Power of Sound

Then there’s sound. The forgotten language of the body.
A sigh, a hum, a vibration that travels through bone and tissue.
When we hum or tone, the vibration gently stimulates the vagus nerve, sending the message of safety from the body upward to the brain.
One of my favorite SE tools is the sound “Wooooooo.”
A long, deep exhalation that vibrates through the diaphragm and the heart.
It’s a sound that doesn’t need to mean anything. It just brings us home.

The Breath as a Bridge

Our breathing patterns change with our emotional states.
Shallow breathing often mirrors protection.
A held breath can mirror fear.
And yet, when the breath deepens, the whole system reorganizes.

Breathwork teaches us that breath is both a reflection and a remedy.
It shows us what is happening, and it helps us move through it.
When we breathe consciously, slowly, and with presence, we invite the diaphragm- and the heart it’s attached to, to move freely again.
The heart literally gains space.
The body begins to trust expansion again.

The Pathways of Regulation

Over time, I began to see how all of my work sourcers - SE, breathwork, forest therapy - meet in six simple doorways through which the body returns to balance:

Seeing : widening the gaze, orienting to the world, letting the eyes rest in openness.
Touch: feeling the body’s edges, temperature, and contact; remembering boundaries and belonging.
Voice: letting sound and vibration soften the inner tension; expressing what the body holds.
Breath: restoring rhythm, flow, and presence; allowing life to move through.
Orientation:engaging the senses to come back to the moment; noticing what’s around you.
Grounding: reconnecting to gravity and Earth; feeling weight, roots, and stability.

Each of these is a conversation between the body and the world.
Together they create a language of safety, one we can all learn to speak.

The Forest as Teacher

From forest therapy I learned that regulation often begins outside of us.
Through smell, texture, sound, and light, the body starts remembering that it belongs to something larger.
Nature regulates us without trying.
The rustling of leaves, the scent of rain, the feeling of soil under bare feet - they all speak directly to the nervous system.
When we breathe with the forest, something ancient inside us exhales too.

Grounding: The Return Home

To ground is not to become still - it’s to remember where life begins.
It’s to feel the earth’s pulse beneath the soles of your feet.
It’s to release what is too much, and to draw in what sustains you.
I often use the image of breathing through the roots - each exhale releasing tension into the ground, each inhale drawing in stability, nourishment, and life.
Grounding is the final note in the symphony of regulation.
It is the body saying: I am connected. I am home.

The Body Already Knows

In Somatic Experiencing we say:“The body always moves toward healing, if given the right conditions.”
Those conditions are simple: presence, curiosity, rhythm, and time.
Beathwork offers them all.
Every sigh, tremor, or tear is not a breakdown - it’s the body reorganizing itself toward life.
We don’t need to fix what’s broken; we need to listen to what’s speaking.
Because the body doesn’t need us to teach it how to heal - it only needs us to stop interrupting its wisdom.

Somatic Breathwork is not a technique. It’s a relationship.
Between breath and body.
Between science and soul.
Between what we can feel and what we can’t yet name.

This practice keeps teaching me that healing is not a performance, but a remembering.
Each conscious breath is an invitation to come back -to the body, to the moment, to the earth beneath your feet.
And if you listen closely enough, you’ll notice that the body has been whispering its truth all along.

What is breathwork?

Or in other words: what do we really mean when we say “breathe consciously”?

Breathwork is more than just breathing.
It’s a practice where you intentionally use your breath to shift your internal state.
Consciously, meaning you know you're doing it, and you're doing it on purpose.

We can use the breath to regulate the nervous system, process emotions, reconnect with ourselves.
Sometimes just to pause and land back in the body. Back in you.

But conscious breathing isn’t one single method. It’s a collection of different approaches, each serving a different purpose. In my work, I distinguish four main types of breath — which can often blend and overlap with one another.

REGULATING BREATH - GROUNDING & CALM

This is a long, slow breath that supports the parasympathetic nervous system (around 4–6 breaths per minute). Its aim is to calm the nervous system by activating the vagus nerve, increase the sense of safety, and help you move out of anxiety, stress, or internal tension.

We use a slow nasal breath, aiming for a rhythm like:
Inhale 4 seconds - exhale 6 to 8 seconds.
The focus here is on extending the exhale.

This is the type of breath I use with clients who experience anxiety, stress, or insomnia.

RELEASING BREATH - SOMATIC & ENERGETIC

Sometimes we need to stir up and integrate stuck emotions, discharge internal pressure, or enter into emotional flow. In this case we employ the type of breathing we call Conscious Connected Breath(work).

In this practice, we breathe dynamically, often faster, using a connected breath - the one with no pause between inhale and exhale. The inhale is full and active. The exhale is soft and passive - let go without force.
I call this a sessional breath - typically done through the mouth, which stimulates the sympathetic system more quickly and helps access suppressed material faster.

Important:
This kind of breath requires a safe space and a trained practitioner, preferably working from a trauma-informed approach, who understands the contraindications of this style of breathing. There will be a separate post about that.

EXPANDED RELEASING BREATH - ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When the releasing breath is intensified and extended, it can lead us into transpersonal spaces and altered states of consciousness.

These sessions are usually longer - often over two hours of deep, connected breathing without breaks between inhale and exhale. This kind of breathwork can evoke visions, memories, and experiences beyond words.
In my opinion, it requires grounding, a skilled and embodied facilitator, and space for integration. After a session like this, you won’t just get in your car and drive home. You’ll need stillness, space, and time for yourself. That’s why I recommend exploring this type of breathwork during multi-day retreats or dedicated workshops, where proper integration is part of the process.

INTEGRATION BREATH - RETURNING TO SELF

This is the breath that helps you come back to yourself after a session.
Quiet, subtle, present. It’s like your everyday breath through the nose, but done with awareness. It helps to close the process and anchor what’s been moved or opened.

CONCLUSION

When someone says “breathwork,” ask: What kind of breathwork? For what purpose? For whom?
It’s not about doing more, or going deeper by force. It’s about choosing the breath practice that meets you exactly where you are. Choosing what your body truly needs.

Different intentions call for different breaths.
And every one of them can be beautiful - if approached with awareness.