The everyday benefits of breathwork
I often get asked the question: Why might I try breathwork? I’m not familiar with it. What does it do?
If breathwork is something you’ve been curious about, then I want to share with you some of the things that clients tend to come to breathwork to address, and what I notice happens over the course of sessions.
Breathwork is a journey and an adventure. It’s important to me to start by describing it that way, because it really is a nontraditional healing modality and form of inner exploration. At first, it might not seem like anything special: the crux of what happens in a session is that the client lies down, relaxes, and breathes uninterruptedly for a long period of time (generally about 45 minutes to an hour). What’s so special about that?
Breathwork brings things to the surface
For a lot of my clients, they are aware that they don’t have enough access to the information they need to understand what is going on with themselves. That might look like being too overwhelmed and distracted to take the time to care for themselves, or feeling like there is more happening under the surface of what they think is going on that they want to better understand. In a session, the simple act of lying down, slowing down, and breathing, allows us to catch up with whatever is happening in our lives. Sometimes people realize how much they have been bracing their body, or resisting facing their burnout, or any number of revelations related to what they need to address in their daily lives.
The simple act of connecting with the information coming from our bodies, hearts, and minds, instead of constantly feeling like we can’t catch up to it or that we don’t want to listen to it, can be relieving and reassuring in and of itself.
Breathwork builds emotional awareness and resilience
This is a big one: many of my clients right now are experiencing peak levels of anxiety, fear, and stress. There is a general sense that things are intensifying and rapidly getting worse, and this can be felt on both a personal and a collective level.
Breathwork creates a space where the person breathing can get grounded enough to face, feel, and express strong feelings as one way of moving through them. Often I’ve found that this is the missing piece in being able to handle and navigate strong emotions: people may be able to acknowledge them, may even be able to feel them instead of pushing them away, but rarely do we make it all the way to expressing and releasing the energy that strong feelings engender. This is a crucial step in building resilience, because when we do this we learn how to continually be in the dynamic experience of the ups and downs of strong feelings over time, and not collapsing as easily when we encounter them. I imagine that we will be needing this skill more and more in the times to come.
Just recently in one of my sessions, a client was grappling with the most intense anxiety she had been feeling in years. By the end of the session, she had regained enough of a sense of herself that she could say: “I feel like I’m back to remembering how to do what it is I do. Which is to keep going.”
Breathwork creates a sense of connection to something beyond ourselves
This might not seem like an obvious health benefit at first, but this is consistently one of the most inspiring aspects of breathwork that clients share with me. By virtue of tuning into our breathing, clients can often experience an embodied understanding that they are part of the vast network of life on this planet. Breathing is the process that links us to trees, dogs, insects, and everything else that breathes. When we are doing breathwork this link can become more obvious and more easily felt. This can support the knowing that we are active participants on the planet that we live on, and that we inherently belong to it. This is a beautiful and important understanding that is unfortunately not a regular experience for many of us, for different reasons. As another client shared with me, “Not only do I feel like I know myself better but I also reconnected with the experience of wonder I felt as a child, gazing at the mystery of life.”
What is so special about breathwork is that it taps into one of the most basic, fundamental processes that very literally supports our lives: breathing. By doing it consciously, we can shift from a sense that we are only automatically sustaining our lives to actively engaging with our lives, and gaining access to the physical, emotional, and mental benefits that doing so can bring. And since we’re breathing all the time, we can build the muscle of emotional resilience, awareness, perspective, connection and capacity into every single day, in a small, accessible way.
I’m offering a special deal for current and former patients of Ashburn Natural Wellness for the months of March and April: $150 off a trial of three breathwork sessions with me. I recommend trying three breathwork sessions to start, as it can take a few sessions to get familiar with how breathwork works. That takes the price from $450 down to $300 total. Each session lasts between 90 minutes and two hours, and I can do sessions virtually or make house visits to do them in-person. I’m available for sessions on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
You can access this discounted package by signing up on this form, and entering the discount code ANW2025 when asked. Reach out with any questions to Em at hello@everydayalive.com.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re interested in taking advantage of this offer. And consider sharing it with your friends, too! I want as many people who want to try breathwork to get the chance to do so. You can learn more about my sessions at https://www.everydayalive.com/breathwork.