The Story
Behind Me.
I had a version of my life that looked, from the outside, exactly like the thing you're supposed to want. Big campaigns. Big teams. A calendar so full that one year I spent my birthday in Bangkok because that's where the meeting was.
Flights that blurred into each other. A salary that meant I never had to think about money. Everything I'd worked my whole career to reach, and I reached it.
And then one evening while visiting family back home, my sister took me to dinner somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, one of those warm summer nights where the air is still and you can smell the sea, and she said:
"Oscar, I'm going to say something that's going to hurt you. We don't want your money. We want your time. And we haven't seen you in years."
I knew she was right before she finished the sentence.
The strange part was that I wasn't unhappy, not in the way you'd notice.
I was just not there. Not anywhere, really.
I'd spent years living between the person I performed and whoever was underneath, and somewhere along the way I'd lost track of which one was actually me. That catches up with you eventually. It had before.
It wasn't the first time I'd lost myself like that. Years earlier, running my own company in London, my body made the point my mind kept ignoring.
One night my throat closed and I couldn't breathe. I thought I was dying. The ambulance came, and the doctor said: panic attack, just relax. Easy to say, when you're not the one spiraling. What she didn't tell me was that it would keep happening. Nights I'd wake up gasping, not knowing why, the one thing you need most suddenly became the thing your body refused to give you. Breathe.
That's when I first found breathwork. Not as a practice, not as anything with a name or a lineage. Just as the thing that worked when nothing else quite did. The breath that kept betraying me turned out to be the way back in.
It got me through, and then, like most things that help, I stopped doing it the moment I felt fine again.
That was London, years before Netflix. I told myself I'd learned something. I hadn't. I went back in, and this time I went as big as it gets. More campaigns, more teams, more quarters. The calendar filled back up, and I told myself this time was different.
Then my sister sat me down by the sea, and a few sentences later I couldn't pretend anymore. I'd done it again. Given everything to the work and almost nothing to the people who'd notice if I disappeared, because I already had.
And once I let myself see that, the rest came with it. The way nothing I delivered ever felt like enough. The way I kept telling myself next month would be calmer, I just had to get this one thing out the door first, and then the next, and then the next. Checking emails at dinner with friends who'd stopped expecting my full attention. Snapping at my partner over nothing, until neglect did what neglect does and I lost him, because I'd chosen work over him one too many times to count. The second burnout was the least of it. But it was coming too.
A month later, I handed in my notice and walked away from all of it. The salary, the title, the version of me everyone recognised. No plan, no next move, nothing lined up to soften the fall. Just the certainty that if I didn't get off the loop, it was going to take something I'd never get back.
I ended up on Koh Phangan. I was meant to keep moving with the friends I was traveling with, next island, next thing, the same rhythm I'd been living for years just with better weather. But something made me stay. Not a reason I could explain or defend. Just a quiet pull in my body, the first time in as long as I could remember that my body had an opinion I was willing to listen to. So I stayed.
That's where I found Tetra Breathwork. I walked into a session the way you walk into things when you've stopped needing them to be anything: loosely, with no expectations, half-curious and half-just-killing-a-Tuesday.
It got through in a way I wasn't prepared for. Not through my head, which is where everything had been landing for years. Somewhere deeper. Something shifted that I couldn't name but also couldn't put down. I signed up for a three-day workshop almost before I'd decided to. By the end of it I was a different kind of quiet than I'd been in years.
"Not empty. Still.
There's a difference."
I went home. I could not stop thinking about it.
Not in the way you think about something interesting. In the way you think about something that found you when you weren't looking.
So I went back to Thailand to train as a breathwork facilitator. I arrived expecting theory, lesson plans, things to memorize. Instead, on the first day, they made us breathe. Weeks of back to back sessions, every kind of breathwork, every intensity, every state you would ever one day hold for someone else.
The logic was simple and total: you cannot recognize what's happening in someone's body if your body has never been there. Before we learned anything, we felt everything.
It was the most demanding thing I've ever done. It was also the most alive I'd felt in years, which told me something important about where I was supposed to be going.
"This seemingly simple process, combining breathing, evocative music and other forms of sound, has an extraordinary potential for opening the way for exploring the entire spectrum of the inner world."
— Stanislav Grof
Then there's Patty.
We'd been in the training together long enough that we knew each other the way you know people when you've breathed through hard things side by side. Which is to say, quite well, quite fast. At a certain point in the training we started doing paired sessions, one person breathing, one person holding the space. Real sessions, not exercises. And it was my turn to sit with her.
She struggled at the start. The connected breath kept slipping before it could build into anything, rhythm breaking, momentum dropping off just before it took hold. I stayed with her, adjusting, watching, coaxing her back into it. At one point I just started breathing out loud alongside her, not instructing anymore, just breathing, so she had something to follow with her body instead of trying to figure it out with her head. Slowly she found it. Then she really found it.
The session deepened. The breath built. I watched her move through resistance and effort and then something opening on the other side of it. And then she started crying. Then smiling. Then both at once, all of it together, the way feelings come when you stop managing them. We practiced blindfolded, she couldn't see me, could only hear the music and occasionally my voice. She had no idea what was on my face.
I was crying too. Not from anything I was carrying. From watching her get there. From knowing exactly what it had cost her to get there. From the particular strange honor of having been part of it.
After graduating I stayed on the island and taught. Session after session, hundreds of breathers, every kind of person, every kind of experience. That time taught me more than any training could.
I came back to Amsterdam knowing something I hadn't known when I left. Not a plan. More like a direction. The practice I'd stumbled into sideways on a Thai island turned out to be the same thing that had helped me breathe in a London living room fifteen years earlier. I just hadn't known what to call it yet.
That's when I started doing this work properly. One to one sessions, groups, partners, the occasional retreat. All in Amsterdam, always in person. I'm a certified Tetra Breathwork facilitator, trained at Samma Karuna in Koh Phangan where the method was developed, and shaped further by hundreds of sessions with real people across every kind of experience. But if I'm honest, Patty taught me more about facilitation than any certification did. What the training gave me was the structure. What the sessions gave me was everything else.
I still think of it as an art form. There's a Picasso line I keep coming back to:
"Learn the rules like a master so you can break them like an artist."
— Pablo Picasso
Breathwork has rules, physiology, structure, things to watch for, ways to hold a room. You learn all of them. And then you're in a session and you put them down and work from what you feel. The energy between two people breathing in the same space. The thing that shifts before you can name it. That part nobody teaches you. That part you develop by showing up, session after session, for as long as it takes.
Most people who find me aren't looking for breathwork. They're looking for a way out of something. I know that feeling well.
If any of this sounds familiar, you already know why you're here.
Now, about the name. Niu.
You've probably been wondering.
It sounds like "new," but it isn't. Niu is the Valencian word for nest.
I grew up in Novelda, a small rural town in the Alicante region of Spain, the kind of place where the summers are long and hot and everyone knows everyone and nothing much needs explaining. That town is my nest. It's where my family still gathers every August, where the food tastes the way food is supposed to taste, where I can walk through a door and immediately be the child I've always been underneath everything else.
No performance required. No title, no calendar, no version of myself built for anyone's expectations. Just the oldest, most uncomplicated version of me, the one that existed before I knew what LinkedIn was.
No matter how far I went, that place stayed the same. It was always there. And knowing it was there made the leaving possible.
That's what I want every breathwork session to feel like. Not a transformation program. Not an optimisation tool. A nest. A place where you can put everything down for a while and just be whoever you actually are, with someone in the room who's been lost and found their way back too.
Ready when
you are.
If you're curious, the first step is a free call. No pressure, no commitment, just a chance to talk it through and see how it feels.