What Is
Breathwork.
Notice your breathing just now? You weren't supposed to, and now you can't stop. That's the door this whole page walks through.
Breathing is the one automatic function in your body you can also do on purpose. Heart rate, digestion, circulation, none of that responds to a decision. Breath does.
That's how breathwork works, in one sentence: it takes a system your body normally runs without you, and hands you the controls.
Here's what that actually gets you. Different breathing patterns tell your nervous system different things. Fast, shallow, urgent breathing is what your body does under threat, so breathing that way on purpose nudges you toward alert, activated, sympathetic. Slow, full, unhurried breathing is what your body does when it's safe, so breathing that way on purpose does the opposite, it calms you down through the vagus nerve, the same wiring responsible for that dropped-shoulders feeling after a long exhale. Your body doesn't know the difference between "this is really happening" and "I'm breathing like it is." It just responds.
A breathwork session picks a pattern and holds it on purpose, long enough for your body to actually believe it and shift, rather than leaving your breath running on autopilot in the background of your day.
That's the mechanic. Which pattern, how intense, what it actually feels like from inside a session, that's what the next sections are for.
Two, in practice. My main one, and the one I adapt into when someone needs less.
Tetra is my craft. I didn't just take a course in it, I spent months at Samma Karuna, on the island where it originated, Koh Phangan in Thailand, living there, training in it, then staying on to teach it to other people long after I'd learned it myself. That's not a weekend certificate. That's months of showing up, in one form or another, since.
The session moves in stages, named after the elements, earth, water, fire, air, each one building more energy than the last, all of it paced against music chosen specifically to match where you are in that build. It's not random breathing to a playlist. The rhythm and frequency of what's playing pulls the pace of your breath along with it, and the breath builds toward wherever that stage is taking you. By the later stages, most people aren't thinking about technique anymore, the music and the breath have taken that job over.
It sits in the same family as holotropic and shamanic breathwork. Stanislav Grof, the psychiatrist who developed holotropic breathwork, built his whole approach around trusting the breather's own inner healing intelligence, the facilitator's job is to protect the space and keep you safe inside it, not to steer what happens within your own process. You're closely cared for the entire time, just not directed. Whatever needs to surface, surfaces, guided by you. It's a beautiful, deeply respected approach, and the deepest versions of it belong to facilitators who've spent years building their entire practice inside that lineage. My training took me a different direction: Tetra asks something else of me. I don't just hold the space, I stay actively involved in shaping it, guiding the pace, the stages, the music, throughout. A different relationship between facilitator and breather, not a better or worse one.
The second style I offer is softer. Slower breath, longer exhale, built to calm the nervous system down rather than move it somewhere new. It comes out of my own fascination with the vagus nerve, specifically the work of Kevin Tracey, the neurosurgeon whose discovery of how that nerve regulates the body basically built the modern understanding of how much it controls. I've read everything of his I could get my hands on. Taking that, the real science of why slow, extended-exhale breathing calms the body, and applying it directly into how I facilitate is what this style is built on.
No two people breathe the same way in, so no two sessions run identically either. I don't put you through a fixed structure regardless of who you are. I build the session around whoever's actually in front of me that day.
You don't choose what comes up, and you don't set an intention going in. I wish I could tell you otherwise, make it feel more manageable, but the breath doesn't take requests. It shows you whatever it thinks you're ready for. Intensity here isn't one thing, it shows up physically, chemically, emotionally, sometimes all three in the same session.
On the Tetra side, breathing that fast and connected for long enough drops your blood's carbon dioxide, shifts it slightly alkaline, and makes your nerves more sensitive to that shift than to normal signals. Tingling in the hands, lips, sometimes further, is common. For some it builds into light cramping in the hands or face. After hundreds of sessions, I've come to see it as something specific: your body's way of saying "this is too much, I don't want to go there." Which is usually exactly where you need to go. The instinct is to pull back. I'll invite you to lean in instead, gently, and see what's actually there, but it's still your breath and your practice, you decide how far.
Then there's the part almost nobody expects going in: how physically wiped out you can feel afterward. I've had people ask me, half laughing, half serious, why their arms feel like they did a hundred push ups when all they did was lie down and breathe. Your diaphragm and chest have been working like it's a real workout, because for that stretch of time, it is one.
The room is a safe space to release whatever comes up, fully, without holding back. I've sat across from people crying without knowing why, laughing two minutes later, sometimes both at once, and none of it needed an explanation while it was happening. That includes the feelings you'd normally keep managed, the unknown or slightly frightening ones. Going deeper into something scary doesn't mean going into it alone, I stay close through it.
The softer style asks less of your body and more of a relaxed mind, showing up already willing to slow down. Slower breath, longer exhale, quietly working the vagus nerve. Given time, something shifts that isn't just calm in the moment, it becomes your new baseline, sympathetic and parasympathetic finding their balance instead of one of them running the show.
It starts with talking, not the breathing. A real conversation, one to one, or a quick temperature check across the room in a group, what's going on, how people are feeling, what's actually needed today versus what anyone assumed when they booked, including which of the two styles actually fits. That decides the shape of everything after, which is why no two sessions with me look quite the same, even in a group that's done this together before.
Some days that means starting slow, a few minutes of just diaphragmatic breathing before asking more of the body. Other days everyone's already there and we go straight into the connected breath. Sometimes I decide that. Sometimes I hand it over and ask the room what it wants.
From there, the music comes in and the breath builds through phases that ask progressively more of the body, quiet and steady at first, deeper and more energised through the middle, fastest and most physically demanding near the end. In a group, I'm reading the collective energy in the room, not just one person's, and that can genuinely change things mid-session, a room that came in wired might need longer in the calmer phases before it's ready for more, a quiet room might be ready to move faster than planned. Nothing's fixed in advance. I'm adjusting the whole way through, watching what's actually happening rather than running everyone through the same sequence regardless.
Then it stops, and the room goes quiet. A calm song plays, and everyone rests while their breath finds its own pace again.
What happens after you leave matters just as much as what happened in the room, sometimes more. A session can bring things up that don't finish resolving the moment you stand up and walk out. Left alone, unobserved, that material doesn't just fade, it can settle back down the way it was before, sometimes heavier for having been disturbed. Journaling helps. So does sitting in silence with it instead of immediately reaching for whatever usually distracts you. Choosing to actually sit with what surfaced, rather than coping your way past it, is part of the work, not something separate from it.
What actually changes isn't the same for everyone, and I'd rather tell you that upfront than promise a specific result you might not get.
What I see most, session after session: people leave calmer than they arrived, in the way you feel after crying it out or finishing a hard workout, spent but lighter. That part's near-universal. What's less predictable is what surfaces to get you there, which is honestly part of the appeal for a lot of people, you don't fully know what a session's going to bring you until you're in it.
There's no finish line with this practice, and that's not a downside. However long you've been doing it, a hundred sessions or your first one, you never arrive somewhere and stop needing it. Every session is still its own thing, some full, some quiet, some where nothing dramatic happens at all. What stays constant underneath all of that is the same regulation, the nervous system finding its way back down, whether the session was loud or silent about it.
That's also where the actual research lands, not just my own read on it. A 2023 meta-analysis of randomised trials found breathwork produced a real, measurable reduction in self-reported stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, small to medium in size, not a miracle effect, but a genuine one, and consistent enough across studies to trust. Separate research on slower, calmer breathing specifically links it to better sleep, through lowered cortisol and a nervous system that's had practice coming down instead of staying wound up.
I'd rather undersell this than oversell it. It's not a fix for everything, and one session won't rewrite years of stress on its own. But once you've actually felt what that groundedness feels like, properly centred, properly still, you know it's there. And getting back to it stops being complicated. It's not a program or a place you have to return to. It's a stop, and a breath, in a room with me or completely on your own. Once you have that, you already have something nobody can take from you.
You don't need to have done this before. You don't need flexibility, fitness, a meditation habit, or any particular belief about breath, bodies, or healing. Most people who end up here didn't go looking for breathwork specifically. They went looking for something to change, and this is what they found.
If you spend a lot of time in your head, if rest doesn't quite land the way it should, if you can name the feeling of being tired in a way sleep doesn't fix, that's usually the shape of the person who finds their way to a session with me. Maybe you'd call it stress, burnout, anxiety, or you wouldn't put a word on it at all. Not broken. Just carrying more than you've had a real chance to put down.
A few real medical situations mean the active style isn't right for everyone, and I'd rather you know that clearly than find out mid-session.
None of this is meant to scare you off, most people reading this list don't have any of it, and it's exactly what the conversation at the start of every session is for, so I know before we begin. If something on here applies to you and you're still curious, don't rule yourself out, write to me and we'll figure out what's actually possible together, gentler work, a shorter session, or the softer style entirely, which carries essentially none of this risk.
Conditions that need medical clearance before an active session, or point toward the softer style instead:
Cardiovascular conditions: heart disease, arrhythmia, uncontrolled high blood pressure, recent heart attack, or a history of stroke
Aneurysm, brain or abdominal
Epilepsy or a history of seizures
Pregnancy, particularly the first trimester
Glaucoma or detached retina
Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or a history of psychosis
Recent surgery, especially anything still healing
Uncontrolled asthma (manageable, just bring your inhaler and tell me beforehand)
Certain medications, particularly psychiatric ones, worth a quick conversation with your doctor if you're on any
If any of this sounds like you, you already know why you're here.
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.