i became a breathwork instructor

a year or so ago i did a breathwork session and it absolutely floored me. not in a “you should try this” way in a “i don’t think i’ve felt this in my body in five years” way. so i did what i tend to do when something surprises me at that level. i decided i needed to know how it worked. and signed up for a twelve-week course to learn how to teach it.

what i found out is that you can’t really learn breathwork by reading about it, although you should also read about it. james nestor’s ‘breath’ is the book. it lays out the science with enough rigour that i stopped feeling like a fraud for finding the practice useful. but the bulk of the learning, it turns out, happens in your own body. you breathe a lot. you breathe with strangers. you sit on a mat in a room with people you have never met and you do practices on each other and then you talk about what came up. this was, to my surprise, the hardest part of the course.

i had thought the science of breathwork would be the hard part. it wasn’t. the hard part was the rehearsing, connecting with random people, leading them through a practice, having them lead me, and admitting out loud what i’d felt. i don’t love being out of my comfort zone. it turned out that being out of my comfort zone was the entire course.

some of what i was taught resonated immediately. some of it didn’t. parts of the spiritual scaffolding around breathwork are beautiful to me. other parts felt a long way from anywhere i can comprehend, and i had to make peace with the fact that i don’t have to take all of it on to teach the parts i can stand behind. that’s also a thing the course teaches you, eventually: what to keep, what to leave at the door.

my first session was with my friends, in a room, as a kind of soft launch. i was nervous about the wrong thing. i thought the difficulty would be running the room and being calm enough, holding the energy and that part turned out to be the easy bit. i could tap into a flow state almost immediately. what was actually hard was the timings. how many breaths per round. how many rounds. what order. when to drop the pace. how to do all of that while staying with the people in front of you and not in your own head counting. that part took practice and is still taking practice.

the surprise of the session was twofold. one: how many people said it actually worked. people described feeling different walking in than they did walking out clearer, lighter, somewhere on the spectrum between calm and elated. that was a privilege to witness. two: how much energy it took from me. by the end i was completely flattened. i hadn’t expected that running a session would draw on you that hard. (i have since started using crystals during sessions to manage it, which is a sentence i would have laughed at three years ago and now write without irony. that’s also part of the journey, i suppose.)

what i’ll say if you’re curious but skeptical: try one session. don’t sign up for a transformation. just notice whether you feel different at the end than you did at the start. the science says you will. the body usually agrees. and the rest you can decide for yourself.

we’ll be running breathwork sessions on our sundays.

permission to be human and imperfect.

love,
saolful