Methods, techniques and teachers abound. Breathwork can be life-changing but breathwork will never be genuinely powerful without an understanding of STATE.
State awareness is understanding where your nervous system is at any given point in time. State awareness is your roadmap to knowing what breath practices will or won’t be powerful for you. State awareness is feeling into how calm you are, how stressed you are, how reactive you are, how irritable you are – whatever the signs and symptoms, these all point to ACTIVATION, DEACTIVATION or BALANCE in your nervous system. 
These signals can be subtle and learning to hear and feel them is a skill we can develop. Breathwork has a direct and immediate effect on your nervous system making it more powerful than many people realise.
Like most of health and fitness, breathwork can fall victim to trends. Watch out for practices offering quick fixes or one-off life-altering experiences, anything that claims to mop up your traumas, clear out all negativity and send you happily off into the sunset. For any form of breath practice to be effective, it needs to be repeated. Sometimes this is only for a few months but some practices need to become daily habits until they become a natural part of your way of being.
Breathwork’s short term effects can be easy to spot but the long term effects can often sit out of awareness. For this reason it’s important to have a well-trained, sensitive teacher who can guide you through options and practices and help you read how your mind-body system is responding both now and in the medium and long term.
A good breathwork instructor should:
- Inform you of the risks (yes, there are some) vs benefits of breath practices
- Be able to teach upregulating, downregulating and balancing practices
- Have an understanding of human respiratory physiology & nervous system health
- Be trauma informed
Ask questions and do your homework before embarking on a new practice. Just because it’s the first result on YouTube or the latest hit on Netflix doesn’t mean it’s good for you.
The truth of breath training is it can give you the keys to unlock yourself.
But you’re going to have to think about it, sit with it, feel into it, and persist with it over time.
#breathwork #state #hyperventilation #superventilation #selfawareness