Where did you complete your training (or where are you still in training)?
I completed 6 months of Conscious Connected Breathwork training followed by 6 months supervision with Pat Divilly in Ireland. I subsequently trained with Oxygen Advantage and qualified as an Oxygen Advantage Advanced Instructor with Patrick McKeown.
I see both as very different but complementary parts of my work. Conscious Connected Breathwork introduced me to the deeper experiential side of the breath, while Oxygen Advantage greatly expanded my understanding of breathing physiology, functional breathing and performance.
I’m still learning, and I hope I always will be. The more I’ve studied breathing, the more I’ve realised how much there is still to understand.
What do you enjoy about breathwork and how has it helped you?
What I love about breathwork is that there is always something more to learn. The breath can be incredibly simple, but it can also take us very deep.
Breathwork came into my own life at a time when I really needed it. I had spent years pushing through stress and eventually burnout, and learning to work with my breath helped me reconnect with myself in a way I hadn’t expected.
Now I get to see it in completely different settings. I might work with someone experiencing stress or anxiety, a GAA player preparing for a big game, a teacher or principal under pressure, a men’s group, or somebody coming for a deeper Conscious Connected Breathwork session.
I love that there isn’t one breath for everyone. It’s about meeting the person in front of you and asking what they need in that moment
Are you trained in any other modalities?
My professional background is in education. I spent over twenty years working in primary education, including nearly a decade as a school principal, before moving into breathwork.
That experience still influences my work enormously, particularly when I work with schools, teachers, children and groups.
How do they integrate with breathwork?
Teaching taught me how to read a room, explain something complicated in simple language and, perhaps most importantly, meet people where they are.
I bring that into every breathwork setting. I don’t want people to feel they need to understand the science of breathing or believe in anything particular before they begin. My job is to make it accessible, give people choice and create an environment where they feel comfortable going at their own pace.
What is your personal journey?
For most of my adult life, I was a teacher.
I became a primary school principal and spent more close to a decade leading a school. From the outside I probably looked like I had everything together. Inside, I was struggling.
Years of stress eventually caught up with me and I experienced severe burnout. I reached a point where I had to walk away from the career that had been such a huge part of my identity.
Breathwork became part of rebuilding my life.
Initially, I wasn’t looking for a new career. I was trying to understand myself and find ways of regulating a nervous system that had spent far too long under pressure.
But the deeper I went into the work, the more fascinated I became.
Eventually I trained extensively in Conscious Connected Breathwork and later in functional breathing through Oxygen Advantage, and The Breathwork Project grew from there.
One of the things I value most now is being able to bring the breath into worlds I understand personally: schools, sport, mental health, stress, burnout and ordinary people trying to cope with busy lives.
My background in education hasn’t disappeared. In many ways I’m still teaching. The classroom has just changed.
And perhaps the biggest thing breathwork has taught me is that we don’t always need to push harder.
Sometimes we need to stop, listen and breathe.
What do you stand for, and what do you stand against?
I stand for safe, responsible and human-centred breathwork.
I believe the person breathing should always remain in control of their experience. A facilitator is there to support the person, not to prove how powerful their technique is.
I stand for proper training, continuing education, knowing our scope of practice and having the humility to say when something is beyond it.
I stand against ego-driven facilitation and the idea that a dramatic emotional release is evidence of a successful session. Nobody needs to cry, shake or have a huge breakthrough for breathwork to have value.
I also worry about an unregulated industry where somebody can complete a weekend course and use the same title as someone who has spent hundreds of hours training.
Beginners should absolutely be welcomed. We were all beginners once. But we need honesty about our experience and limitations.
The breath belongs to the person breathing, not the facilitator.
What is your greatest wish for your clients
My greatest wish is that people leave with something that belongs to them.
I don’t want anyone to feel that they need me in order to regulate themselves. I want them to understand their own breath a little better, trust themselves a little more and know that something they carry with them every second of every day can become a powerful resource.
Other
Much of my work focuses on making breathwork practical and accessible outside traditional breathwork spaces, particularly within education, GAA and sport, men’s wellbeing and all community settings.
