Where did you complete your training (or where are you still in training)?
I completed Journey the Breath under Pat Divilly in 2024, a six month container which offered IBF accreditation.
What do you enjoy about breathwork and how has it helped you?
What I enjoy the most about breathwork is that it allowed me to get underneath the ‘thinking part’ that was very good at trying to explain & rationalise my emotions, but not so good at actually feeling & experiencing them. For years I could think about the things that have happened in my life with great clarity- and still feel almost nothing. Breathwork changed that, and in doing so changed my life.
It has helped me carry loss without subconsciously slipping into emotional numbness, and soften my nervous system that spent years fluctuating between hypervigilance and shutdown. Breathwork taught me that strength isn’t just about gripping tighter & trying to ‘power through’, it’s about working towards wholeness and experiencing all the parts of ourselves, when that happens it opens up a new world of appreciation & self love- I didn’t have access to these before breathwork.
In terms of facilitation, what moves me is helping people meet something they may have spent most of their lives protecting themselves from, and helping them discover that it was never the enemy or some kind of defect, it was a part of us and just needs to be met in a different way.
Are you trained in any other modalities?
I am fully trained in Compassionate Inquiry under Gabor Mate, and I have also completed training in Shadow Work. While not a modality as such, I also hold an BSc & MSc in Psychology.
How do they integrate with breathwork?
For me they all fit together well. Breathwork will often help to bring up subconscious material, Compassionate Inquiry helps people meet it, and shadow work helps make sense of it.
When you breathe like that for a while the thinking mind goes quiet and the body starts to talk. Tightness, grief from nowhere, anger that seems too big. But on its own that can just be a release. People feel great for a day and nothing really changes.
CI is what joins the dots. Simple questions afterwards: what’s happening in your body, what was that part protecting you from? People find the meaning themselves, I don’t tell them. And CI taught me the defence isn’t the enemy, it was there for a reason.
Shadow work helps me understand what comes through. Pushed-down anger, shame, but also the good stuff people have disowned. Some people are more shaken by feeling their own power than by any pain.
I watch the pace though. Breathwork can bring things up faster than people can handle. And there’s no real research on combining these. It’s just something I’ve found works.
What is your personal journey?
In 2020 I was thrown into some very difficult personal circumstances, which led to me question everything about my life- to be honest there were many times where I questioned whether life was worth living.
This was during COVID, so there wasn’t even anywhere to go, no real help to be had, and I was forced to go through what I now realise was a deep journey of soul searching, inner work, and trying to find a way through. I started to get a sense that there was an opportunity in all this, to emerge as a wiser person.
I came to realise that in the total darkness I was experiencing there was so much emotion that needed to be felt instead of just being endlessly thought about, and looking back I now understand that this was my own ‘heroes journey’, back from the abyss to a world of wholeness and understanding.
This in turn led me to breathwork, and it was this modality which really enabled me to feel everything that needed to be felt without the mind stepping in to try and sanitise it all, and it changed my life. This naturally led to Shadow Work, which helped me make sense of all my defences and traits, the things about me that led to me being in the situations I was in, and in turn that led me to Compassionate Inquiry.
Although I have experienced pain, grief and fear which at times I thought would be impossible to navigate, I am now a completely different person & I can truly appreciate the challenges sent to me, because they gave me the insight to go on a journey of complete transformation.
And now, I take great satisfaction in trying to help other people experiencing difficulties to go on a similar journey.
What do you stand for, and what do you stand against?
I stand for meeting everything with love, compassion and understanding. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad feeling, or a bad trait, they’re all telling us something. I stand for taking suffering seriously, for listening to the body, and for respecting the ways people have protected themselves.
I’m against breathwork being portrayed as a quick high or a big emotional release with no follow-through, or integration. I’m also against rushing people, because I know that emotions don’t have a timeline and nobody ‘gets over’ something after an emotional release on a mat. I also stand against judgements- in my experience almost everyone carries something we can’t see.
What is your greatest wish for your clients
Simply to be able to meet & experience themselves in a different way, a more compassionate and insightful way.
