How this magazine is put together, who decides what, and what you can hold us to.
Breath and Words is an independent magazine. I am the editor, and the practitioners who write here are the magazine.
What follows is how I work. If we ever fall short of it, tell me.
Everything carries a name
Every article here is published under the name of the person who wrote it, with a profile page saying who they are, where they trained and what they do. No anonymous articles. No house bylines standing in for a person. No advice from nobody in particular.
That matters most on anything touching health. If you cannot see who is telling you something about your body, you have no way to weigh it, and I would rather not publish it than ask you to take it on trust.
Where I have written something myself, my name is on it too.
Every piece is labelled
Each article carries one of four labels, so you know what kind of writing you are reading before you start.
- Evidence. Rests on published research, with the sources named.
- Method. How the work is actually done, by someone who teaches it.
- Lived Experience. One person’s account of what happened to them.
- Tradition. Passed down through a lineage, and where it comes from.
All four are worth reading. They are not the same thing, and running them together helps nobody. A personal account is not a study, and a study is not a substitute for what a practitioner has learned in a room with people. The label just tells you which one you have in front of you.
Editorials are the exception. They carry a section but no label, because the four labels say what kind of claim a piece is making, and the editor’s column is not one of them.
What I will not publish
- Anything that diagnoses a condition, treats one, or promises to cure one.
- Anything that names or identifies a client without their written consent.
- Straight advertising for a course or a product. Write about the practice, not the price list.
- Anything unkind about another practitioner or another school.
- Work that is not the author’s own, or that has appeared elsewhere without them telling me.
How editing works
I edit for length, clarity and house style. That is the whole remit.
If an edit changes what a piece means, the author sees it before it goes out and has the final say. Their voice is the reason I wanted the piece, and an article that no longer sounds like the person who wrote it is a worse article, not a tidier one.
Authors keep their copyright. They license me to publish the piece and keep it up, and they are free to republish it themselves afterwards with a link back here.
Claims about the body
Everyone published here is a breathwork practitioner, qualified or in training, and their training and affiliations appear on their profile. What does not appear here is anything claiming breathwork treats, cures or fixes a named condition. That is a medical claim, and this is not a medical publication.
The Evidence Policy sets out where the line sits.
Anything giving practice guidance carries a note at the foot pointing you to your GP, and there is more on the Breathwork Safety page about who should take particular care.
Dates
Foundations and Our Contributors carry no date. One is reference and the other is people, and a date on either tells you nothing worth knowing.
If a piece is substantially revised, it says so.
Images
Photographs of practitioners are their own. Everything else, the picture at the top of an article, is usually made rather than taken, generated from the words in the piece.
Where a contributor sends their own photograph, it runs as theirs and nobody else’s work is passed off as it.
I mention it because an image above someone’s name reads as theirs, and it is not fair to let you assume that when it isn’t.
Money, and what it does not buy
Nobody pays to be published here and nobody is paid to write here. Event listings are free.
If that ever changes, anything paid for will be labelled as such, plainly, at the top of the piece and not in small print at the bottom.
I also co-found a breathwork training organisation, The Exhale Awakening, with Marie Doherty. It is named in the footer of every page. Being published here has nothing to do with it, and no contributor is ever asked to have anything to do with it.
Comments
There are none, deliberately. An unmoderated comment thread under an article about breathing and the nervous system is a problem nobody here has the hours to police properly, and half-policing it is worse than not having it.
If you want to say something, email me. I read everything.
If we get it wrong
We will, at some point. The Corrections and Complaints page says how to tell me and what I will do about it.