BREATH&WORDS – Written by the people who hold the room
Thousands of us practise this work. We sit with people while something moves through them. We watch things happen we can’t fully explain, and almost none of us write any of it down.
So the words that reach people who are curious tend to come from everywhere except us. From marketers. From strangers. From nobody in particular.
This is us answering in our own voice. Written by practitioners, about the work as it really is, in the ordinary language of people who do it.
Every piece has a name on it and a training behind it. Nobody here promises a cure, you are not broken. And nothing is held back or behind a paywall. No subscription, no account, nothing to unlock. Just read.
You breathe, you’re one of us already.
Welcome to Breath&Words.
What you’ll find here
The Foundations – Breathwork, explained by the people who teach it. Whether it’s your first breathwork or your thousandth, there’s something for you here.
The Voices – Practitioners writing honestly about their own becoming. The doubts and the wobbles included.
The Body – What actually happens when you breathe consciously. What the evidence shows, and where it’s still finding its feet.
The Practice – For those who hold others. The continued learning of the craft, the quiet questions, and the business of it all – which so few discuss kindly.
Our Contributors – The people this magazine is made of. Names, faces, and where they trained.
How we do things
Everyone who writes here is a breathwork practitioner, qualified or in training. They tell you where they trained, and their name is on the piece. If you want to know who’s talking to you, you can always find out.
What we steer away from is anything claiming breathwork does a specific thing to a specific condition. Bodies are complicated, and so are lives. What moves one person may do very little for the next. Nothing here diagnoses, treats, or promises to cure.
That doesn’t make the writing timid. It makes it useful. There is a great deal we can tell you about breathwork that is supported by evidence, and a great deal more that practitioners know from years of sitting with people. Both are worth your time. We’ll always be clear which is which.
Three things guide us:
Accessible. No subscription, no account, nothing to unlock. If you can find it, you can read it.
Kind. To our writers, to each other, and to ourselves. This work asks a lot of the people who do it, and kindness is not a soft option. It’s the whole discipline.
Community. Nobody does this alone. What one of us learns, all of us can use.
Meet your editor
I’m Sharyn with a Why, the founder and editor here. The Curious Curator, if we’re being informal about it.
I came to breathwork the way a lot of people do. A long-time overachiever with a great deal of responsibility, I overextended my nervous system until it stopped cooperating. Burnout, arriving alongside perimenopause. I was very good at carrying on, right up until I wasn’t. The breath saved me.
I trained at Breathing Space, where I now teach. Over a thousand hours of accredited training, and I’m still learning. What surprised me wasn’t that breathwork helped. It was how much practitioners know that never gets written down. That’s why this magazine exists.
I met Marie Doherty at Breathing Space and together we co-founded The Exhale Awakening, home of the Exhale Wisdom School. We teach breathwork, share Celtic wisdom and natural astrology, and support practitioners with the business and the tending of it all. It’s work we love, and a good deal of what we write here comes from our experience there.
Write with us
If you work with breath, we’d like to publish your words. Wherever in the world you practise.
Most people think they’ve nothing to write about. In our experience they’re wrong. The things you know best have simply stopped feeling remarkable to you. They won’t be to somebody else.
There’s no account to make and nothing to pay, and you don’t need to have written for a magazine before. Some of our best pieces came from people who never had.
Have a look at Write with us, or email hello@breathandwords.com and tell us what’s been on your mind.