What this magazine publishes about the body, and where the line sits.
Breathwork sits in an awkward spot. Some of it has been studied properly. Some of it is thousands of years old and has never been near a laboratory. Some of it is what a practitioner has noticed across a few hundred sessions and cannot yet explain.
All three are worth writing about. The problem comes when they get run together, and a reader cannot tell which one they are being handed.
This page is how we keep them apart.
The author is the authority
Every piece is published under the name of a breathwork practitioner, qualified or in training, with their training and their affiliations stated on their profile page. They are the authority on their own practice, and their name goes on their words.
Where the line sits
Write about your practice, what you teach, and what you have seen in a room with people. That is what this magazine is for and it is the writing nobody else is doing.
What does not run here is a sentence that says breathwork does a named thing to a named condition. “Breathwork lowers blood pressure” is a medical claim, and it needs a clinician behind it, not a magazine. “When I slow my breathing right down, I feel steadier within a couple of minutes” is your own experience, told as your own experience, and it needs nothing behind it but you.
If a piece drifts into the first kind, I will say so and we will find the second sentence together. It is almost always the better one.
If you want to write about research, do. Name the study, link it, and say what it actually measured. That is an Evidence piece and it is welcome. It is just never a requirement.
Words that do not appear here
Cure. Treat. Heal, where it means a medical outcome. Detox. Proven to. Guaranteed. Miracle.
Not because they sound bad, but because each one makes a promise that breathwork cannot keep and that no honest practitioner would make in a room with a client.
The four labels
Every piece carries one, and it tells you what kind of writing you have in front of you.
- Evidence means sources are named and you can check them.
- Method means this is how the author teaches it. It is their way of working, not a general recommendation.
- Lived Experience means this happened to one person. It is not advice and it is not a study.
- Tradition means the practice is handed down, and the piece says where from.
A Lived Experience piece is not held to a lower standard of honesty. It is held to a different standard of proof, which is the right one for what it is.
Where the evidence is thin, we say so
Quite a lot of breathwork research is small, short, and done on people who volunteered because they were already interested. That does not make it worthless. It makes it early.
A piece that says “the studies here are small and this is still an open question” is a better piece than one that does not, and it is the version I would always rather run.
If you think we have got something wrong
Tell me. The Corrections and Complaints page says how, and what happens next. If a claim on this site is wrong, I want to know more than I want to be right.