I needed a graduation project. That was the whole brief.
To qualify as a breathwork facilitator I had to travel a journey and document it in some way. It was mid 2020, the middle of a pandemic, and I had no work. So I sat with a question for weeks. What does my breathwork path actually look like?
The first answer arrived as a picture.
I saw it the way you see something in a dream and know it matters before you know why. A shape. I had no idea what it was, so I looked it up, and then I half laughed and half cried. It was the Lorenz attractor, the butterfly-shaped figure that has come to stand for chaos theory. The idea that a tiny difference at the start can change everything that follows.
Chaos.
The exact thing I had spent my working life resolving. Bringing calm to chaos in companies, in teams, in broken processes. And the exact thing sitting in my own chest that year, when my sense of direction was shaky at best and some weeks absent altogether.
The second thing I was given was the number one. Along with a clear understanding that if you duplicate it and turn it over, the two halves come together as an arrow pointing north. The one true direction.
Those two shapes went together with the star that has been with me since I first started working for myself, drawn by Cathy of The Old Burrow. That was the first draft. The words that came with it were Breath of Business.
And then nothing happened for a long while.
The idea went up on the wall where all my ideas go to settle and sprout, and I left it there. Meanwhile something else was surfacing.
For decades I had worked and worked and worked. I had my first job at thirteen. The pandemic took the work away, and at the same time put me in the most wonderful house on the edge of a lake, with green everywhere and ducklings and moorhens for company. The sun shone. I spent part of every day in breathwork, in meditation, in contemplation.
That was when I noticed how full on my life had been. And how much I was enjoying hearing the rhythms underneath it. The seasons. The times of day. The in breath and the out breath.
I started with the moon, because I have always been drawn to it. Each month I noticed the dark, the full, and some of what happens in between. I was reading Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star at the time, and I could see a parallel between her work on change and the change that happens overhead every month.
So I began mapping my working year onto it. Winter for going inward and letting go. Spring for curiosity and research. Summer for production, when an idea becomes a project and the growth happens almost without you. Autumn for harvest and finishing.
I want to be careful here, because this is a frame I found useful, not a claim about how anybody’s body works. What it gave me was permission.
I wake up in winter. I make a very slow start. I am properly awake at night, in the autumn hours before bed. Others wake like larks and have half their day done before I have found the kettle.
Knowing that did not make me more productive. It made me stop treating myself as a failure for not being up at five.
By the time I came back to the logo, the arrow had stopped feeling right. Having a direction had mattered less than I thought. Noticing the phase I was actually in had mattered more. So the arrow came out and the four colours of the moon went in, turning the chaos the other way up, into calm, with the breath.
That is the story of a logo.
Then I had to build the actual thing, which is the part nobody tells you about graduation projects.
I wanted to offer something that let people spend an hour with me for free, before deciding whether they wanted anything more. My two passions are coaching and breathwork, both from a place of empowerment rather than repair. So I built a session that opened with a cuppa and a conversation, moved into wherever we were in the cycle, and then into a creative breathwork with a playlist that matched it.
One thing I made a point of saying every time. The moon gets talked about as feminine and as the keeper of women’s cycles. The ebb and flow of creative energy is not. It belongs to everyone in the room, whatever their gender and whatever their age.
Sometimes one person came. Sometimes more. I was inconsistent with the marketing and I knew I was being inconsistent while I was being inconsistent. One paying client came out of it, eventually, from the time we spent together.
I was happy with the project. I was also clear that it was a start and nothing more than a start.
If you are coming up to your own graduation project, that is the bit I would want you to hear. Not the vision in the dream. The one person who turned up, and the marketing you did not do, and the fact that it counted anyway.
The sessions still run, years later, on the quarter turning of the moon. The marketing is still spasmodic. I have made my peace with that.
