I came to breathwork by accident…or so I thought. When I first began practising just over a year ago, it was simply a requirement of my training to become a certificated professional breathwork coach and facilitator. As is common for me, and I suspect for many of us, I demanded a lot of myself but wasn’t sure what to expect of breathwork. I’d been advised to anticipate anything from emotional release to spiritual experience, greater self-awareness, a calmer relationship with stress, and perhaps a kinder one with myself.
What I did not expect was trauma release, grief, talking to ghosts, tears (lots), laughter (also lots), more capacity to love, more self-compassion, improved mental clarity, greater neuroplasticity, or… to become a poet. This was not the plan.
After my first guided conscious connected breathwork session, my experience of what I call my three V’s: vivid, visceral and vital, was so much all those things that I couldn’t look away. I was IN. And in I went, too fast, too hard, too often. So much happened in those breaths (mostly CCB at this stage) that within two months I felt burnt out and had to step back gently from my practice to ‘reflect’.
Reflection isn’t the wrong word, but I now understand this to be an integral part of the process we call integration. Being honest, at the time, at the time, it felt more like disintegration — a kind of unravelling. Then something shifted. My ‘magic’ arrived. I should stress that this article speaks only to my experience of integration; I know from research, clients, peers, mentors and amazing teachers that what emerges is different for everyone.
Once I stopped trying to do breathwork and force an outcome, and began creating real spaciousness around my sessions, I realised that integration is simply the moment when the body’s truth finds a form. Breathwork shone a light on shadows I didn’t know were there, moved energy to places neglected, allowed me to revisit the remains of days untended, and surfaced memories without seeking permission. In the quiet that followed a practice, something in me needed to capture what I’d witnessed, not explain it, but honour it. What began as raw, unfiltered ‘word-vomit’, slowly revealed itself as poetry: a way for experience to settle, to be witnessed, and when I needed, to be rewritten.
I was hearing people on my course refer to the ‘Twin Trails’, and realised I was breathing them, walking them and writing them. So, alongside the catharsis, calm and all the physiological benefits of practicing breathwork, I was walking a path of creativity previously gated to me. My poems became the place where the somatic experience settled, preserving some of the texture, temperature and feeling.
My experience has been that breathwork opened a conversation with parts of me that don’t speak in obvious analysis or explanation, but through images, rhythm and words. I realise now that the body wrote first and the language was received. Not everyone who practises breathwork will write poetry. Some may journal, draw, dance, sing, bang a drum, hug a loved one or, simply sit quietly with what emerges…creating a legacy without trying.
Because integration is not always talking, thinking or analysing. Sometimes it is making something imperceptible by creating spaciousness in ourselves. So, perhaps the best way to explain what happens when the body writes first is to step aside and let a poem speak.
Legacy
Is this a dream
or a realisation?
A reflection…
Does he see the shadow
blowing over his face?
Admission that some lives are called
not toward personal legend but,
the quiet work of caring.
He cannot decide when to look away;
follows the pull of the dream,
never ready for the quiet that comes,
when longing ends.
Because the finished thing stands alone.
A door swinging open to judgment.
The unfinished self can keep becoming.
Remaining in the making is a way
of staying unpinned…
still shimmering with what-ifs,
untouched by the gravity of failure,
safe in the place where nothing is asked
to succeed.
© Ian King 2026.
