What Happens After You Leave the Room: A Reflection on Breathwork Integration
You’ve been to the retreat. Or the workshop, or the session, or the course.
It was wonderful.
You felt that something shifted.
And then, a few days later, you’re back in your ordinary life wondering where it all went.
If that sounds familiar, I don’t think you did anything wrong. Perhaps the integration never really got started, because we’re rarely told what it actually involves.
The Ice Cream
We had a retreat at the studio recently. A day of breathwork, movement and some lovely connection, run by my breathwork mentors, Sharyn and Marie at The Exhale Awakening.
It was a beautiful day.
And we may have accidentally started a new tradition, because afterwards we got the ice cream out. Then we went off on one of my Wonder Walks together.
Now this might sound like a small and slightly silly thing to build a piece of writing around.
But it stayed on my mind all week, because I think the ice cream was doing something more interesting than we might realise on first look.
Integration: The Tick-Box Version
There’s a word that gets used a lot in breathwork, and in plenty of other wellness spaces.
Integration.
And often what people mean by it is something fairly small and quite tidy.
Finish the session, have a glass of water, do five minutes of journaling, and there you go.
Integration done. Tick.
There’s nothing wrong with any of that, and if journaling is something you enjoy, please do it. But I think it can miss the mark, and, especially for those of you who have a regular breathwork practice it can turn something living into a tick-box exercise ( I wonder if you can relate to that).
For me, integration isn’t really a thing you do for five minutes after an experience. I believe it’s how you choose to live once you’ve left the room.
A group of us sitting around with ice cream, still in that softened state together, might have been better integration than any amount of journaling would have managed that day.
Slowing Down the Advice
Now I’m not preaching about this as if I know some other “better” way to do this and I too give the standard advice, of course.
I say it after every breathwork I facilitate.
Drink some water.
Eat something nourishing.
Spend time with lovely people.
Be gentle with yourself.
It’s good advice.
However, my own breathwork journey has shown me that it’s a bit too easy to nod along to and then do nothing with it afterwards.
Those words are doing a lot of work, but how often do we really stop to ask what they actually mean?
So let me slow them down for you.
Drink plenty of water.
Fine. And there’s sense in it.
If you’ve been breathing with your mouth open, or faster than usual, you may well come out with a dry mouth. We do lose moisture through the breath.
Though let’s be accurate about the scale of it. We’re talking tens of millilitres, not litres. So perhaps “drink plenty of water” isn’t quite the right instruction. Carry on drinking as you normally would is nearer the mark.
But I think the water is doing something else anyway.
There’s something grounding about taking something physical into the body. And there’s the cup itself. Something to hold. Something warm, perhaps.
Because here’s what I notice. The moment a session ends, there’s often a pull towards the next thing. Gathering your bag. Thinking about the drive home. Already halfway into the rest of your day while your body is still settling.
A drink gives you a reason to stay. To sit down for another few minutes rather than rushing off.
And does it have to be water? Maybe not. A cup of tea. A hot chocolate. Whatever gives you that pause. Though perhaps not alcohol, since your system has already been through something and is still processing.
Because perhaps the point was never the water at all. Perhaps the point is that you stayed a little longer.
Nourishing food.
Okay….
But how familiar are you with what actually nourishes you?
Not what’s considered healthy.
Not what you think you should be eating.
What leaves you feeling well, and steady, and cared for?
And of course there are many more ways to nourish yourself than food. Perhaps a walk in the garden, a nap, a snuggle with your favourite blanket or perhaps a furry friend.
It’s a surprisingly personal question, and sitting with this could very well be a whole exploration in itself.
Spend time with lovely people.
Also fine.
But who are your people, really?
And the harder bit…
Can you actually get to them?
Because sometimes the answer is that the people who would nourish you most are not currently in your life.
And that’s tough.
So the advice isn’t go and see your people. It’s go and find your people. Which is, once again, a much bigger piece of work, and an important one, but not always easy.
When Something Asks Something of You
Then there’s the slower layer of integration, which is the one that fascinates me most.
Sometimes things come up in a breathwork that ask something of you. Not in a dramatic way. But you might come out of a session looking at the world a little differently. Looking at the way your life is set up, and whether it still fits.
Maybe even wondering whether something you’ve been tolerating is still something you want to tolerate.
Sometimes you might realise there’s a conversation you need to have.
A difficult one. And maybe you don’t feel ready (and that’s ok!).
That isn’t a problem with the breathwork. That’s often the work of breathwork. You’ve been given information, and information has a habit of changing us in some way.
But you don’t have to act on it that afternoon.
You can sit with it.
You can breathe with it for weeks if you need to, until it becomes clearer, or until you feel steadier. That’s integration too.
Somewhere to Return To
This is why community matters so much in this work.
Integration is easier when there’s somewhere to return to. The people who come back to Still Space Hull month after month, and to the evening sessions, aren’t just coming for another breathwork. They’re coming back to a place where this kind of thing is the norm. Where you can arrive carrying whatever you’re carrying, and nobody needs it thoroughly explained.
That returning is part of the integration. Having a rhythm. Having somewhere that holds the thread between one session and the next, so the insight doesn’t evaporate on Monday morning.
Breathwork as Integration
A reframe I’d like to offer, if it lands for you.
There’s a school of thought in some spaces that breathwork is the thing that stirs everything up.
The big experience.
The session where something shifts or surfaces or you have a huge realisation.
But breathwork can also be the thing that helps you settle what’s already been stirred.
It doesn’t always have to open something new.
Sometimes it’s the place you go to make sense of what’s already there.
To let something land.
To be with a thing you’ve not quite become ready to act on yet.
So there’s breathwork, and there’s life after breathwork.
And then sometimes there’s breathwork to integrate the breathwork.
Which sounds a bit circular when I see it written down, but I think that’s how these things actually work, and, well…. I like that.
If It Faded by Monday
So if you’ve been to a retreat, or a workshop, or a session of any kind, and found yourself back in ordinary life a few days later, that’s not a sign anything has failed.
Ordinary life is where you were always going. It’s the point. The session was never meant to be the destination.
But what might be worth asking is whether anything came back with you.
Not a feeling, necessarily. Feelings fade, and they’re supposed to. More whether you’re seeing something a bit differently now. Whether you’re a little more open to something being different, if that’s what you want. Whether you’re a bit more willing to be yourself in the places you usually aren’t.
We can arrive at these things half expecting a transformation. A big realisation. Something we’ll be able to point at afterwards and say, that was the moment. And occasionally it does work like that. But far more often the change is small and slow and almost boring to describe. You say no to something you’d normally have said yes to. You notice you’re bracing and you stop. You have the conversation.
Much harder to spot than a transformation. But it tends to last longer.
It’s not only the journaling or the sharing circle. It’s what you eat, and who you’re with, and what you let yourself look at afterwards. It’s whether you have somewhere to come back to.
And yes, sometimes, it’s ice cream.
And a proper thank you to Sharyn and Marie at The Exhale Awakening for a beautiful day at the studio.
May you meet yourself with compassion, walk with presence, and remember, you already have everything you need.
