Lying on my back with an eye mask on, I sense a silly, happy grin forming on my face. It could be relief that the active phase of my first taste of “deep dive” breathwork is over.
Or maybe something more.
Certainly, as music plays in the background, a deep sense of relaxation pervades the body. It comes after more than half an hour of being coached to breathe in and out of the mouth, in a constant circular motion, pushing the exhale down to belly and hips. This is interspersed by “toning”, which is best described as imitation of a toddler tantrum – pounding the mat with heels and clenched fists.
Welcome to the world of conscious connected breathwork (CCB). At its most extreme it can, some studies suggest, bring people to an altered state of consciousness, akin to the effect of taking magic mushrooms. This is attributed to shifting the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, to a degree that was never going to happen on a first session undertaken for journalistic reasons.
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Breath coach Paul Reynolds brings me back to the reality of a Monday afternoon with the offer of chocolate, a glass of water and debrief to end the two-hour, one-on-one session.
Earlier, sitting cross-legged on a cushion in the studio at the top of his south Dublin home, he explains how breathwork has changed his life personally and professionally. Last July, this quietly spoken, English-born father of two made the leap from being partner in a successful renewable energy consultancy firm to devoting himself full-time to combining business coaching with teaching breathwork.
In a new self-published book, Breathe Free: A Guide to Your Conscious Connected Breath, he outlines how his first experience of this type of breathwork in June, 2021 – soon after moving to Ireland – has led to this. He firmly believes that if you change your breath, you change your life.
As babies, we do it right, breathing deeply into the belly. But as we grow up, life pressures tend to alter that habitual, unconscious pattern. Stress, trauma, posture and even something as mundane as tight trousers, he explains, all shape and restrict breathing over time.
Shallower breathing from the chest may become the norm, keeping us in a low-grade fight-or-flight state. This can contribute to issues such as fatigue, tension, anxiety, irritability and scattered thoughts.
“When you consciously change how you breathe – expanding where it’s tight, softening where it’s held – you change the messages your nervous system sends to your brain,” he said.
At this turning of the year, many people reflect and think about what they might try to change about their lives. What to start and what to stop in the next 12 months.
Is breathwork something to consider?
There are lots of different reasons why you might want to try it, says Reynolds. These range from stress relief and emotional release to more efficient functioning of the body. He also finds it brings new clarity of thought, which he says clients report too.
Finally, there is the connection to self, of which he says: “The most important relationship you can have, but we don’t really talk about it very much, certainly not explicitly. This is an amazing way to meet yourself and to start to like yourself and ultimately move towards loving yourself.”
This might sound trite and corny, he acknowledged, but “ultimately it is what everyone wants on one level”. He added: “I think this is a very effective tool for improving that relationship with yourself, which then spills out into a relationship with others and work and everything else.”
“Breathwork” is a term that covers a multitude and Reynolds likes to use the acronym ART to describe the scope:
- A) Awareness practices, such as mindfulness, meditation and body scans, where you’re becoming aware of the breath and the body, but not necessarily looking to change the breathing pattern. “That can be powerful in its own right and obviously meditation is well known and has a range of different, beneficial results.”
- R) Regulatory practices, which enable a shift from the “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system to the “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system. For example, box breathing, consisting of four seconds in, hold for four seconds, four seconds out, hold for four seconds etc, imagining each step as a side of a square box. A variation on that, the four-seven-eight technique (inhale-hold-exhale) can be helpful for getting to sleep.
- T) Transformational, like CCB, which he describes as the “deepest dive” into breathwork. “You’re looking to shift the CO2-O2 balance in the blood, which then can help people enter . . . a non-ordinary state of consciousness, or an altered state.”
Reynolds has always been driven by curiosity. “Maybe searching for something; a slight sense of nonfulfilment, a slight sense of lack. And because of that, I went on this kind of crazy self-development journey. I’ve done pretty much everything there is to do in that sort of space, from having frog poison burnt into my arm and running across Ireland (with his wife Vanessa) in seven days.”
He was always willing to try something and, when he heard about breathwork through a friend of a friend while living in London, he gave it a go. “It really had an impact. I tried it again and again.”
When he moved from London to Dublin five years ago, he wanted to make new friends and find a community.
He contacted some breathworkers and ended up at the door of Nadia Haugh of The Breathing Room in Booterstown, Co Dublin. That was where he had his first session of CCB.
Breathwork is basically about “getting to know your breath”, Haugh tells The Irish Times. “Getting to know this tool that is free in your body and to use it.”
From a physical aspect, “it is retraining the body to breathe open again. Using the diaphragm so that we can reactivate our parasympathetic state and reconnect with our rest-and-digest mode.
“We live mainly with our thinking brain. We forget that we have a whole part of the brain that is called the unconscious mind. Our analytical thinking brain is so powerful that we often don’t create enough space or silence to listen to what our unconscious parts are saying.”
By using the CCB technique of circular breathing, to affect our carbon dioxide and oxygen levels, it slows down the thinking brain, she says. “That’s how emotions can surface through the unconscious mind.”
This is not to be confused with nasal breathing, as championed by internationally renowned Galway-based breathing instructor and author Patrick McKeown. Having trained in the Buteyko method in Moscow, he founded Buteyko Clinic International in 2002 and has developed the Oxygen Advantage Method. Described as a science-based system for optimising oxygen use, calming the mind and strengthening resilience, it is geared towards body, mind and sport. It too is about reconnecting breathing with the body’s natural design but, as Haugh explains, with a different purpose.
“We have a very different intention with our technique,” she says. “He’s absolutely right, you should always breathe through your nose. With our mouth breathing, we invite people to go deeper into the body.”
While nasal breathing is about becoming more efficient in, say, sports performance, “ours is really stress and trauma relief”. She likens the mouth breathing technique to “giving your body a spring clean, whereas nose breathing is like polishing the silver”.
Haugh discovered the transformative effect of CCB in 2014, when Ireland hosted the annual global breathwork conference in Galway. Her sister-in-law was one of the organisers, so she went along out of curiosity as well as to support her.
“At that time, I was going through a very difficult time in my life. I’d lost my mom. I had personal things happening. We were working on our house. The kids weren’t sleeping. And there was a lot of sadness, grief, heavy emotions.”
One moment she was lying on the floor being coached in circular breath, the next “I’m right into my grief”. In our society, “we have created a very performative life,” she says. “We have to keep going. I don’t think I ever really truly stopped. We don’t have the space or the silence anymore to go and feel what we carry, what exists in us.
“I think it was the first time that I was given a space without going into words, but going into silence, to feel how deeply sad I was for the loss of my mom and, 10 years before that, my dad. My dad died when I was pregnant with my first child.”
She lay there suddenly remembering her granny sitting by the Aga and she cried. She realised how our society has lost the art of mourning. Her time at the conference had such a profound impact that she went on to train in breathwork and now trains others.
“What it’s given me, and what I now in turn can bring to others, is create a silent space to just be, to just go and feel.”
