The word breathwork carries a lot of baggage. Say it out loud and people picture ice baths, chanting, a yoga class with incense, or someone on the internet promising it will change your life in four minutes. What I do is none of those things, so let me describe a session plainly.
Breathwork, as I practise it, is structured breathing that I guide you through from start to finish. It isn’t meditation. It isn’t yoga breathing. There’s nothing to learn beforehand and nothing to perform.
Why breathe in a pattern at all?
Because some of what we carry doesn’t live in the thinking mind. It lives in the body.
You’ll know this if you’ve ever understood your problem perfectly, explained it beautifully to friends, read the right books, and still felt your chest tighten in the same old situations. Insight is useful, but it doesn’t always reach the place where the pattern is held. I’ve written before about why talking about your problems isn’t always enough, and breathwork is one of the answers to that gap.
Breathing in a structured pattern shifts the nervous system into a state where what’s stuck can start to move. Not because it’s mystical, but because the breath is one of the few levers we have that speaks to the body directly.
The session itself
You lie or sit comfortably. That’s the full extent of the physical demand.
I guide the breathing pattern throughout, and I check in with you constantly. You stay aware the whole time. A session runs around an hour, and there is no point in it where you’re left wondering what you’re supposed to be doing.
What happens next varies from person to person, and I mean that honestly. Some people cry. Some feel a physical release, a trembling or a warmth or a letting-go they find hard to describe afterwards. Some simply feel calm for the first time in weeks. There is no single right experience, and a quiet session is not a failed one.
What it tends to help with
The people who get the most from this work usually arrive carrying some mix of chronic stress, overwhelm, emotional exhaustion, anxiety, or that flat, shut-down state that’s often the freeze response doing its job too well.
For nervous-system overwhelm, breathwork is often the fastest relief in the room. Talking takes time to reach the body. The breath is already there.
Why guided matters
People sometimes ask why they should sit with me when there are breathing apps and hour-long YouTube patterns available for free. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is about pace.
A recording moves at the recording’s pace. It doesn’t know that your shoulders just rose, that your breath has gone shallow, that something surfaced two minutes ago and needs room. Guiding a session means adjusting it in real time to what your body is actually doing, and knowing when to slow down, when to deepen, and when to simply let you rest.
It also means someone is holding the room. Part of why stuck things can finally move in a session is that, for once, you’re not the one keeping watch.
On its own, or alongside hypnotherapy
Breathwork stands perfectly well on its own. But in my practice it often sits alongside hypnotherapy, because they’re the body-led and subconscious sides of the same work. Hypnotherapy works with the beliefs and patterns underneath a problem. Breathwork works with what the body is holding. Some weeks call for one, some for the other, and a course of sessions can weave both.
If you’d rather not do this alone
Some people find the idea of one-to-one work a little intense as a first step, and for them there’s group breathwork in West London. Same structured work, held in a small room of others, guided from start to finish. The groups are beginner-friendly and deliberately small, so dates go to the waitlist first. A message is the way in.
The practical questions
Do I need any experience? None. If you can lie down and breathe, you have every qualification required.
What if nothing happens? Then you’ll have spent an hour breathing well and resting, which is more than most nervous systems get in a normal week. In practice, something usually does happen; it’s just rarely the thing people expect.
In person or online? One-to-one sessions run at my practice in Ealing, W5, a short walk from Ealing Broadway, or online via Zoom UK-wide. If you’re driving, on-street parking is usually available on the surrounding residential streets. And the work travels well online; the guidance and the check-ins are the same through a screen.
What does it cost? Sessions are £125, or £150 in Central London, with packages available. Before any of that, there’s a free introductory call of up to 30 minutes, so you can ask everything you want to ask before committing to anything.
Final thoughts
If you’ve spent years managing everything from the neck up, working with the breath can feel almost suspiciously simple. That’s usually the objection: surely it can’t be that direct.
But the body doesn’t respond to sophistication. It responds to safety, rhythm and time. Breathwork offers it all three, in a room where someone is paying attention.
If your system has been running hot for longer than you’d like to admit, start with a message and tell me in a sentence what’s going on.