On Breathwork and Other Things Everyone's Qualified to Teach
A few years ago, everyone suddenly started offering breathwork. I remember thinking: Okay... what's the difference between breathwork and pranayama? The answer, as far as I could tell, was the target audience.
Wellness has a remarkable talent for discovering things that have existed for thousands of years and introducing them to us as if they just invented oxygen. Or, conversely, inventing something and then calling it a thousands-of-years-old ancestral technique.
Out of curiosity, I joined a breathwork session a few years ago. The facilitator was someone I trusted enough at the time, and it was a space for BIPOC. So I felt a little safer breathing. Before we started, he took his time explaining his difficult past, how he got into breathwork, his experiences with it, and what could happen. Memories. Emotions. Physical reactions. Things coming up. Looking back, I appreciated that. Because even with someone being careful, I walked away thinking: This is no joke.
Which is exactly why I get nervous every time I see another "Become a Breathwork Facilitator" training pop up.
Nowadays, breathwork seems to have become the new yoga teacher training. One weekend. One certificate. One "How to Market Your Offering" follow-up course with 15% off. Go heal people.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned. But if someone has spent thirty years studying the breath—whether through medicine, respiratory physiology, yoga, or another serious discipline—why would I rather put myself into the hands of someone who discovered conscious breathing eighteen months ago?
I'm not trying to be sarcastic here. It's a serious question.
Because breathing isn't just... breathing. You can influence your heart rate. Your blood chemistry. Your nervous system. You can trigger panic attacks. You can induce altered states. People can faint. People can dissociate. People can experience profound emotional releases. And yet the safety briefing often consists of: "Don't participate if you're pregnant or have a pacemaker." Good to know. But... is that really the full list?
What if someone has bipolar disorder? PTSD? A panic disorder? Psychosis? Severe trauma? Do we know? Does the facilitator know? Or are we all just finding out together
Just in case you are wondering, I don't expect facilitators to have an explanation for every experience someone has. Some things will remain mysterious. Good. I hope they do. Not everything meaningful can—or should—be explained. But when we're intentionally changing someone's breathing—and with it their nervous system, blood chemistry, and state of consciousness—I do expect a little more expertise than: "I did a training and it changed my life."
That's what fascinates me about so much of the healing industry. People are deeply interested in healing (which I think is great). Less interested in understanding what they're actually doing (which I don't think is so great). Intensity has somehow become a substitute for depth. The stronger the experience, the more healing we're told it must have been.
Breathwork is just the example. I've been noticing the same pattern across the wellness industry for years. Many of us are confusing having an experience with understanding an experience. Someone has one life-changing retreat. Six months later, they're leading retreats. Someone heals from burnout. A year later, they're helping others heal burnout. Someone discovers the nervous system. Two weeks later, they're explaining trauma to 200,000 followers.
I'm exaggerating. Okay, I'm not.
Of course, lived experience matters. I would never dismiss that. But lived experience and expertise are not automatically the same thing. One tells you what happened to you. The other helps you understand why it happened, when it happens differently, and when your experience should not be generalized to everyone else. That's a very different kind of knowledge.
And the breath, my spiritual curious friend, is extraordinary. Which is exactly why I think it deserves a little less confidence and a little more competence. We've become incredibly comfortable guiding people into experiences we barely understand ourselves. And then we call it healing.
Sometimes I wonder whether the most spiritual sentence a facilitator could say is simply: "I don't know enough to guide you through that." Apparently, certainty converts better.
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