Martin McPhilimey - School of Breath Science

A powerful breathwork experience can feel healing.

When someone has a significant emotional release, they often feel lighter, calmer, more connected, and more hopeful afterwards.

But there is a difference between a powerful experience and long-term change.

There is a difference between creating emotional intensity and knowing how to work with a human being over time in a way that creates safety, resilience, and sustainable results.

Intensity has its place.

Catharsis can be useful in the right context, at the right time, with the right person.

But not when a client needs restoration rather than activation.
Not when they need regulation rather than emotional overwhelm.
Not when they lack the capacity to safely process what emerges.

My concern is that in parts of the breathwork industry, catharsis has become the product.

Trauma has become the marketing hook.

Emotional vulnerability has become the conversion strategy.

Powerful breathwork experiences are filmed, edited into compelling social media content, and used as evidence that transformation has occurred.

But not every powerful experience is healing.

Not every emotional release leads to lasting change.

Many people experience temporary relief only to find themselves back in the same patterns days or weeks later.

Before choosing a breathwork training, ask the teacher:

• How are individuals assessed?
• What is the scope of practice?
• Do they understand nervous system physiology?
• Do they teach progression and regression?
• Do they teach when NOT to use a method?
• Are they teaching you how to think, or simply how to facilitate an experience?

Because if you want to work with people experiencing stress, burnout, anxiety, grief, trauma, sleep disruption, or dysregulation, you need more than a method.

You need reasoning.

You need systems.

You need judgement.

You need understanding.

At the School of Breath Science, we believe breathwork should not be manipulation disguised as transformation.

It should be safe, skilled, ethical, and grounded in understanding the person in front of you.

If that resonates with you, comment BSC below and I’ll send you more information.

The unconscious mind connects with the conscious mind through feeling, but those representations of feeling come from creative symbolism. It’s not whether the symbols need working out like logic; it’s an intuitive felt sense from a creative spirit.

The therapy session started as if I felt as if I hadn’t created any space to connect to myself for a while, and as a result I was disconnecting from the things that I love. This wasn’t about mental health, although had I ignored the signs, it could have led down that route.

There is a sense of pressure to show up every day. If that is only validated through growth, financial success, and actually getting all you want in life, it could be easy to miss the gratitude, the contentment, and to simply enjoy it.

I don’t want to be on my deathbed wishing that I’d lived this life a different way.

We all have unconscious drivers. We all have patterns of behaviour that are conducive to creating these types of loops, and unless they become closed, they will drive us unconsciously.

There’s nothing to this post other than to share something vulnerably. If you connect with it, then I’m glad it’s helped. If you think I’m over-sharing, then I’d say I’m not here to perform.

If you’d like to share something underneath, perhaps your own reflection, then I’d love to hear from you, not from a place of need, but from a place of love.

Higher HRV does not always mean better recovery.

This is one of the biggest misunderstandings I see in the breathwork, wellness, and nervous system regulation space.

In this video, I break down a case example of a 46-year-old female breathwork facilitator with high HRV, but also emotional intensity, inconsistent energy, variable sleep, emotional highs and lows, and fluctuating motivation.

On paper, her wearable data might suggest she is “recovering well.”
But when we look at the bigger picture — sleep quality, emotional stability, respiratory patterns, stress exposure, training load, and day-to-day function — the story may be very different.

This is why HRV should never be interpreted in isolation.

For breathwork facilitators, coaches, therapists, yoga teachers, somatic practitioners, and anyone working with nervous system regulation, this conversation matters.

Because higher HRV is not always better.

Sometimes the better question is not:

“Is the HRV high?”

But:

“Is this person becoming more stable, functional, adaptable, and regulated in real life?”

Comment YTB below and I’ll send the full video to your DMs.

Social media rewards attention.

That’s great for exposure.

But exposure isn’t enough.

Attention gets people to look at you.

But what if they are looking at you because they like how you perform?

A bit like watching a Netflix documentary full of cheap, exciting ideas, but lacking any real depth. You leave feeling like you’ve learned something, but when you reflect on it, there’s not much there.

There are many people with large numbers who have no idea how to convert that attention into a business.

They have worked with every business coach under the sun, tried all the tricks, and still got nowhere.

That’s because trust is the reason people buy from you.

Unless you’re only selling tricks.

But if you’re a coach or an educator, you have to build trust and likeability.

You do that through authenticity.

And often, that requires a hell of a lot of vulnerability.

The joy of my 1:1 mentorships is that you are not just getting an educator.

You are getting someone who has walked the walk and can talk the talk.

And I am there to mentor you, not just educate you.

Lydia told me a few weeks ago that she could never see herself getting behind the camera.

I told her the truth:

People don’t buy from businesses.

They buy from people.

She is now posting regular reels, and I could not be more proud.

If this is the type of support you want alongside your professional training, drop me a DM today.

“But it’s just breathing.”

As a breath practitioner, you’ve probably heard that before.

Yet an interesting finding from the research is that how breathing is practised appears to matter.

Whether someone is being guided, counting their breaths, following a specific pace, or simply observing their natural breathing pattern can influence which brain networks are engaged and how the experience is processed.

This raises an interesting question:

If someone struggles with attention, might a guided practice be more useful initially because it provides an external anchor for focus?

Over time, however, that same person may need to learn how to count or pace themselves so regulation is not dependent on someone else’s voice.

Likewise, someone experiencing anxiety or panic may find it difficult to let go of conscious control. For them, simple breath awareness and learning to observe the breath without changing it might be a more appropriate starting point.

The nuance matters.

Breathing is automatic, but that doesn’t mean it is unimportant.

In fact, the very fact that it operates mostly outside conscious awareness may be one reason why it is so often taken for granted.

And perhaps why the work of breath practitioners is sometimes taken for granted too.

The breath may be automatic.

How we relate to it is not.

A recent study concluded that different breathing approaches can engage attention, emotional regulation, and self-referential processing in different ways.

What are your thoughts?

Have you noticed that different breathing instructions create very different experiences for your clients?

Ng, H. Y. H., Hsu, A. L., Wu, C. W., Huang, C. M., Chao, Y. P., Jung, T. P., & Chuang, C. H. (2026). Frontal Electroencephalography Asymmetry and Desynchronized Functional Connectivity Associated with Long-Term and Short-Term Breathing Training. Mindfulness, 1-16.

schoolofbreathsciencE

Breathwork is not as simple as choosing a technique and expecting a guaranteed outcome.

A breathing practice is not powerful because someone on the internet says it “activates the vagus nerve,” “releases trauma,” “improves CO₂ tolerance,” or “calms the nervous system.”

Those claims often confuse mechanisms with outcomes.

A mechanism might make something biologically plausible, but it does not tell you how that technique will land in a real person with a real history, real stress, real sleep patterns, real health concerns, and a real nervous system already adapting to its environment.

This is where a lot of breathwork education falls short.

It teaches techniques before it teaches assessment.

It teaches claims before it teaches clinical reasoning.

It teaches “do this for that” before it teaches practitioners how to understand the person in front of them.

The same breathing technique can help regulate one person and dysregulate another.

That is why context matters.

The goal is not to memorise more techniques.

The goal is to understand when, why, and for whom a technique may be useful—and when it may not be.

Don’t be fooled by the person with the biggest following telling you what the “best” technique is.

Simple content from the peak of Mount Bu****it often goes viral.

Depth, nuance, assessment, and personalisation rarely do.

If you work with people, put the person before the breath.

Too many breath coaches are focused on techniques.

The best practitioners are focused on understanding the human being in front of them.

Hyperventilation syndrome may be more complex than simply “breathing too much.”

This paper compared 12 people with confirmed idiopathic hyperventilation syndrome to 12 matched healthy controls and found a more nuanced pattern of ventilatory control.

People with HVS showed:
* higher resting ventilation
* more variable breathing
* more breathlessness at rest
* similar central CO₂ sensitivity
* lower plant gain
* greater peripheral chemoreceptor influence

In other words, the physiology may not be best explained by a simple “low CO₂” story.

Instead, this study points toward a broader picture involving breathing instability, altered CO₂ buffering, and stronger peripheral influences on resting ventilatory control.

Important context: this was a small case-control study, so the findings are best viewed as mechanistic and hypothesis-generating rather than the final word.

Pauwen, N. Y., Bruyneel, M., Herpeux, A., Sergysels, R., Ninane, V., & Faoro, V. (2026). Peripheral chemoreceptors, plant gain, and CO₂ stores as drivers of resting ventilatory control in idiopathic hyperventilation: A prospective case-control study. Journal of Applied Physiology, 140(1), 262–278.