What is Rebirthing Breathwork?

Rebirthing Breathwork is the art of conscious and connected breathing which induces relaxation and an ability to feel into and gently release stored survival energy in your body. This allows you to experience deep inner peace and make profound changes in your life. In short:

Rebirthing offers a unique pathway to inner wisdom, healing and life mastery.

Rebirthing is all about ‘Conscious’ and 'Connected' breathing. 'Conscious' means that we are actually aware of our breathing and are actively in the process. And ‘Connected’ means that the inhale part of our breath merges with the exhale, creating a continuous loop of air and energy (rebirthing is also known as intuitive energy breathing). Breathing in this pattern starts to stir up stored survival energy ready for release when the time is right.

By learning to breathe in this way, many clients have experienced profound shifts in our state of awareness and perspective on life as well as the  ability to handle situations that we once found incredibly difficult.

Most people associate trauma with an external event, such as a car accident or assault. But in truth, trauma is any event (or series of events) where the body feels unsafe and cannot handle the survival stress that gets activated. If that activation is not resolved, that energy gets stored in the body, but the person will still feel its effects (feeling ‘on edge’, a sense of ‘urgency’, constant stress, numbness or a sense of stuckness). Being in this state for long periods of time can lead to chronic health conditions.

So trauma is not what happened to you: it’s what happened in your body when that event was happening. Some people are resilient and can work through the stress of an event, where others cannot. If you're not able to resolve the survival stress, it can result in coping strategies like addictions which can be really harmful (though they protect us from feeling the uncomfortable feelings that happened when the incident occurred). 

That is why it is so essential to get to the root of the trauma (especially if you want to be free of addictions) and rebirthing provides you with the space to gently explore these key moments in our life. This involves feeling into the sensations that we couldn’t feel during the incident. This is not always easy to do, but if done gradually (with titration), the survival energy can and will be released. The difference with rebirthing from therapy is that we don't have to relive the memories or talk about it. We can simply feel it and heal.

My aim in one of our sessions is to firstly create a container where you feel SAFE. Safety is the key. I will ask a few questions to explore what is holding you back in your life, what you want to let go of and what you want to achieve in life.

Then I guide you to feel into your body and then start the connected breathing rhythm, where the inhale and exhale merge into one. And when you drop into that rhythm you’ll start to shift your state of awareness, your state of consciousness will change into something a lot more deeper, a lot more present, a lot more connected to yourself with your body. This is where tension or blockages in the body start to surface.

I then use my skills and experience as a practitioner and my own inner guidance to guide you to connect, feel and release that stuck energy. This usually takes about an hour or so. The session will end with a period of ‘integration’ (kind of like Savasana in yoga) to process the experience. You are welcome to share any insights with me as you wish, but it is not necessary.

Unlike other trauma release and breathwork modalities, I tend to focus on expanding capacity to feel into the body first - this means it may take some time to ‘release’ the tension from the body. From experience I can tell you that releasing too much too soon is actually counter-productive. So I favour a more gradual approach than pushing you to a release too much too soon.

During a session, you may experience sensations of tingling or buzzing which is perfectly normal. Sometimes this results in a cramping feeling in hands. This phenomenon is known as 'tetany' and does subside as you get used to the practice.

You may also find yourself getting distracted especially in the early stages. This is because our psyche is preventing us from re-experiencing those feelings/emotions of helplessness, fear, rage and shame that came with trauma. So our system is trying to protect us from these feeling states.

These defences are known as ‘urgency barriers’: a series of distracting responses such as going into thought, spacing out, or getting the overwhelming sense that you need to ‘do something’ or even stop the session.

This is common and my task as your guide is to support you in staying with the breath (as long as I have your consent to do so), so that you can observe what is going on and gently move through the urgency. If you can stay with the sensations and not react to the urgency, you will experience a ‘profound realisation’ about yourself. Think of it as the 'boss' in a video game that you have to beat in order to get to the next level.

For more insight into this phenomenon, this article elaborates in depth.

If you make it through the urgency barrier, you will be able to surrender to and experience bliss, a state of complete peace and relaxation: a peace that passes all understanding. You may also receive profound insights about your life (sometimes it's like watching a movie) - or it may be just an inner knowing of something that used to baffle you.

If you dedicate yourself to the craft (maybe even doing a series of 10 sessions with me),  the more layers of pain and trauma you work through, the more peaceful and clear you will start to feel as your baseline in life. This doesn’t mean that you will never experience a negative feeling again or be triggered, but you will have more capacity to handle those situations - more so than ever before.

Years and years of coping mechanisms will stop having such a strong hold over your life. You will have greater insight and awareness when those desires surface, and have greater capacity to make a different choice (whereas in the past it felt like an overwhelming compulsion you had no choice over).

You may also feel greater mental clarity which will allow you to start pursuing new projects you’ve always wanted to do, or approach your existing endeavors with greater creativity and clarity.

If this has piqued your interest, you can book a discovery call with me to see if we’d be a great fit to work together. I am especially passionate to help folks who are recovering from addictions get to the root and resolve their underlying trauma (which is the driving force behind their addictions). So if you want to find out more, check out the button below to book a call.