Breathwork: using the breath to change how you feel in your body

What is breathwork?

Breathwork is a practice where the breath is the work itself: you consciously change its rhythm, length and pauses and observe how your state in body and attention changes with it.

Breathwork is an umbrella term. It covers slow, lengthened breathing, more active cyclical patterns, and simple awareness exercises where you change nothing at all and only observe.

What holds them together is one idea: the way you breathe both reflects and shapes your state. Short, high breathing travels with hurry; long, low breathing travels with calm. Working with the breath is a way of working with that state from the inside instead of arguing with yourself about it.

Breathwork and pranayama: what is the difference?

Pranayama is the codified breathing discipline inside the yoga tradition; breathwork is a modern, broader term that includes pranayama plus practices that grew outside yoga.

Pranayama is the breathing discipline inside the yoga tradition: named techniques, precise ratios, and a philosophical context explaining why they are practised.

Breathwork is a modern, wider word. It includes techniques that come from pranayama, and also practices born outside yoga, usually described in physiological rather than traditional language.

In daily practice the difference that matters is intention: you can use the breath to wake up, to slow down, to stay present inside something uncomfortable, or simply to notice how you are.

Francesca completed Breathwork Facilitator training with Sky Bear's BreathWorks Academy, and her yogic breathing comes from her yoga teacher training. The more active form she facilitates she calls circular connected breathwork — sometimes also transformational breathwork or connected breathing. None of this is a clinical qualification.

• BreathWorks Academy

What does a breathing practice look like?

You start by watching the breath as it is, add a structure for a few minutes (longer exhale, even rhythm, pauses), then return to free breathing and stay still for a moment.

It usually starts with how you are breathing right now, with nothing corrected. Then a structure arrives: lengthening the exhale, matching inhale and exhale, adding a pause, holding a rhythm for a few minutes and then letting the breath go free again.

A practice can be five minutes or twenty. At the end you stay still for a moment: that is where you notice the difference, not during.

In the online studio breathing appears on its own, as a short practice, and inside yoga and meditation classes, where it becomes the thread that holds movement and attention together.

What does the breath have to do with body awareness?

The breath is a signal that is always available, so noticing it is the simplest way to catch tension while it is arriving rather than afterwards.

The breath is a signal that is always available. You do not have to produce it, it is already there, which makes it a reliable place to return to when attention wanders off.

Over time what you can notice changes too: you feel the breath shorten before you realise you are tense, and that gives you a few seconds of room to answer differently from the automatic way.

How to start if you have never practised

Five minutes a day, at the same time, sitting comfortably with a long spine. Short and repeated teaches more than long and occasional.

Start short and regular: five minutes, every day, at the same time, sitting comfortably with a long spine. A short practice repeated teaches far more than a long one done occasionally.

If you want guidance, follow practices that are already built: the online studio holds breathing, meditation and yoga sessions you can do at home, with someone keeping time for you.

If you want work built around your body and your days instead, a 1:1 journey starts from how you actually breathe, not from a generic template.