What is Somatic Breathwork?
Somatic Breathwork is an active breathing process that helps you free your thinking mind and drop into your feeling body. It invites active participation for healing and self-study by bringing awareness to what’s present for you in this moment.
Benefits of Somatic Breathwork include:
emotional release
deep insights through self-study
transformative inner healing
relieve tension and stress
accessing greater clarity, sense of purpose, new states of vitality
The practice is divided into 2 sections: clearing and integration (or repatterning).
In the first half, we activate our nervous system through mouth breathing. This serves to stimulate a physiological response as you explore what’s being held in your body.
You’ll be guided to explore where feelings such as tension or heaviness live, and whether emotions, memories, and beliefs are asking to be acknowledged, and released.
In the second half, we switch to nasal breathing.
This helps to regulate your nervous system and signals your body to slow down and find safety within itself. It’s also an opportunity to embody how you want to feel after clearing away limiting beliefs and freeing the energetic weight that’s been held in your body.
Emotions may arise, and this is completely normal.
Expressing emotions is a natural part of the process. Common expressions include crying, laughing, yelling, dancing, and smiling as you feel sadness, grief, rage, joy, and gratitude.
Not all feelings may arouse an expression and that is okay too. The practice can be just as powerful in other ways. Some participants experience more visual journeys seeing colors, their inner child, and witnessing memories or future states of being. Others find peace in the presence of a calm mind that would otherwise find itself racing and unable to pause its thoughts.
A full journey is 90-minutes, and is typically practiced no more than 1-2 times per week given the intensity and depth of the work. The framework can be adapted to shorter sessions such as a 5-10 minutes daily practice for a quick reset, or a multiple-times per week practice within the 20-30 minutes time frame. Workshops as a sampler of the full journey can range between 45-75 minutes.
No two sessions are alike, and that’s the beauty of the practice. The recommended frequency noted previously is just a guideline and what is needed will vary from person to person and their unique circumstances.
Interested to learn more? Book a free 30 minutes consultation with Alycia here.
