Breathwork
I didn’t find breathwork, it found me.
At least, it makes me happier to think about it this way. For practically 50 years, I’ve strived to create, orchestrate, manoeuvre and manipulate everything else into happening. To have no destination, no project or process is intensely liberating. And in this liberation, I have found a reason to be cheerful and more; I have connected to a sense of – and for – the path that I am on.
This path began with floating a foot or so off the floor for an hour at The Ministry of Sound in early in 2019. Or at least it’s how I felt. I’m sure many people have had similar sensations at Ministry, the difference being that mine was in the morning and powered by my breath. I had man-made a high so intense that the euphoria of dopamine was more intense than anything I’d experienced in my youth, with the benefit that there was no danger or mid-week come down. “What a curious feeling!” I thought, as if I’d sipped from a magical bottle marked, “Drink me.” I did it again, and again. What started as simple breathwork advanced to training with breathwork superstars including Dan Brulé and Wim Hof, including the ice immersions. Further and further I fell into the rabbit hole.
When I was a child, I used to take things apart and then feel a flush of panic as I tried – and sometimes failed – to put them back together. What started with my toys developed into more complex investigations into calculators - the physical thing, at the time, seen as bleeding edge tech (remember Sinclair and Texas Instruments) – and then the family TV. I put this inquisitive behaviour down to my father and forefathers being engineer s; my parents just saw it as expensive vandalism. However, unperturbed, I’ve continued to break stuff down to see how it works all my adult life and so it was with breathwork.
As Lockdown began, I studied with World- renowned author and breathing practitioner Patrick McKeown. He published The Oxygen Advantage in 2015, after 20 or so years in medical practice and sports performance coaching. I had found his instructor’s course months before the pandemic but like so many events, it was disrupted and switched to zoom. Little did I realise that the classes I attended were actually the Advanced Series; it was no wonder everyone apart from me was a biochemist, doctor or elite sports coach! After many hours of mind-blowing content and intense study, I sat and passed my Advanced Instructors qualification.
Breathwork is not snake oil. It’s the practice of changing your biochemistry, biomechanics, neuroplasticity & psychology by controlling your breathing, inhales, exhales and breath holds. With practice, people can experience significant change in performance, better sleep, lower anxiety and improvement over chronic conditions.
Just weeks into the pandemic, it became obvious that people were suffering due to losing their livelihoods. I had to help. A family I’d helped when I owned a footwear company were financially threatened and I wanted to send them money. The challenge was, I didn’t have any. Yes, I’d sold SEVEN FEET APRT but regrettably all I’d walked away with was debt.
Enter the lesson. If you haven’t got money, give what you do have. I wrote a breathwork class script with several patterns (what I call each way of breathing), scribed a visualisation and remixed some music. I turned the phone’s camera back on myself and went live.
And then it started.
A handful of faithful friends attended my first live class on Instagram and together, we raised a few hundred pounds, much-needed funds paid for food, nappies and some comfort for our friends in need. I think that more than this, it was affirmation for the family that people can care, even if they have never met. It is one of so many stories of helpfulness and generosity that have been written because of Covid. Being able to have done this – with the love and kindness of my friends - still makes me tearful with happiness.
The messages began.
People had been touched, physically, mentally and spiritually by the experience of the breathwork class. For some, it had been deeply relaxing, a temporary escape from the captivity. A space to breathe. For others, it unlocked intense emotions; happiness, blended with tears.
One class became two a week. Deep classes led to one-to-one coaching. And lunchtime catch ups. And training for elites and mortals in sports performance, especially running communities. And workplace breathwork classes, appearances in virtual gyms and on sports channels. One class in a year became over 120 in the blinking of an eye.
Perhaps there are times in classes when I’ve underplayed the power of breathwork to help people rejuvenate and restore themselves and reticent to talk about how breathe reconnects us with our spirituality. Maybe it’s because I feared of being run out of town as
a charlatan, just a guy who can count to four and back.
And here is the reason I am really happy about this journey in breathwork; it doesn’t matter. If just one person finds a moment in a class, it’s a class worth doing. People arrive at class, exhausted, anxious, flustered, battery low, the energy worn away by the day, week or month; even me.
And then it happens.
We close our eyes, close our mouths and open our minds. In unison, we create energy. As I often say, this is not woo woo, it’ science. We raise our state of consciousness, to see more clearly, mentally and spiritually. We rewrite the past and unlock the future. we reconnect with friends and family, existing and past. We float and fly.
I don’t have to find an audience for breathwork, it finds me. I don’t have to persuade people to change their behaviour or pay for their attention. They generate change for themselves. Breathwork is a gift I was given to constantly give away. To do so is deeply satisfying.
To discover that the collective noun for a group of people breathing is ‘Inspirers’, from the Latin ‘inspirare’, which means to breath in, makes me very happy indeed.
Matt Bagwell
If you enjoyed this post, you might like Breathing In, Breathing Out and You’ve Got to Splay to Play