What Happens When You Say Yes to Your Breath?
From insight to initiation. How a two-day event set me on a Breathwork mission.
After witnessing my daughter’s extraordinary transformation through breathwork, something began stirring in me. I couldn’t ignore it. I had seen, first-hand, what no amount of talking, analysis or intellectual understanding could offer. The breath had touched something deeper in her, and in me.
Still, I wasn’t ready to leap. I’m not impulsive. My work has always been grounded in rigour: executive coaching, neuroscience, psychotherapy, systems... I understand trauma and healing, but from within structured frameworks. In session with my therapists, supervisors, peer reviews. Breathwork felt… different. Ancient, intuitive, disproportionately powerful. I was yearning to test it for myself.
So a few weeks after the festival, when I heard about a two-day event run by Christian R. Minson, sponsored by TCHHE (The Collective Healing for Human Empowerment), I signed up.
Over 200 people gathered. Strangers. Facilitators. Curious seekers. Something about the scale of it felt intimidating, yet oddly intimate. I allowed myself to arrive without needing to hold space for anyone else. Not my clients. Not my daughter. Just me.
We breathed.
Four deep breathwork sessions over two days. Four journeys inward and beyond my physical world.
What struck me wasn’t just the emotion, although there were tears, lots of them, and there was anger and resentment. All sorts of feelings surfaced. It was also the physiology. The way breath changed my internal landscape. My heart rate, my body temperature, the tremble of old memories in my muscles. The resistance and harsh tension in my joints. My nervous system didn’t just respond - it reorganised.
Between sessions, we listened to impactful teachers in a field unravelling itself to me with wonder!
Zulma Reyo’s School of Consciousness offered an incredible session on the “I Am” - not as a label, but as an energetic frequency we can return to through breath, presence and intentional living. Her teachings opened a portal between the mystical and the practical.
Then there was Penny Boyland, whose work on somatic healing and physiology gave a compelling explanation of why breathwork is so effective. She spoke about the nervous system in a way that was both scientific and spiritual, about how breath can recalibrate our internal wiring, helping us move from survival into expansion.
At the end of the event, Christian R Minson stood up and announced he’d be leading a facilitator training in San Diego. A small cohort. A chance to go deeper, not just as a participant, but as someone who could guide others through these portals of transformation.
I went home stirred. Moved. A fire was lit.
Over Christmas, I sat with it. I spoke with my family. I asked for their blessing. Because I knew that if I did this, I’d be stepping into a new rhythm of life, not leaving behind what I knew, but integrating it with something very new. We talked about the impact on the family, my passion for learning and for taking something I care about and bringing it to life. But it was unanimous, this calling was bold, they encouraged me.
That February, I flew to San Diego.
Twelve days. Twelve days of opening, dismantling, listening, learning…breathing.
Receiving my Breathwork certification
I saw how breathwork wasn’t an alternative to my professional training, it was a compliment. It met the nervous system, the subconscious, the unspoken memory held in the body. It softened the armoured, over-functioning patterns so many of my clients and I had carried for decades.
I returned reflective. More surrendered. More whole. And full of curious energy about the work ahead. Committed to helping others access this medicine, one that exists in all of us.