What Happens When You Commit to Your Breath?
A quiet, steady transformation no one talks about, but many of us feel.
After those first few breathwork experiences, with my daughter Anees, and then in London and San Diego, I began to notice an uncomfortable, nuanced, and multi-layered shift in me.
It wasn’t sudden or showy. It felt gradual, subtle, less physical, more like something reordering itself beneath the surface. This wasn’t a spiritual high or a one-off breakthrough. It was quieter than that. More foundational.
I began to see how I responded to stress. How I listened. How I paused. How I stayed with myself, with others, with discomfort, with pain and suffering.
Me Samreen facilitating a breathwork session.
My breath became a mirror.
It revealed where I was holding tension, where I was rushing, where I was overriding my own needs. But more importantly, it offered me a way back. Not just to calm, but to clarity. To stillness. To a new kind of strength.
As I kept going one breath at a time, one session at a time, the shifts began to settle. Into my nervous system. Into my choices. Into my way of being.
That’s the thing about committing to your breath. It involves remembering who you were before the before the conditioning, before the noise that built up and before the conditions were generated that led to burnout.
Over time, I noticed:
More space between trigger and response.
I could feel the activation rising, and softened in how I might react.
A deeper sense of presence.
Even with clients I’d known for years, something changed. I wasn’t just listening with my ears; I was receiving with my whole body.
Emotions became information at an even deeper scale.
Sadness, anger, even shame became guides. Invitations. Wisdom.
My energy shifted.
People would tell me they felt calmer around me. Softer. Safer. They noticed their own nervous systems regulate.
But most of all, I became more me, unapologetically for the first time ever.
Breathwork didn’t add anything. It peeled away what was never mine to carry.
The Five-Minute Practice
Through my training, and as an extension of my own discipline, I began integrating daily breathwork. My teacher, Christian, encouraged us to keep it simple: just five minutes a day. A top-up. A moment to meet myself each morning. To come home to my body before the world’s demands arrived. To practice breathing and embed skills to fully exploit the full capacity of our breathing.
Living near woodland, I often take my dogs out and breathe as I walk, a moving meditation among the trees. I encourage others to find their own version of this. Grounding barefoot in a garden. Breathing in a city park. Sitting quietly beside a window. It’s less about the setting and more about the intention: to return to breath as a rhythm of safety. We have this available to us so much more than we even realise!
Grounding barefoot in the garden
Weaving Breath with Other Practices
Alongside breathwork, I found myself drawn deeper into yogic practices, not as performance (my competitive roots are never far behind), but as a way to open my body to stillness and flow. My embodied work was enhanced by the gentle, wise guidance of Simon Caviccia, my supervisor.
Simon once reminded me:
“There is nothing more powerful, and more calming for our clients than showing up as a self-regulated being.”
He’s right. The more regulated I am, the more my clients settle. Not because of anything special I’m doing, but because safety is felt not explained, it comes from a rooted sense and it’s felt.
A Story of Co-Regulation
Not long ago, I was working with a client who was feeling completely overwhelmed, tangled in her thoughts, fighting back tears she didn’t want to let out. As she spoke, I noticed her breath become shallow, her shoulders tense. Her body hunch.
So I invited her to pause. To sit back. To take some time to sit with this feeling, and breathe. With permission, I set myself up close to her, and placed my hand over hers and brought them to her heart space. I gently cradled her, meeting the younger version of her that was feeling raw emotions of loneliness (later expressed as effects of abandonment). And I let my breath become the metronome for us both. Slow. Soft. Safe.
Touch, rhythm, breath - the oldest medicines we know as humans.
And as I softly offered a verbal affirmation: words that countered her inner story of loneliness, this act began to rewire the old narratives, planting new seeds of worthiness and belonging.
And it worked…
Her shoulders softened. Her breath deepened.
She began to exhale more softly. To regulate. To feel safety. Feeling held and supported, shifting her state profoundly.
To find out more about breathwork in group sessions or 1:1 check my website www.breathwithsamreen.com
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