History and Development of GRMT

Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT) developed from more than four decades of practical experience with breathwork, combined with clinical practice, psychotherapy training, university teaching and research. My early experience was primarily with Rebirthing, which provided a powerful experiential introduction to the potential of breathing to access deeply held psychological material. As I began applying breathwork within a clinical context, however, questions emerged about how such work could be adapted for professional mental-health practice without losing its experiential depth.

One of the first challenges was the difference between traditional breathwork settings and ordinary clinical practice. Rebirthing sessions were often relatively open-ended, with the expectation that the process could continue for as long as necessary, and cathartic expression was commonly part of the experience. Neither approach fitted comfortably within the predictable time limits and practical requirements of clinical practice. This raised a fundamental question: could breathwork produce meaningful therapeutic change within a defined clinical session, without depending on prolonged sessions or cathartic discharge?

Developing an answer required a more structured approach to the breathing process. Attention increasingly focused on what was happening from moment to moment: the person’s breathing, level of activation, ability to remain present, and capacity to engage with difficult experience. Rather than allowing the experience simply to unfold, the facilitator needed to remain actively engaged with the process. This led to greater emphasis on moment-to-moment guidance, maintaining an appropriate level of activation, recognising breathing inhibition, and helping the person remain in contact with experience while it changed.

Another significant development was the integration of mindfulness into the breathing process, drawing specifically on a Buddhist orientation to mindfulness and on related elements of Buddhist psychology. At the time, mindfulness was not something I encountered as a clearly identified component of the breathwork approaches with which I was familiar. In exploring how other leading practitioners understood their work, I found relatively little emphasis on mindfulness in their descriptions of what they considered most important. For GRMT, however, maintaining present-moment contact became increasingly central. This included an interest in the Buddhist understanding of contact as the immediate meeting of experience with awareness, rather than moving away from experience through distraction, thought or habitual response. Mindfulness therefore became more than an additional technique: it contributed to the way the developing model understood and worked with present-moment experience.

These developments along with others gradually produced a model quite different from the more open-ended and cathartic forms of breathwork from which my work had originated. Breathing, mindfulness, relaxation and active facilitation became part of a structured therapeutic process, supported by clear and direct communication so that clients could actively participate rather than relying entirely on the facilitator. The approximately one-hour breathing period was also developed within a predictable overall clinical session, with attention to establishing engagement, supporting the process through its middle phase and preparing for a gradual, well-regulated completion. The structure remained flexible, allowing the facilitator to respond to substantial differences between individuals and between sessions.

Over time, these observations and developments were brought into formal postgraduate study and research. The emerging model was progressively examined through clinical work, practitioner training and academic research, with the aim of establishing whether the approach could be clearly described, taught, investigated and applied within professional mental-health settings as a practioner friendly clinical model. GRMT therefore developed not as a single innovation introduced at one point, but through an extended process of clinical observation, questioning, refinement and research. Today, it is a manualised, clinically oriented breathwork approach that brings together respiration, mindfulness, relaxation and carefully guided experiential work. Its development continues through clinical practice, practitioner training, research and professional collaboration, with the intention of preserving the experiential potential of breathwork within a coherent and professionally responsible clinical framework.