The Practitioner and Mindfulness of Breathing
Lloyd Lalande, PhD
What does a person actually learn when they learn breathwork?
It is tempting to think of breathwork training as learning techniques: how to breathe in particular ways, guide another person’s breathing, respond to what happens during a session, and structure a practice. But beneath these skills lies something more fundamental. The developing practitioner is learning to become increasingly attentive to breathing itself.
This is mindfulness of breathing: the capacity to notice breathing directly, recognise its changing qualities, and remain present without immediately trying to control or interpret what is happening.
Learning to Notice Breathing
Breathing is unusual because it is both automatic and accessible to conscious attention. We can leave it alone, or deliberately alter it. This makes breathing an immediate way of encountering the relationship between conscious intention and processes that normally occur outside awareness.
The practitioner gradually becomes familiar with how breathing changes with tension, relaxation, attention, anticipation, emotion and activation. They learn to notice changes in rate, depth, rhythm, muscular effort and bodily sensation.
Breathing therefore becomes more than something the practitioner does. It becomes something they can closely observe as it unfolds.
This kind of experiential knowledge cannot be acquired simply by reading about breathing.
Different Depths of Mindfulness
Mindfulness of breathing is not a single capacity. It can develop in depth.
Initially, the practitioner may simply learn to notice the characteristics of breathing. With practice, attention can become more sustained and sensitive, allowing subtler changes in breathing and bodily experience to be recognised.
At a deeper level, mindfulness becomes less about identifying particular characteristics of breathing and more about remaining present to experience as it continuously changes.
Different breathwork approaches make different demands upon this capacity. Some may require primarily technical awareness of breathing; others may require a much more sustained and receptive presence.
There is therefore no single level of mindfulness of breathing that defines the breathwork practitioner.
From Technique to Presence
Technique asks:
What should the breathing be doing?
Mindfulness asks:
What is the breathing doing now?
A skilled practitioner needs to work with both. There are times when breathing needs to be deliberately guided, and times when the practitioner needs to observe rather than intervene.
With development, these capacities become increasingly integrated. The practitioner can guide without losing contact with what is occurring, and observe without becoming passive.
The Breath and the Practitioner
The practitioner is also learning to notice their own responses while attending to another person’s breathing.
A practitioner who becomes uncomfortable with activation may intervene too quickly. One who is drawn to dramatic experiences may inadvertently encourage them. One who can remain present with uncertainty is better able to allow the process to unfold.
Mindfulness of breathing therefore develops alongside mindfulness of oneself as a practitioner.
This is an important part of professional development. The facilitator is not simply bringing knowledge about breathing into the session. They are bringing their own capacity to remain present while breathing and experience change.
A Possible Deeper Development
For some practitioners, continued mindfulness of breathing may eventually become more than a professional capacity. Close attention to breathing can reveal something about the changing nature of experience itself.
Each breath arises and passes. Sensations change. Emotional states shift. Thoughts appear and disappear.
This can lead naturally toward an interest in meditation and contemplative traditions, including Buddhist approaches to mindfulness of breathing. It is not a requirement of breathwork practice, and different approaches may lead in quite different directions. But for some practitioners, the experience of closely attending to breathing can become the beginning of a deeper exploration of impermanence, non-attachment and the nature of experience.
The development of a breathwork practitioner can therefore extend beyond learning how to work with breathing to learning how to be with breathing, as is the case in GRMT.
That distinction may ultimately be one of the most important aspects of becoming a breathwork practitioner.