In my work I draw a clear distinction between two areas of use. This distinction is central to how I work, and both sides follow the same logic: emotions and physical sensations are not there to be breathed away, but to become experienceable and bearable.

1. In the therapy room: the breath as a route into emotion

During a session I do not use breathing patterns to calm things down, but to deliberately activate emotion, and only ever within a guided exposure (embodiment, EAT).

Emotions are physical processes before we find words for them. People who have learned to keep distressing experience at arm’s length can often talk extensively about difficult events while feeling almost nothing. Deep processing, however, requires precisely that felt sense. Embedded in the right context, certain breathing patterns can set emotional experience in motion physically and open an access point that conversation alone often cannot reach.

The real work begins after the activation. The feeling that rises is not immediately regulated, breathed away or brought to an end. Instead, we practise meeting it, holding it, naming it and understanding it. The aim is not for the emotion to subside quickly. The aim is for it to lose its terror, because we have the experience of being equal to it.

This application takes place exclusively within the session. Together we set the pace, pause when it becomes too much, and afterwards make sense of what happened.

2. Between sessions: meditation

As a practice for home, I almost never give a breathing technique. I give mindfulness meditation. That is observing the breath without intent, without judging or altering it (Anapana).

This is not a fallback option but a deliberate choice, and it rests on a core principle of modern, evidence-based psychotherapy.

Much psychological suffering arises not from unpleasant feelings themselves, but from the sustained attempt to get rid of them. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) describes this as experiential avoidance. We try to breathe tension away, to control restlessness, to regulate anxiety. In the short term this often works. In the long term, the need for control becomes the actual problem. The feared consequences grow more threatening, the effort required increases, and our room for manoeuvre narrows. The attempt at control is frequently not the solution but the problem itself.

This is exactly where a daily breathwork technique (controlled breathing) carries a risk. It can quietly become a tool of avoidance, something used so that a feeling will go away. In that case, we spend every day rehearsing the very stance we are trying to leave behind.

Simply observing the breath trains the opposite movement. The breath is constantly changing of its own accord, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep, sometimes unsettled. Being able to notice it without having to control it is, in miniature, exactly what acceptance means on a larger scale. We practise an accepting stance towards the adversities and discomforts of life that we often cannot avoid for good. Along the way, a certain distance from our own thoughts develops. They come and go without our having to follow them. And there is no standard to fall short of , no „correct“ breathing to get wrong, and no nervous system that needs regulating by us. It regulates itself, if we let it. For people who already tend towards self-criticism and self-optimisation, this matters enormously.

The difference, then, is not technical but fundamental. With active breathing techniques, you steer your breath. In meditation, you let it go. For daily practice I consider the latter more sustainable, and it also prepares what is needed in the session itself. That is the capacity to meet an inner state and hold it, without having to end it straight away.