What is Breathwork and How Does it Impact the Body
Right now, in this moment, please turn your attention to notice your breath. Is it shallow and quick? Deep and slow? Or perhaps you are holding your breath? Most of us go through our entire day without ever paying attention to how we’re breathing, yet this simple act holds extraordinary power over our physical and mental wellbeing.
Breathwork has emerged as one of the most accessible and transformative wellness practices available today, offering a bridge between our conscious mind and our body’s automatic functions. Whether you’re seeking stress relief, emotional healing, or simply a deeper connection to yourself, understanding what breathwork is and how it works can open doors to profound personal transformation.
What is Breathwork and How Does It Work?
What is breathwork therapy? At its core, breathwork refers to any intentional practice of controlling your breathing patterns to influence your mental, emotional, and physical state. Unlike normal breathing, which happens automatically without thought, breathwork involves conscious manipulation of your breath’s rhythm, depth, and pace.
Here’s what makes breathwork so remarkable: breathing is the only system in the body that is part of the autonomic nervous system—meaning it functions automatically—AND we have conscious control over it. Your heart beats on its own, your digestion happens without your input, but your breath operates in both realms. This unique characteristic means we can breathe in different ways to affect not only our body’s state, but our mind and emotions as well.
How does breathwork work? When you change your breathing pattern, you directly influence your nervous system. Slow, deep breathing activates your parasympathetic nervous system, triggering your body’s relaxation response and lowering stress hormones like cortisol. Conversely, certain rapid breathing techniques can energize you, increase alertness, and even create altered states of consciousness that allow for emotional release and healing.
The practice works on multiple levels simultaneously. Physiologically, controlled breathing optimizes oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in your blood, improves circulation, and can reduce inflammation. Psychologically, it helps regulate emotions, calm anxiety, and create space between stimulus and response. Energetically, many people report that breathwork helps clear blocked energy and release trauma stored in the body.
What is breathwork meditation? While traditional meditation often focuses on observing the breath as it naturally occurs, breathwork meditation actively uses specific breathing techniques as the primary tool for entering meditative states. The breath becomes both the object of focus and the mechanism for transformation, creating a more active form of meditation that many people find easier to access than purely observational practices.
Types of Breathwork Techniques
There are numerous approaches to breathwork, each with its own rhythm, purpose, and benefits. However, it’s important to understand that not all breathwork techniques are designed for trauma healing, and many are not trauma-informed in their approach.
Biodynamic Breathwork stands apart as the only true form of trauma resolution among breathwork modalities. This comprehensive somatic approach integrates deep, connected breathing with movement, sound, touch, and emotional expression, all grounded in extensive nervous system education. Through continuous circular breathing—where there’s no pause between the inhale and exhale—practitioners can access and release stored tension and trauma that lives in the body.
What makes biodynamic breathwork uniquely effective for trauma is its foundation in nervous system science and trauma-informed principles. The practice recognizes that trauma isn’t just a psychological event but a physiological one that gets trapped in the nervous system and body tissues. Facilitators are trained to track nervous system states, work within your window of tolerance, provide co-regulation, and support the completion of incomplete survival responses. The practice honors that healing happens at the body’s pace, not according to a predetermined protocol.
Biodynamic breathwork creates a safe container where the body can finally discharge what it couldn’t at the time of the traumatic event—the shaking, crying, pushing, or spontaneous movement represents the nervous system completing its protective responses. This is true trauma resolution: allowing the body to finish what it started and return to regulation.
Other Breathwork Modalities can be beneficial for stress relief, energy management, and general wellness, but they are not trauma-informed and should not be considered trauma resolution tools:
Holotropic Breathwork uses accelerated breathing to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness. While this can be a profound spiritual experience, it is not designed with trauma resolution as its primary focus and can actually be activating or overwhelming for those with unresolved trauma. The technique often works with large groups and may not provide the individualized nervous system tracking and co-regulation that trauma healing requires.
Box Breathing (also called square breathing) involves inhaling for a count of four, holding for four, exhaling for four, and holding again for four. This technique is excellent for reducing stress and maintaining calm focus under pressure—it’s used by Navy SEALs and athletes. However, it’s a regulation tool, not a trauma processing modality.
4-7-8 Breathing is a calming technique where you inhale for four counts, hold for seven, and exhale for eight. It’s particularly effective for reducing anxiety and promoting sleep, making it a wonderful daily practice for nervous system regulation, but it doesn’t address stored trauma.
Wim Hof Method combines specific breathing patterns with cold exposure and meditation. The breathing involves cycles of deep inhalation and passive exhalation, followed by breath retention. While this can influence the immune system and increase energy, it’s focused on physical optimization and resilience rather than trauma healing.
Alternate Nostril Breathing (Nadi Shodhana) comes from yogic traditions and involves breathing through one nostril at a time, alternating sides. This balances the left and right hemispheres of the brain and promotes calm clarity. It’s a beautiful practice for daily regulation but doesn’t facilitate trauma release.
These types of Breathwork techniques serve valuable purposes for stress management, performance enhancement, and general wellbeing. However, if you’re seeking to heal from trauma, process stored emotions, or resolve nervous system dysregulation, biodynamic breathwork’s comprehensive, trauma-informed approach is essential. Working with a trained biodynamic breathwork facilitator ensures you have the nervous system education, safe container, and skilled support necessary for true trauma resolution.
Is trauma Holding you back?
Perhaps you experienced a specific event that left you feeling different, disconnected, or stuck. Or maybe you carry a sense of unease in your body, struggling with anxiety or a feeling that something isn’t quite right.
As a somatic experiencing practitioner I specialize in helping people process and release stored trauma through gentle yet effective methods.
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Benefits of Breathwork
The benefits of breathwork extend across every dimension of human experience. Research and practitioner reports have documented remarkable improvements in both acute and chronic conditions.
Physical Benefits include reduced blood pressure, improved respiratory function, decreased chronic pain, enhanced immune function, better sleep quality, and increased energy levels. Many people report feeling more vitality and presence in their bodies after establishing a regular breathwork practice.
Mental and Emotional Benefits are equally impressive. Breathwork can significantly reduce anxiety and depression, help process and release trauma, improve emotional regulation, increase mental clarity and focus, reduce symptoms of PTSD, and promote feelings of peace and wellbeing. The practice creates a safe container for experiencing and moving through difficult emotions rather than suppressing them.
Spiritual Benefits often emerge as well. Many practitioners describe experiences of expanded consciousness, deeper connection to themselves and others, access to intuitive wisdom, feelings of unity and oneness, and profound insights about their life purpose and patterns.
Why is Breathwork So Powerful?
The power of breathwork lies in its ability to work with the body’s innate intelligence rather than against it. When we experience stress, trauma, or overwhelming emotions, our bodies naturally protect us by tightening muscles, restricting breath, and creating patterns of holding. While helpful in the moment, these protective mechanisms can become chronic, leading to anxiety, pain, disconnection, and illness.
Breathwork offers a pathway back to wholeness. By consciously changing our breathing, we signal to our nervous system that it’s safe to let go. The practice bypasses the thinking mind—which often keeps us stuck in loops of rumination and analysis—and speaks directly to the body’s wisdom.
Understanding how trauma lives in the nervous system is essential to appreciating why breathwork is such an effective healing tool. When we experience something threatening or overwhelming, our nervous system responds in one of several ways: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These survival responses are governed by the autonomic nervous system, which operates beneath our conscious awareness.
In an ideal world, once the threat passes, our nervous system would complete the stress cycle and return to a state of safety and connection. However, trauma occurs when this cycle doesn’t complete. The survival energy gets trapped in the body, and the nervous system remains stuck in a state of hypervigilance (constantly scanning for danger) or shutdown (feeling numb, disconnected, or depressed). This is why someone might logically know they’re safe now, yet their body still responds as if danger is present.
Traditional talk therapy, while valuable, often cannot access these pre-verbal, somatic patterns because trauma is stored beneath the level of language and conscious thought. This is where biodynamic breathwork becomes uniquely powerful as a form of trauma release.
Biodynamic Breathwork and Nervous System Healing
Biodynamic breathwork is specifically designed to work with the nervous system’s natural capacity for self-regulation and healing. The practice is rooted in deep nervous system education, helping practitioners understand the different states their body can be in and how to navigate between them safely.
The approach recognizes three primary nervous system states:
Ventral Vagal State is our state of safety and social connection. When we’re in this state, we feel calm, present, and able to connect authentically with others. Our breath is easy and natural, our face is relaxed, and we can think clearly.
Sympathetic State is our mobilized, activated state—the fight or flight response. Our heart rate increases, breathing becomes rapid and shallow, muscles tense, and we feel anxious, angry, or restless. We’re prepared to take action against a threat.
Dorsal Vagal State is our shutdown or freeze response. This is an older survival mechanism where the body immobilizes to conserve energy or play dead. In this state, we might feel numb, disconnected, depressed, exhausted, or dissociated.
Through biodynamic breathwork, you learn to recognize which state you’re in and understand that each state served an important protective function at some point in your life. The goal isn’t to eliminate these responses but to increase your capacity to move fluidly between states and return to safety and connection.
The connected, circular breathing pattern used in biodynamic breathwork creates a gentle activation of the nervous system. By bringing more oxygen and energy into the body in a safe, controlled way, the practice allows incomplete survival responses to finally complete. The shake that couldn’t happen during the traumatic event can happen now. The scream that was silenced can finally emerge. The tears that were too dangerous to cry can flow.
This is why biodynamic breathwork often incorporates movement, sound, and even specific touch techniques. When someone’s body begins to shake during a session, it’s not something to stop or be afraid of—it’s the nervous system discharging stored activation, much like an animal shakes off stress after escaping a predator. When someone’s hands spontaneously push against resistance, they might be completing a fight response that was thwarted years ago. When guttural sounds emerge, the body is expressing what words never could.
A skilled biodynamic breathwork facilitator creates what’s called a “trauma-informed container”—a safe space where the nervous system feels secure enough to let go of old protections. This includes helping you understand nervous system responses, tracking what’s happening in your body moment to moment, staying within your “window of tolerance” (the zone where you can process experience without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down), and providing co-regulation when needed.
Co-regulation is a crucial concept in nervous system healing. Our nervous systems are designed to be social—they regulate in relationship with other nervous systems. When a facilitator maintains their own calm, grounded presence while you’re moving through intense experiences, their regulated nervous system helps your dysregulated nervous system find its way back to safety. This is the neurobiological foundation of healing through relationship.
The education component of biodynamic breathwork cannot be overstated. When you understand that your racing heart, shallow breathing, and racing thoughts aren’t something wrong with you but rather your nervous system in sympathetic activation, you can respond with compassion instead of shame. When you recognize that your numbness and difficulty feeling anything isn’t laziness or brokenness but a dorsal vagal shutdown, you can honor it as a survival strategy that once kept you safe.
This nervous system literacy empowers you to become an active participant in your own healing rather than a passive recipient of treatment. You learn to notice your body’s signals earlier, intervene before you become fully dysregulated, and develop a toolkit of practices to support your nervous system in daily life.
Getting Started with Your Practice
If you’re feeling called to explore breathwork, start gently. Even five minutes of conscious breathing daily can create noticeable shifts. You might begin with simple techniques like box breathing or 4-7-8 breathing for stress management and daily regulation before moving to more intensive practices.
For deeper healing work, particularly if you’re dealing with trauma, working with a trained biodynamic breathwork facilitator is essential. This comprehensive, trauma-informed approach can bring up intense emotions and physical sensations that require skilled support, nervous system tracking, and co-regulation to process safely and effectively. A skilled facilitator will help you build your capacity gradually, ensuring you develop the nervous system resilience to process what emerges without becoming overwhelmed.
If you are curious or feeling ready to experience the transformative power of biodynamic breathwork for yourself, head on over to my contact page. Let’s set up a free 15-minute discovery call where I can answer any of your questions and we can explore if we are a right fit for working together.
Brianna Anderson, SEP
If you’re ready to begin your healing journey I’m here to help so you can begin to live the life of your dreams
My private practice specializes in helping people who have endured trauma, resolve the symptoms out of their body, mind & spirit so they can feel comfortable in their skin, find inner peace and live the desires of their heart.
I am based out of South Orange County, Ca and offer online therapy sessions. Whether you are just starting your healing journey or ready to try something new, I am here to help.