In part one of my keynote transcription, we looked at the stages of awareness in healing. In part two, we begin to connect these stages and the reasons people may come to a breathwork session, also identifying the reasons why informed consent and ethical practice in this work are so fundamental.

Trauma, shock, hurt and suffering can affect anyone. There is no heirarchy in these experiences and in some way or other, most of us know where ours originated even if that knowing is only a sense of it rather than a clear memory.

As our life continues, many of the experiences which could be seen as having negatively impacted us, now form the foundational structure our belief system and our outwardly manifesting ‘personality’. Our nervous systems begin to ‘re-act’ (the clue is in the word ‘re-act’) rather than respond to life, and we find ourselves stuck in repetitive loops of behaviour which more often than not aren’t helpful to us.

Deb Dana and Stephen Porges’ polyvagal work asks us: “Are we wired for connection or for contraction?”

I love this inquiry as it recognises the parts of us that contract when we feel unsafe/under threat, or that open to greater connection when we feel supported, heard and safe. On an interpersonal level, safety is not generic, it is individualistic and this is why I avoid saying ‘this is a safe space'“ in my work, replacing that statement with “I hold a strong, grounded space in which you can begin to open up if you feel safe enough” (for example).

We all need to feel safe to meet these tender edges of our character structures, and so often in healing work that part is missing if it’s not deeply embedded in the practice, the training and the individual holding space.

Polyvagal theory teaches us about ventral vagal safety; the place where we find community, connection, ease in life’s flows, and which generates a feeling of safety as our needs are met. From there we may move to healthy sympathetic nervous system activation as as an appropriate response to danger or threat. The problem is that many of us get stuck in that activation state, residing in a stressful and anxiety inducing world that does not feel the least bit safe to us.

We may also see fawning come in here as a way to stay safe, to belong, or to find acceptance, but fawning typically originates from inauthentic self expression which creates problems for us. In fawning, we are usually either betraying ourselves and our personal truth in order to stay safe or simply not recognising our own needs and therefore seeking external validation from others. If healthy and appropriate responses to ‘threat’ to don’t work (fight flight) and if fawning is not an option, we typically move into freeze or disassociation states where we may experience life through the lens of depression, lifelessness and lack of vitality. Now we have gone into a dorsal vagal shutdown state. In order to heal this, we need to move back up through the freeze state into sympathetic activation and ultimately back into ventral vagal connection, and for some of us, this is our life’s work.

As breathwork facilitators we are supporting this healing process to begin, or to continue to be met, for the unfolding reparation of our mistaken core beliefs.

We cannot support in others what we can’t support in ourselves, so we need to primarily know ourselves and our own limitations and be conscious enough to meet them with radical honesty. We need to ethically refer a client on if we recognise that we aren’t capable of holding that space or we are triggered by it, without making the client feel rejected or wronged in any way. That’s professionalism in action! It is in our willingness to meet these tender and vulnerable parts of ourselves and then our clients that we begin to create true healing.

I no longer call the part of the work where we meet these hidden, often fearful or shame ridden aspects of ourselves ‘shadow work’, choosing instead to call them ‘meeting the teacher parts of ourselves with compassion’. These parts are here as the representatives of our wounded self, the distortions of our true innocence, and so they must be met with gentleness and compassion.

We must always respect the personal sovereignty of our client/breathers, but so many of us fall into the ‘trap’ of thinking we know what our clients and breathers need, or what they ‘should’ be feeling and doing, and then pushing people beyond their limits and boundaries. We are dishonouring their own embodied ‘No! I’m not ready to go there yet’, and this creates the very real potential for re-traumatisation.

Full disclosure - When I first started Breathwork I didn’t feel I'd done a good job if the whole room wasn’t in activation by the middle of the session. I would see this as evidence of my efficacy in holding a strong space, but the truth is that this more likely came from my own need to prove my value as a facilitator. I’ve since learned that gentleness, humility, presence and respect for client boundaries are where the real ‘medicine’ lives.

So, to consent. The issue of consent is fundamental to any somatic or psychotherapeutic practice, however as we know breathwork is a largely unregulated field of practice and so it’s pretty wild out there!

The Wheel of Consent, part of Dr Betty Martin’s incredible work, teaches us to recognise that we each have our own personal ‘domain’ to take care of. Here is my domain and I’m responsible and accountable for it, and there is your domain which you are responsible and accountable for. In the intersection where we meet. In relationship of any kind - professional or personal, or in our practice, exist our mutual agreements. It’s crucial that we recognise and understand this in our practice. We must negotiate with clarity our agreements before any session, and often in breathwork we do this in our framing. This is why this part of any session is so important. If your facilitator doesn’t mention waivers, contract-indications or consent, run the other way!

There is a difference between consent and informed consent. In trauma based work or somatic therapies we need to negotiate those boundaries clearly from the shoot. We mustn’t become afraid to touch people, but we MUST be fully informed and trained about appropriate and consenting use of touch. A recent graduate of our breathwork training program asked a mixed group with a mixed gender support team, to privately let them know if anyone was uncomfortable being touched by someone of the opposite sex, and that their choice would be honoured. I can’t tell you how much I loved this!

In the wake of recent revelations of abuse in breathwork practice, I have heard suggestions that we ask before every point of contact or touch, but can you imagine how intrusive this would be to an unfolding practice that is both somatic and pyschotherapeutic in it’s nature!! For me, it’s more important that we are trained with integrity and awareness so that this fear doesn’t have to creep into our work.

Below is an illustration of Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent. In part 3 of my keynote I will speak to why this matters, what goes wrong and how we can work properly with client centred consent in our practice, and I will highlight what I see as some good practices we can adopt in our work.

AFRICA KEYNOTE - PART 2: CONSENT

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