AFRICA KEYNOTE - PART 3: BEST PRACTICE
Today I share the final part of my keynote presentation recently given in Kenya, Africa as part of the Global Inspiration Conference 2023
You can find part 1 and part 2 clicking the hyperlinks.
If you would like to know more about Steph Magenta’s public speaking, or invite me to present at your event, please contact my PA via email giving as much notice as possible.
In part one of my presentation, we started by identifying the stages of healing and our nervous system responses to trauma.
In part two, we looked at the important issues around informed, consent and ethical practice.
In today's post, we start to identify what we need to do as practitioners in order to uphold better practice in Breathwork Facilitation & Training.
At Seven Directions® and Integrative Breath (our sister program) we pride ourselves on training our students very thoroughly in these areas. We invite the professional expertise of those working in these fields of best practice to come into our program and teach our students why it’s so important to uphold integral principles within this work. Steph’s extensive background in this area also informs our teaching.
We believe that best practice must:
Understand the reasons for the use of touch, and be grounded, present & appropriate in the application of touch.
Clearly frame, outline and boundary the use of touch and consent in breathwork sessions.
Always give people the right to refuse touch.
Let people know that in mixed gender sessions they can let the facilitator know if they prefer not to be touched by someone of the opposite gender (we acknowledge the use of binary terminology here).
Use practice waivers in every session; group or one to one.
Empower clients to ask for what they need.
Let clients know that their boundaries are welcome, respected and agreed to. Many people with histories of abuse will not know how to identify and trust their boundaries.
Let clients know that their job is not to worry about “upsetting” the facilitator in refusing touch, but it is their job to set and maintain their personal boundary.
Ask about who do doesn’t want touch discretely. People can feel shame in saying ‘no’ and go into the “allowing” part of the wheel of consent inauthentically e.g., “oh this is what happens in breathwork and everyone else is ok with it so I ‘should’ be too”. Empower breathers by validating their choices.
Facilitator but take care not fall into the trap of ‘doing to’ but rather ‘stay with’ and ‘respond to’ from a place on presence and attunement..
Be clear and responsible in our practitioner aftercare boundaries, discouraging co-dependence but respecting that high activation may need more care after a session.
When we think we understand what ‘consent’ in breathwork means, often we don’t! Why?
Because we don’t know how to be present to ourselves and our motives.
Because we don’t know how to slow down, attune and respond to another person before taking action.
Because our motives may be to ‘fix’ ‘heal’ ‘teach’ etc, which creates an unhealthy power dynamic that can be serving our own needs rather those of the client.
Because we aren’t trained in proper framing which empowers our clients to remain in full and clear choice. A sloppy frame creates blurred boundaries.
Because we haven’t ‘updated’ our social and inter-personal awareness and we’re still operating from old belief systems.
Because we don’t understand the subtleties of polyvagal theory and our core childhood structures and how they drive us and our clients and so we project, interfere and assume and lose our capacity to hold neutral, grounded space.
Because we haven’t actually asked for it!
So what’s the answer?
As breathworkers and somatic practitioners, we must educate ourselves thoroughly. It’s our professional duty to ensure we update our knowledge and skills base often, understand the proper use of touch, work to codes of ethics and join professional associations that help us maintain a collective experience of ‘good practice’ in our work.
SOME REMINDERS!
We must recognising and heal our own inner structures before offering that to others - at Seven Directions®, we use the Presence Process in our training as a fundamental part of that.
We must avoid projecting or assuming we know what our client is feeling or experiencing.
We engage in active listening and bring full presence into the moment.
We never work on two breathers at the same time, transferring energy this way is a no-no. Be with who you are with and don’t linger or hover!
We practice atunement and co-regulation.
We always ensure we are in practitioner self regulation before moving towards another, and/or when moving away from another.
We don’t get ‘emotionally’ lost in a client’s process, we hold neutrality to support inquiry.
We offer excellent and thorough framing (i.e., managing expectations) which should be huge part of any training.
We respect a client’s self determined personal boundaries
We recognise our own personal boundaries and limitations in terms of our clients’ needs and refer appropriately when necessary.
We see our clients as whole and complete wherever they are in their process.
We educate ourselves properly about consent!
It’s not enough any more to say we didn’t know, we weren’t aware, it wasn’t like that in my day etc etc - best practice needs to be an integral part of our work.
Breath is our gift of life! From our first inhale when we feel the stark contrast of the warm waters of the womb to the day we breathe air for the first time on birthing into the world, and to the moment we take our last exhale and let go, our bodies become the keeper of every story we have ever lived. I like to think of this as a living library of our personal, familial and collective experience, and the breath is also our greatest self regulation tool once we understand it on a day to day basis. This makes the breath and the potency of the breath very Sacred to me, and as such it’s something to be respected and understood, honoured and treasured.
The power to heal lives and breathes in the heart! It lives in the soul’s evolution as we walk ourselves home to our final reckoning. How can we do better, be better, and love ourselves and each other more in a world that values competition, productivity and the ego more than it does connection and community? Through awareness, acceptance, knowledge, integrity and compassion. We welcome it all and we commit to getting better informed.
Our next Breathwork Facilitator Training cohort starts in October this year. For more information, please go HERE. To see our Code of Ethics, please go HERE
