2024 Reflection and Looking towards 2025

A big shift for breathwork in the uk

What an honour it was to welcome our community back together again with our collective prayer for 2024: Together We Can.

This year we expanded the festival by an extra day to accommodate and allow more spaciousness in our offerings, a more integrated experience for our breathers and create multiple opportunities for practitioners to share their life-changing work. The impact of this allowed participants to take their time, choose their journeys, meet the facilitators and ask questions. We created spaces for integration, workshops that could support the unfoldings of a breathwork session and really glean the insights gained from such an immersive experience.

This year we welcomed over 150 participants and over 25 different practitioners from all over the UK, welcoming folks from England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. The Breathe Festival is fast becoming what it has always intended to be: a annual gathering for breathwork of all modalities in the UK.

As part of this reflection, we have a few thank you’s to make for this festival to come together:

Firstly, a huge thank you to the commitment and professionalism of all the practitioners that came and offered their work. We can only do this work because you do yours. Thank you so much for continuously sharing your wisdom, skills and knowledge with us. Thank you for your generosity to share it and offer people opportunities to dive deeper into themselves, into their consciousness and into the healing.

Secondly, thank you to the Breathe Team - yet again another year of meeting, gathering, conversing to bring this together. This festival is a passion project, and the team are all volunteers, and it is such a gift to come together for the love of breath. Every member on this team has their deep, unique skills that can allow us to pull something like this off. Thank you to everyone on the team! Also, a huge thank you to the volunteers on-site to help with venue management and smooth running - your help on-site give such an immense morale support for practitioners in each venue. It can be daunting to present to a group, and your presence was definitely felt and appreciated.

And finally, to you all. Breathers, participants, breathe festival-goers. We cannot do this without you. Thank you for coming to this event each year, thank you for sharing it with your colleagues and loved ones. Thank you for breathing and attending to whats present for you. It takes a deep sense of courage to attend something like this, and we acknowledge that. We see you, we thank you, we love you.

A few highlights

Though it was chillier than most years, there were some key highlights: welcoming new members to the festival, seeing good friends again, mornings in the sacred circle, our opening circle and our animal families, beautiful recipes form the kitchen, the sauna and hot tubs, our dance nights with DJ Alex and not forgetting our tent waterfall mishap during Steph’s session. All wonderful moments and I am sure you have more to add here.

A Big Shift for Breathwork

This year at The Breathe Festival, we launched UKBA: UK Breathwork Association. This is a formal association for professional breathworkers practicing in the UK. This association was formed in response to the needs and desires from last years collective gathering. It was expressed that professionals in the field were seeking support in their careers and the industry requires ethical and practical solidity in the growth of the profession. We are excited to share that this association is in service tot his community, the growth of breathwork in the UK and the evolution of its professional standing as a therapeutic healing modality and method.

This was also deeply supported by a lively conversation about breathwork and the NHS held by Denise Gomez and Nic Stoke. This conversation allowed us to explore how breathwork can support the health and wellbeing of many people when we come together. This was a deeply nourishing and thought provoking conversation and we are so grateful that we were able to platform it.

Moving Forward

Looking toward 2025, some other big shifts are happening at Breathe. We will be moving venue…

We are consciously entering a new relational dynamic with a new venue: Osho Leela in Gillingham, Dorset. We are yet to set the exact parameters but we are all very excited for how this new venture may give rise to other shifts for the festival. We are so looking forward to putting this all together again, and we are so grateful to you for your trust. Until next year!

Feedback

As we debrief from this year and plan the next, it would be invaluable to receive how it landed for you and whether you have insights that we dont on how we can improve it. Please send your feedback here.

Thank you and until next time, take care.

With Love,

The Breathe Team

2023 Reflection and Looking towards 2024

‘‘thank you, thank you, thank you’’

We are so  grateful to all those that joined us this year in our journey of Coming Back Together. This year's weaving and learning from 2023 was to re-learn what it means to celebrate diversity, to re-learn what it means to come together in our differences, to celebrate the power of our own bodies and the medicines that reside in it. 

We are so honoured to have welcomed over 30 different facilitators with over 36 different workshops. It was full, full, full to the brim and we loved the ride. It was educational, joyful and expansive and this is exactly what we signed up for.

This last year has been one of the hardest, for our community and for our team - with love, loss, grief, sickness and longing. So, Coming Back Together stands as a testament to the inevitable power that comes with community, to stand and to sit together, to sing and to breathe together in the complexities of our feelings.

This year’s Breathe: A Festival of Life was a softening, an invitation to soften the hard-worn armour that we wear on a daily basis and to allow ourselves to feel - to breathe the subtleties, to extend the extremes. It was an invitation to welcome the feminine, to walk back together to the parts of ourselves we have left behind and to remember and embrace who we truly are. And it was magnificent. 

We gathered as a community ready to grow, ready to develop and welcome a new era for breathwork in the UK. Breathe: A Festival of Life welcomes the UK's finest breathworkers and be a hub to connect, learn and grow and intended to host important ongoing conversations on education, ethics, standards and care. 

As the community grows, so does this profession and we are so excited to be part of its evolution. 

Which brings us into the theme and the prayer for 2024: TOGETHER WE CAN. 

2024: TOGETHER WE CAN

What we have found over the years of running this festival and becoming a communal gathering place of UK breathworkers is the extremely high level of integrity and care we have within this community. 

Though we are aware that we are still small and that there is room to grow, we are so excited to do this together. 

An adage that comes to mind when thinking about this prayer is: ‘if you want to go somewhere fast, go alone. If you want to go somewhere far, go together’ - And we are in this together; for the long haul-bringing the best care, tools, practices, and education we can in order to empower those that join us to rest, heal, love, accept and to choose their path.

Breathwork is not a ‘protected term’ and so it can be difficult to decipher what it is that we are offering, but as a practice that straddles the quantitative and qualitative, the evidence and anecdotal, the science and spiritual, we aim to hold space for that liminality, just like the breath does in every moment. 

So, here we are, having come back together, feeling deeply inspired and ignited. Together we can! 

So, what futures can you imagine when we work together?

What imagined future can we practise together?

What does a future of care look like for UK Breathwork? 

Together we can imagine a future we want to create, now. 

The invitation lies with you in reading this, what can you imagine? How would you finish this sentence: ‘‘Together we can….

Sending you all so much love, until we see each other again.

Team Breathe

a huge thank you!

2022 was an absolutely, heartbreakingly powerful moment….

As the sun set over the first evening of our breathwork festival, all participants gathered in the stretch tent and honoured what meeting in person looked like again after so many sessions online. We were able to look at each other’s eyes, to welcome our whole bodies back into the collective and welcome all the heartache, sorrow, pain and adversity we had all been witness to over the last couple of years.

This years Breathe Festival was a prayer to reweaving, to re-weaving our connection to the earth, re-weaving our connection with the breath and to the community. Breathe Festival is a celebration of our collective wisdoms that attend to our collective wounds and we are so honoured, proud and elated to have brought such wonderful people together and to have welcome some beautiful new faces too.

We want to say a huge thank you to every single person that made this event possible, to all those miles travelled, to all those thoughts that needed to happen to get you here, to all the ways our bodies sent us messages craving for this connection.

We are, because you are. We cannot thrive without you, so deep gratitude for you, for the medicines and the powerful courage it took for us all to breathe deeply in a time where we are met with so much chaos and division. Together we are reweaving our medicine, remembering who we are and what our breath’s purpose is here on this planet.

Sending you love and protective prayers to you and yours.

Until next time,

The Breathe Team

Breathe Festival 2022

impressions caught by David Jensen

Breathe Festival 2021

Summer 2021, we welcomed 150+ people into the sacred fields at Earth Spirit

We want to say a huge thank you to all the wonderful folks who came and celebrated breath with us in 2021. After two years of the pandemic and lockdowns, we are so proud we were able to put on a safe and community centred event where we could breathe, celebrate the life we had and honour those that we have lost.

Below are a few images from our time together…

Breathe festival 2019

On the last weekend in August around 120 breathers gathered at Gaunts House in the idyllic Dorset Countryside to explore and celebrate Breathwork.

After the success of its opening in 2018, the Breathe team wanted to follow with an event that would exceed everyone’s expectations. And it did. A new program structure was created to allow the expansion of the event, better accessibility to more participants and greater diversity in the styles of Breathwork and practices on offer.

Once again we received a loving support from many amazing facilitators including Anthony Abbagnano and Amy Rachelle, Heinz-Gerd and Lera Lange, Rebecca Dennis, Lynn Veitch, Martin Petrus and Artur Paulins, Nevsah, Kim Kindersley and Lunka Nadush, Doug Sawyer and Brigitte Martin Powell, Roger Gong, Jeannine Goh, Robert Moore, Pennie Quaile-Pearce, Yael Hochenberg, Lucy Hamel and many more.

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who contributed. Whether facilitating a workshop, working in the background or simply attending as a participant, your contribution is greatly appreciated and helped make this year’s event a huge success. A big thank you to everyone!

‘‘I have been to many many festivals and healing events and this was one of the most powerful and memorable I have ever been to.  An incredible energy was created and beautifully held by a talented team of organisers that attracted world-renowned leaders in the Breathwork movement.  I was blown-away by the experience and the wisdom and teachings of the weekend and of Breathwork in the hands of these incredible teachers.  This is a gathering of people who deeply care about the world, their self and each other and of collective healing.  I spoke to many kindred spirits and like-minded souls who like myself had a truly transformational experience.  This  festival is the beginning of something unique and particularly special.  See you there in 2019!’’

Dr Jeannine Goh

Breathe festival 2018

It took two years of planning and years of dreaming for the team to gather and Breathe Festival was finally born on 31st August 2018. After sending out the messengers and making a wish, the angels rallied and the perfect tribe gathered. Blessed with clear sky in an idyllic location it was a beautiful experience for everyone involved.

Breathe Festival in its first year was lovingly supported by Dan Brule, Rebecca Dennis, Anthony Abbagnano, Sophia Magdalena, Doug Sawyer, Brigitte Martin Powell, Roger Gong, Louisa Love, Jeannine Goh, Richard Bostock, James Frost, Vicky Sinclair, Christian Platts and many more. Let the beautiful words of those who attended and the memories we captured be the testimonial for what was a truly amazing weekend.

‘‘Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! To the Big 4 team for the wonderful weekend of 'Festival of Life' from John and myself! It certainly was a celebration of life. You all worked so well for us all!

It was so amazing to be around people with such strong life energies! One thing that I did not put on the feedback form was about the 'Inner child' session with Anthony. He had only been talking for a few minutes and he talked about the little girl who had asked her new-born baby sister "Baby, Baby tell me about God, because I'm beginning to forget". That was a powerful session and I've been awakening in the mornings with the voice of a little child speaking. They are memories of me speaking to my Mum as a very young child. Mostly about needing attention from her. Just the memory of that session is making me cry now. And I made a commitment to give my inner child a hug every day early in the morning and last thing at night. A very powerful weekend altogether’’

Brenda Richardson-Little