I’ve practised yoga since I was thirteen. I’d been teaching it for ten years. And it took me twenty years on the mat to realise I didn’t actually know how to breathe.

Twenty years of doing all the “right” things and still not getting what they were meant to give me.

The day something finally settled

I found out by accident, through a book that hit me hard enough that I went and trained in breathwork properly. That was around fifteen years ago now.

I remember sitting on my mat afterwards, and for the first time in twenty years something settled that yoga alone had never touched. Not relaxed. Steady.

My first thought wasn’t “that’s nice.” It was that every student I’d ever taught had needed this, and I’d never given it to them, because I didn’t have it myself.

From yoga add-on to a standalone breathwork teacher training

So I folded breathwork into every yoga teacher training I ran. From 2012, every trainee learned it.

Then Covid hit, and it became obvious this had nothing to do with yoga. GPs, nurses, teachers, blue light workers, HR managers watching their whole workforce fall apart from the inside. None of them were ever going to do a downward dog. All of them were breathing shallowly through a crisis nobody had trained them for.

Breathwork couldn’t stay hidden inside yoga courses. It needed to stand on its own, for anyone who helps people for a living. That became the Breathwork Facilitator Training, and it went on to become CIMSPA’s first endorsed breathwork qualification.

Who comes to breathwork training now

A few years ago I’d get the odd email from a yoga teacher wanting to add breathwork to her classes. Now it’s GPs, counsellors, teachers and HR managers. Women who’ve never done a downward dog in their life, all asking the same thing.

Nervous systems are frayed in a way they weren’t before. People who spent years regulating everyone else’s crisis, patients, pupils, staff, are finally asking who regulates them.

And the question they ask me isn’t whether breathwork will change their life. It’s whether it will be safe for their clients.

No guru, no smoke and mirrors

In the Wizard of Oz, the big reveal isn’t a twist. It’s a relief. There’s no wizard, just a man with a microphone and some smoke. Once Dorothy sees that, she stops being afraid of him.

That’s what I want breathwork teacher training to feel like. You’ve seen the guru version. The soft voice, the flowing trousers, the course that promises you’ll “find your purpose” but never says what you’ll actually be qualified to do afterwards.

Ordinary People Academy has run accredited courses since 2009. The breathwork training is dual accredited through IPHM and CIMSPA. You learn the physiology, safety and scope, how to hold a room, and how to get paid. You don’t have to change your personality to fit someone else’s idea of what a breathwork teacher looks like.

What the training actually changes

Laura came to us as a working counsellor. She’d spent years doing top-down work and wanted something bottom-up alongside it. She also wanted to move more of her work into groups so she could reach more people, but she’d never learned how to hold a group space. She has now.

That’s the point. Not a certificate for the wall. An actual shift in what you’re able to offer people.

If you’ve got questions, start with the breathwork facilitator training FAQs. If you want to know where you stand first, take the free Safe Hands Readiness Check.

Victoria