How we work...

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Prior to first session

In advance of your child or young person's first session, you will be emailed a client questionnaire to complete. This will ask questions about their medical history that may impact upon our sessions, as well as a series of diagnostic questions to help when framing their first session. Please bring this with you to our first session.

First session

In the first session, we will review the completed questionnaire and discuss any questions or concerns you or your child or young person may have. We will start our breathwork practice with a 'go to' exercise that can be used any time to quickly and efficiently regulate the nervous system. We will then move through a series of breathwork exercises designed to promote optimal functional breathing that will need continued practice at home in between sessions. Throughout the session, we will discuss breathwork tips, the effect of breathwork on cognitive and physical well-being and why breathwork is so important to regulate our autonomic nervous system.

Subsequent sessions

In additional sessions, we will check in with how your child or young person found their 'homework' exercises and any changes they have noticed. We will recap previously taught exercises and build on these by practising further exercises that will best help your child or young person to build and manage their functional breathing pattern.

Generally, three sessions will give your child or young person a solid basis from which they can continue to develop their functional breathing pattern with daily home practice. Five sessions is optimal to ensure that the breathwork exercises are consolidated in memory, correctly and consistently applied and to ensure appropriate progress has been made to create a solid and sufficient base from which ongoing daily breathwork practices can continue at home.

Contraindications

If your child or young person has pulmonary hypertension, a serious respiratory illness, severe asthma, severe anxiety or panic attacks,  epilepsy, type 1 diabetes, kidney disease, depression, cancer or any cardiology issues, please do not book a session unless you have been advised, in writing, by your GP or consultant that it is safe to do so. Please also speak to us first, before making a booking so we can offer further guidance. For all the above conditions, the practising of daily or twice daily breath holds to optimise day-to-day functional breathing may place inappropriate strain on the body. It is advisable to practise only nasal breathing, and potentially, depending on the individual case, gentle reduced breathing.

If your child or young person uses an epi-pen, inhaler or any other medication in an emergency, please bring these with you to a session. If your child or young person has type 2 diabetes, please bring an appropriate snack and / or drink to the session. 

If your young person is in their first trimester of pregnancy, please do not book a session. No breath holds should be performed during this trimester - breath holds are used to create a sense of 'air hunger' to increase the level of carbon dioxide in your lungs to balance your body's biochemistry and influence your autonomic nervous system. However, a regular and consistent breath pattern is fundamental during the first trimester because we do not wish to place any stress on the mother or developing baby. This is why breath holds should not be performed. If your young person is in their second or third trimester, a session can be designed that focuses on promoting relaxation and wellbeing to include gentle breathwork exercises to calm the mind and body and, potentially gentle and limited breath holds. It may be best to simply wait until after baby has arrived.