Breathwork UK 2022 — Breathe A Festival of Life

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