Breathwork helps regulate the nervous system, deepen therapy, and accelerate emotional healing. Learn how breathwork supports counselling and psychotherapy at Seva Counselling and Margaret River Breathwork.
Introduction
Breathwork offers one of the most direct ways to shift emotional states and work at the foundational, unconscious level of our character. Many people arrive in counselling or psychotherapy feeling overwhelmed, tense, or disconnected. Therapeutic conversations help, but sometimes activation in the nervous system itself is “in the way” and can benefit from the kind of relief and alleviation breathwork provides.
Breathwork provides that pathway. Breathwork helps the body soften, settle, and release pressure, which creates more space for emotional regulation and deeper therapeutic progress.
As a standalone methodology, breathwork is a method for direct psychotherapy. However, there is a mystical element to it as well because active breathing puts the client under pressure and helps to dissolve the barrier between the conscious, controlling mind and the vast interiority of the unconscious – the vast interiority of our true nature and what we are beyond the stories of the mind.
In that way, breathwork offers the dissolution of the person you think yourself to be, freeing up the potential that always lives within, just waiting for access and to break free.
Breathwork helps release trapped negative emotions and trauma, identify limiting core beliefs, and rework the ancient stories of the past for the sake of greater clarity and freedom. Along the way there’ll be tears as well as laughter, as is normal when you’re doing the most important work you’ll ever undertake on your own life’s journey.
The Role of the Breath in Emotional Regulation
Breathing patterns and emotional states are intertwined. A tense breath always reflects a tense mind. A shallow breath often comes from long-term vigilance or unresolved stress. A held breath often signals fear, shame, or the anticipation of conflict.
Breathwork brings relief to the unconscious physiology operating beneath these emotional states. A regulated breath tells the nervous system that the environment is safe. More safety allows clearer thinking, stronger boundaries, better decision-making, and deeper emotional access.
Why Breathwork Helps People Who Feel “Stuck”
Many clients hit a point in counselling or psychotherapy where insights increase, but emotional movement slows. The mind understands the issue, yet the body keeps reacting the same way. At Seva Counselling, I am always working with the unconscious level with clients because that’s where change occurs. But as a standalone practice or support for ongoing counselling sessions, breathwork offers the chance to leapfrog ahead.
Breathwork helps loosen the emotional architecture so therapy can engage both the intellect and the nervous system.
People usually feel:
- More present
- Lighter and less overwhelmed
- More grounded in the body
- More open to therapeutic work
- Less ruled by old reactive patterns
Breathwork helps the emotional system co-operate with the therapeutic process rather than work against it.
How Breathwork Supports Counselling
Counselling sessions often become smoother and clearer when breathwork forms part of the process. Breathwork calms the system enough for decision-making, communication, and emotional reflection.
Counselling benefits from breathwork when clients experience:
- Stress responses that overwhelm logic
- Difficulty accessing inner clarity
- Emotional reactivity in relationships
- Anxiety that disrupts day-to-day life
- Overthinking and racing thoughts
- Historic trauma intruding on present-day experience
Breathwork helps clients remain steady enough to apply the practical tools that counselling offers.
How Breathwork Strengthens Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy works with deeper emotional patterns, early attachment wounds, and long-standing beliefs. These layers often live inside the body’s protective responses as a reflection of processes ongoing inside unconscious areas of the mind.
Breathwork helps psychotherapy by:
- Releasing emotional material stored in the body
- Access to significant memories from past life events
- Allowing access to feelings that were previously numbed or walled off
- Softening the hypervigilant state that blocks therapeutic depth
- Helping the nervous system integrate insights rather than resist them
- Creating space for old patterns to reorganise
- Working directly with the unconscious where core beliefs are held
Many clients find that breathwork opens areas that talk therapy alone has not been able to reach.
The Nervous System as the Foundation of Emotional Change
Nervous system regulation underpins all emotional progress. A person’s unconscious is the silent engine behind what is experienced within the nervous system. Breathwork influences the autonomic nervous system directly, which means the body begins to shift before the mind has to work harder.
A settled nervous system supports:
- More emotional capacity
- Better tolerance for vulnerability
- Reduced shutdown and overwhelm
- More stable relationships
- Greater self-trust
- A clearer sense of personal agency
Therapy becomes more effective when the nervous system stops reacting as if life is constantly unsafe.
What Breathwork Looks Like in Practice
A typical full-cycle breathwork session initially involves guided active breathing to help induce an altered state of consciousness in which the barrier between the controlling mind and the unconscious dissolve. Active breathing is focused, but perfectly safe provided the client has no pre-existing health conditions. The session remains grounded and supportive, with a strong focus on integration and nervous-system safety. In the second half of the breathwork session, guidance through integration can greatly support emotional and energetic release.
Breathwork may include:
- Gentle regulation-based breathing
- Conscious connected breathing
- Somatic awareness
- Release of stored emotional and physical tension
- Integration through grounding and reflection
- Guided psychotherapy
Clients often describe a sense of lightness, clarity, or inner spaciousness after a session.
Breathwork at Seva Counselling
Seva Counselling integrates breathwork with counselling and psychotherapy in a way that matches each client’s readiness and emotional capacity. Some clients benefit from short breathwork moments during sessions. Others choose full breathwork sessions designed for deeper work.
Breathwork supports:
- Emotional regulation
- Trauma processing
- Nervous system healing
- Burnout recovery
- Relationship clarity
- Integration of past experiences
The aim is always to help clients feel more present, more grounded, and more capable of lasting change.
Group Breathwork or Breathwork Journeys
There are some people in the region offering group breathwork, but one-on-one breathwork is in truth a completely different modality.
Group breathwork can certainly be a pleasant and worthwhile experience. But guided personal breathwork provides translation and guidance with inner experiences that come to the surface, demanding if not begging for the change people seek when drawn to this kind of work.
Few group breathwork practitioners or those offering a “breathwork journey” are trained psychotherapists. Instead, certification from a single retreat or an online course trains those facilitators to coach clients through the active breathing required in a breathwork session. However, that training rarely covers what to do with clients or the material that emerges once breathwork has opened the pathway to the individual’s unconscious.
Where to Begin
A single session is usually enough to explore whether breathwork, counselling, psychotherapy, or a combination will support your emotional wellbeing. Many clients begin with counselling and gradually move toward breathwork and psychotherapy as deeper layers emerge. Often if breathwork would be beneficial to the client as a single session or ongoing treatment, I will recommend during ordinary therapy.
Breathwork does not replace therapy. Breathwork strengthens therapy.