Body & Breath

Somatic explorations of breathing through the lungs, ribs, diaphragm and pelvic floor

Breathing is something you’re already doing.

Most of the time, you probably don’t need to think about it at all.

But what happens when you become curious about how you experience it?

Body & Breath is a collection of 16 guided somatic sessions that invite you to develop and refine your awareness of the sensations and movements of breathing through your lungs, ribs, diaphragm and pelvic floor.

Through movement, sensation, imagery, sound and changes of position, you’ll experience your breathing in familiar and less familiar ways – not to find a ‘right’ way to breathe, but to deepen what you can sense and discover what becomes possible as your attention becomes more refined.

The Body & Breath Collection

Body & Breath brings together four courses, each focusing on a different area of the breathing body. You can take them individually, or experience all four as a complete collection.

The Ribs

Experience your ribs as responsive, moving areas of your breathing body, focusing into their relationships with your breastbone, spine, shoulders and hips. Discover what happens as you find more freedom in your ribs, giving you greater choice in how you live, breathe and move.

The Pelvic Floor

Develop a more detailed and nuanced awareness of, and engagement with, your pelvic floor, moving beyond the idea of a single area to contract and release. Explore how its different layers participate with your breathing, sound and whole-body movement.

A different way of exploring the breath

My interest in breathing began long before I trained in somatics. I trained in pranayama in 2011 and became familiar with many different breathing practices and techniques.

I remember teaching Kapalbhati — sometimes called fire breath — and reaching the point where being able to do 75 repetitions felt like an achievement. There was an assumption that being able to do more meant I was getting better at it.

As I became immersed in somatics, I began to question that assumption. The number of repetitions told me what I could do, but it didn’t necessarily tell me anything about the quality of my experience.

When I started bringing more detailed attention to my diaphragm and upper abdomen, I realised that despite being able to perform all those repetitions, I didn’t actually have such a strong connection with what I could sense there.

That began to change the way I approached breathing. Instead of only being interested in whether I could perform a particular breathing technique, I became increasingly curious about what I could actually feel and experience while I was breathing.

Many breathing practices begin with an instruction: breathe here, expand this, contract that, hold the breath. But those instructions can assume an awareness of the body that we may not yet have developed. Somatic exploration offered me a way to develop and refine that awareness — and to discover possibilities for breathing that I hadn’t previously known were available to me.

Body & Breath grew out of that curiosity.

Choose how you’d like to explore

Each course can be taken individually, or you can bring all four together with the complete Body & Breath collection.

Who is Body & Breath for?

You don’t need any previous experience of somatics or breathwork to take part in Body & Breath. The sessions begin with something we all already do, breathing, and invite you to become more curious about what you can feel, sense and notice.

If you already practise somatic movement, Body & Breath offers an opportunity to bring the same kind of attention and curiosity specifically to breathing, and to discover how the lungs, ribs, diaphragm and pelvic floor can become part of your movement explorations.

The courses may also be particularly interesting if you teach yoga, Pilates or other forms of movement. Perhaps you’ve learned particular breathing patterns, or become accustomed to telling people when to breathe in and out. Experiencing breathing from a somatic perspective can open up other possibilities, not by giving you another set of breathing instructions to teach, but by inspiring you to become more curious and creative in the way you work with breath in your own teaching.

David has a remarkable ability to observe how experience unfolds. Rather than providing answers, he invites curiosity. Rather than telling you what to notice, he helps you discover it for yourself. His teaching has a quiet way of revealing patterns and possibilities that often go unseen, leaving you with a deeper trust in your own direct experience.

Frequently Asked Questions