What is FBR breathwork?

Facilitated Breath Repatterning (FBR): Where Neuroscience Meets Breath

Your breathing patterns are not just about oxygen exchange - they are a direct communication channel between your body and brain, constantly signalling safety or threat to your nervous system.

The Science Behind the Breath

The way you breathe directly influences your autonomic nervous system through the vagus nerve, which acts as a information superhighway between your brain and major organs. Shallow, restricted breathing activates sympathetic (fight/flight) responses, while full, relaxed breathing stimulates parasympathetic (rest/digest) states. This isn't metaphorical - it's measurable physiology.

Your diaphragm, the primary breathing muscle, shares fascial connections with many other core stabilising muscles. When our diaphragm isn’t functioning well, it can cause a host of downstream effects such as tension, gripping, and not able to take a full inhale or full exhale. 

Chronic tension doesn't just restrict breath - it creates a feedback loop that keeps your nervous system in protective patterns, even when no actual threat exists.

Why Subconscious Patterns Run the Show

95% of your nervous system activity is subconscious. Your brain and limbic system make decisions about safety, connection, and survival before your conscious mind even registers what's happening. These patterns were encoded early - often in childhood or through unresolved stress - and they shape how you breathe, move, relate, and respond to life.

Dysfunctional breathing patterns become hardwired into your motor cortex and limbic system. You're literally running outdated survival software that once protected you but now limits you. Traditional talk therapy often can't reach these pre-verbal, somatic patterns because they're stored in body memory, not narrative memory.

Breath as Gateway to Repatterning

Breath is unique because it's both automatic and voluntary - the only autonomic function you can consciously control. This makes it a direct access point to reprogram subconscious patterns.

FBR uses conscious connected breathing to:

• Create interoceptive awareness: bringing attention to internal sensations that have been suppressed or ignored

• Shift blood chemistry: altering CO2/O2 ratios temporarily accesses      non-ordinary states where rigid neural patterns become more plastic

• Complete stuck stress cycles: allowing the body to discharge activation that's been held in the system

• Rewire proprioceptive feedback: changing how your brain maps your body and interprets safety cues

Combined with precise bodywork on the diaphragm, intercostals, and fascial restrictions, we're creating new neural pathways – a way to do things differently. Your nervous system learns through experience, not explanation - we're giving it a different felt experience of breathing, being, and responding.

Conscious connected breathing temporarily shifts your blood chemistry (increasing oxygen, decreasing CO2), which:

• Reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex (the thinking, controlling brain)
• Increases activity in the emotion and body-sensing regions
• Creates a non-ordinary state where rigid defensive patterns become more fluid
• Allows access to implicit memories and sensations that normally stay subconscious

This isn't dissociation - it's embodied presence with less cognitive interference. It's a practice of being, and staying,  with ourselves in all states.

The Mechanism of Stored Events and Memory

Trauma isn't just a story or memory - it's incomplete survival energy that remains stored in our system. If that energy can't be discharged at the time of the event, it gets stored as:

• Muscular armoring: chronic tension pattern
• Respiratory restrictions: held breath, shallow breathing, or bracing that became your new baseline
• Autonomic dysregulation: a nervous system stuck in threat response, even in safe situations
• Fragmented interoception: disconnection from body sensations as a protective mechanism
• Unwanted  or unproportionate reactions and loops: ongoing reactions to events  and situations that signal threat (that may be unproportionate to the real situation)

This stored activation doesn't fade with time - it waits for conditions safe enough to complete the cycle.

Why FBR can be supportive

• It  speaks the language of the nervous system (sensation, rhythm, breath, and body) rather than narrative
• Supports areas of tension and holding to create softness and space for authentic movement and change in muscle function
• It accesses implicit memory where trauma is actually stored, not just the explicit story
• It provides the missing piece - the completion of survival responses that got interrupted
• It works with, not against your body's protective mechanisms, honoring the pace your system needs
• It creates embodied proof of safety and capacity, which is more powerful than cognitive reassurance

Benefits of FBR

• Integrative with life
• New neural pathways form around the experience of safety and completion
• Your  body recalibrates its baseline - what "normal" feels like shifts
• Breath  mechanics reorganise around less restriction and creating freedom of movement      and expression
• Your window of tolerance (capacity to handle stress) expands

FBR Can Support:

• Chronic stress and dysregulated nervous system states
• Anxiety, panic, hypervigilance
• Breath dysfunction (paradoxical breathing, breath-holding patterns, chest breathing)
• Trauma stored in the body (developmental, shock, complex)
• Depression and low vagal tone
• Disconnection from body signals and intuition
• Chronic pain linked to breathing mechanics
• Patterns of overwhelm, shutdown, or hyperarousal 

The bodywork, vocal guidance, and energetic attunement throughout this process ensure you're not flooding (overwhelmed by too much activation) or dissociating (disconnecting to escape). We're working within your nervous system's capacity, at the pace your body determines.

The Practice

This is nervous system-informed somatic work that respects your body's wisdom and pacing. Emotional and physical releases are common and supported. Every session is tailored to what your system needs in that moment - same attunement, different experience.

How you breathe is how you live.