When I mentioned the breathwork training I was at last week, a number of you wrote back with questions. Good ones. Three came up more than once, so I want to answer them here — briefly, because the next Anima Experience goes into this properly, and I'd rather not flatten it into a few paragraphs.
But here's enough to be useful.
"What kind of breathwork is best?"
There isn't a best one. There are different kinds doing different jobs.
Some breathwork is activating — it uses faster or fuller breathing to stir things up, move energy, bring material to the surface. Some is the opposite: slow, settling, down-regulating, designed to bring the system toward rest. Some sits in between.
"Best" depends entirely on the person, the moment, and what's actually needed. An activating practice is not better than a settling one. They're not even trying to do the same thing. The skill is matching the practice to the state — which is the whole thread of this work.
"How do I know if someone is a good facilitator?"
This one matters more than the technique.
A good facilitator is trained, and not casually — real breathwork training takes years and hundreds of hours, most of it about how to hold what a session opens, not the breathing itself. They screen before they work with you. They ask about your history. They can describe what their practice does and does not do, without grand promises. They adjust to you rather than running everyone through the same intensity.
If someone offers powerful breathwork after a weekend course, with no questions about your history and no sense of when to slow down — that's the wild west. The technique might be real. The container isn't.
"Is breathwork safe for me, and is it right for me right now?"
Sometimes the honest answer is not yet.
Strong, activating breathwork can be genuinely destabilizing — especially for a system that's already running hot, already depleted, or carrying a lot. Intensity is not the same as progress. More is not the same as better. A practice that overwhelms your capacity doesn't build it.
This is the Anima stance, and it's the opposite of how breathwork is often sold: capacity before intensity. You build a system that can hold more before you ask it to.
So — where does that leave you, if you're curious about the breath but not about to go book an intense session?
It leaves you at the actual starting point. Not the dramatic end of the spectrum. Your own everyday breathing — the baseline that runs underneath your sleep, your stress, your energy, all of it.
That's what the Start with the Breath guide is for. It's a grounded introduction to how breathing and your nervous system shape each other, with simple practices you can explore on your own, gently, at your own pace. No intensity. No facilitator needed. Just the foundational layer, which is where nearly everyone should begin anyway.
Hundreds of you have already requested it over the past few months. If you're one of them — it's worth opening again now, with all of this in view. It reads differently once you can see the whole landscape around it.
And if you don't have it yet, I'll send it to you.
Reply to this email with the word BREATH, and I'll send you the guide.
More soon,
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Sunday Thoughts:
She’s brilliant!
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OPTIMIZED MIND: For decades, depression was explained almost entirely through the lens of serotonin deficiency… which is a model that only scratches the surface. Yale researchers now point to other synaptic connections as a central driver, and they’re finding that when depression is effectively treated, the brain can return to looking like a healthy brain, both at the cellular and structural level. 
REGENERATIVE FUTURE: If you saw The Need To GROW, you know that healthy soil doesn't just grow food, it actively pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and locks it underground. According to the IPCC, scaling regenerative agriculture globally could sequester up to 23 gigatons of CO₂ by 2050. That's one of the most credible, nature-based ecological solutions we’ve got, and we should all be loudly demanding it. 
