Your First Breathwork Session
What to Expect and How to Prepare
You don’t need to be good at this. You only need to breathe — I guide the rest.
Maybe you’ve booked. Maybe you’re still deciding. Either way there’s usually one quiet question underneath the curiosity: what is actually going to happen to me? This page answers it — fully, with nothing withheld and nothing promised that no one can keep.
What breathwork is — and what it isn’t
Breathwork is an umbrella term, not a single technique. It covers practices that deliberately change the depth, rhythm and pauses of your breath in order to shift your physical and emotional state. Slow practices belong to it, as do rhythmic ones with breath holds, and connected breathing without pause.
Research maps the field by lineage: alternate nostril breathing comes from yoga, vase breathing from Tibetan Buddhism, coherent or resonance breathing from medicine, and conscious connected breathing from the psychedelic tradition. Four lineages, four directions of effect, one word.
This is where most guides online go wrong. They say "breathwork" and describe only conscious connected breathing — the most intense form of all. Anyone who finds that daunting concludes breathwork isn’t for them. In truth it is only that one method that doesn’t suit every beginning.
At the Integral Breath Academy I work with various original methods: from ancient yoga te chniques to modern brandmarked SOMA Breath® and Transformational Breath®. They differ in breathing pattern, intensity and direction of effect. Which one carries your first session is the next question — and the answer depends on what you came for.
Which method your first session uses
According to your needs several methods are optional to you as a first session, since I am trained in about 15+ techniques. For example SOMA Breath® breathes rhythmically to composed music with deliberate breath holds. Transformational Breath® uses connected diaphragmatic breathing with breath analysis, body mapping and toning. Neither is the beginner version of the other and in between are several variations. Here is a comparison of major differences
SOMA Breath®
Transformational Breath®
Breathing pattern
rhythmic, in time with the music, with deliberate breath holds
connected diaphragmatic breathing, no pause between inhale and exhale
Shape of the session
pranayama to prepare, around 50 minutes of rhythmic breathing to music, silence and integration
breath analysis, then connected breathing with body mapping and toning, then integration
Direction of effect
regulating, settling, clarifying, hypnotic or energizing, blissful, focus
opening, releasing, emotionally deep, can be deeply touching, joyful, spiritual
Good if you want
rest, sleep, a way out of chronic stress
or focus, ecstatic bliss, community
to meet and release something you’ve carried for a while, feel fully alive, connect with your spiritual side
Lineage
Niraj Naik learnt from Yoga Teachers and medical doctors; the protocol has been studied at the University of Cambridge
created and refined by breathwork pioneer Dr. Judith Kravitz since the late 1970s; today in 56 countries
My qualification
SOMA Breath® Master Instructor and Transformational Coach
certified Facilitator and Group Leader (Level 5)
Every session listing says which method carries it. If you’re unsure, write to me and we’ll place it together.
Read more: SOMA Breath® → /soma-breath · Transformational Breath® → /transformational-breath
Why the groups stay small
Four places for Transformational Breath®, up to twelve for SOMA Breath®. That isn’t manufactured scarcity — it is the standard. Transformational Breath® is facilitation: during the breath journey I work with the individual people in the room, reading the breath and guiding each person directly. The professional ethical standards and the method itself cap group size for that reason. Beyond four breathers, an assistant joins.
How your first session unfolds
Every session moves through three phases: fifteen to twenty minutes of arriving and instruction, then the breath journey, then twenty-five to thirty minutes of integration. Sessions run online, so you breathe in your own room — and I stay with you on screen throughout.
Phase 1 · 15–20 minutes — arriving and instruction
You lie down and come out of your day. You name an intention for yourself; one sentence is enough. Then I take you through the breathing technique. In Transformational Breath® this is also where the breath analysis happens: If you booked a private 1:1 I look at where your breath is restricted, which I can see also on zoom.
Phase 2 · 50–70 minutes — the breath journey
In SOMA Breath® you breathe rhythmically for around 50 minutes, in time with curated music and with breath holds woven in, while I guide you by voice. This session can also be done while sitting upright, as it is close to meditation. In Transformational Breath® you breathe connected for about 40 to 50 minutes (online), following the protocol of Dr. Judith Kravitz. Online, I guide the body mapping verbally and you place your own hands — this is called self-facilitation, and it works. If you lose the rhythm, I bring you back.
Phase 3 · 25–30 minutes — integration
A gentle return, an anchor in the body for the next twenty-four hours, and space to share if you want it. After a Transformational Breath® session there is a short one-to-one integration call the following day, because what moves often settles twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.
What you need: a laptop or tablet — not a phone, the frame is too narrow for me to see you — headphones, a stable connection, a quiet room where you won’t be interrupted, and something to lie on with a blanket.
What you may feel during the session
The physical sensations that are often reported in breathwork sessions are tingling in hands and face, tears with no story attached, warmth, cold, heaviness or lightness. All of it occurs, all of it is physiologically explainable, and none of it means something is going wrong. "I didn’t feel anything" belongs on the list too.
● Tingling in hands, feet, around the mouth — the most common experience of all.
● Hands that cramp into a claw shape. It is called tetany and looks dramatic; it resolves within minutes as the breath settles,
● Emotion without a story — grief, anger, sudden laughter. It doesn’t need an explanation to be allowed.
● Images, colours, memories, deep insights
● Deep rest, or the sense of having slept.
● Nothing at all. That is a complete experience, not a failed one.
Why the tingling happens can be stated precisely, and most pages get it wrong. It is not "changed circulation". Breathing more intensely lowers the carbon dioxide level in your blood, the pH rises slightly, and that temporarily changes how much free calcium is available at the nerve endings. Hence the prickling; hence the tension in the hands. Some science suggests that it is appears more often in people with calcium defficiency. The process is measurable, harmless and entirely reversible — it ends as soon as you breathe more slowly.
Knowing this before it happens is half the difference.
What you need: a laptop or tablet — not a phone, the frame is too narrow for me to see you — headphones, a stable connection, a quiet room where you won’t be interrupted, and something to lie on with a blanket.
Before and after your first Breathwork session
How to prepare
Not much is needed. Comfortable clothes, a light stomach, a little buffer of time. Everything else happens in the session.
1. Eat nothing heavy for two to three hours beforehand. Breathing is laborious on a full stomach.
2. Wear something that doesn’t constrict. Have warm socks and a blanket nearby — lying still, the body cools, even in summer.
3. Drink water across the day.
4. Skip alcohol that day and keep caffeine low.
5. Leave time afterwards. No meeting straight after.
6. Log in ten minutes early. Arriving is part of the practice.
7. Make sure that you are in a space where you cannot fall and hurt yourself when you sit or have a comfortable place to lay down with your upper body in 45 degree angle (stuff some big pillows under your torso and head). If you do a T ransformationalBreath® session follow the instructions mailed to you to beforehand.
10. Think about a topic for the session, we'll phrase it into an intention together.
The 48 hours after
The effect doesn’t stop when the music fades. Over the next day or two your nervous system keeps working. Some people feel clear and light; others feel unusually tired or thin-skinned. Both belong to the process.
● Drink more than usual.
● Write down what surfaced, without interpreting it. Understanding can come later. You may also draw or paint.
● Keep the evening free if you can.
● Moving outdoors helps the body sort things more than talking about it does.
● If something lingers that worries you, write to me. That is part of the accompaniment and costs nothing extra.
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Life is 10 % what happens to you and 90 %, how you react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll
Who guides you
I’m Eva Makkos — a Transformational Breath® Group Leader, SOMA Breath® Master Instructor and certified Art and Trauma Therapist in Germany, teaching and facilitating for more than fifteen and meditating since 1987.
My work sits where science, living lineage and trauma-sensitive depth meet — rooted in the lineages of Kashmir Shivaism and Krishnamacharya and Ethnomedicine Traditions around the world, held with genuine care. → About Eva
Your next step
If you’d like to feel what this does before you join a session, start with the free twelve-minute reset. It is short, guided, and enough to notice the shift in your own body.
Going further afterwards
• Send me the free guided meditation — start today.
• The Integral Breath Reset — a guided 4-week journey including meditions, work on the subconscious, healthly lifestyle.
• Work with me 1:1 → Book a free connection call — for personal, in-depth practice.
“Come home to yourself. It begins with one breath and the pause before the next.”
Eva Makkos
FAQ
No. The pattern takes two minutes to learn, and if you lose it I bring you back. There is nothing to achieve here — not even for those of us who like to do things properly.
Ninety minutes to two hours, depending on the method. The active breathing is only one part of that; arriving, resting afterwards and integration belong to it and can’t be cut without cutting the effect.
Most commonly temporary tingling, light-headedness and cramping in the hands, caused by the drop in carbon dioxide. They pass within minutes as the breath slows. Emotional waves in the following days also occur. That is why we breathe in guided groups rather than alone with a video.
I’m there. You can return to normal breathing at any moment, sit up, step away. I can see when someone reaches an edge, and I stay with you. Nobody is taken through anything they don’t want.
Yes — and in Transformational Breath® it has a name: self-facilitation. I guide verbally and you place your own hands where I would place mine. Many people go deeper at home, because the room is already safe.
No. Breath works through physiology, not conviction. Scepticism is no obstacle — some of the strongest experiences happen to people who arrive with their arms folded.
Because the breath reaches feeling before the mind can file it. Tears in that state are not a breakdown but a discharge — often with no story attached, and usually followed by a striking calm.