3 Lessons from 1yr of BRB

Blue River Breathwork is celebrating it’s 1 yr anniversary and, fun fact, it falls on the same day as Deagan’s birthday! As we reflect upon this last year, we want to share with you 3 insights that you, the participant, rarely or would never see.

Before we get into it, we want to highlight the wins of Blue River’s first lap around the sun ☀️

70+ classes conducted
Nearly 2,000 plays on our digital tracks
30 reviews with an average rating of 4.97/5 stars.

Deagan has also voluntarily brought her skills to our local Hospice organization, Compassionate Care, where she has brought breathwork to bereavement support groups, hospice nurses, and patients who are at the end of life.

Without further ado, here are 3 things we’ve learned this last year!

It’s Always Working

If we’re being honest, lots of times when we’re observing someone doing breathwork it looks like it’s not working. They’re just laying down. Sometimes it’s over Zoom and we can’t see them well or they switch up their breath & do something completely different.

Both of us have thought to ourselves “this isn’t working” way more than we’d like to admit…

But every time we have that thought the person comes back telling us what a wonderful experience they had!

It’s never us doing the work, it’s you, the participant, and your breath that’s giving you what you need every single time. Our job is to make sure that whatever needs or wants to happen can and that we’re ready for anything. We are continually learning to get out of the way for whatever needs to come through.

There’s a Lack of Experience

We live near Asheville, a hub for healers & alternative medicine practitioners. There are so many things we love about this city but one thing I’ve come to notice is that there are lots of people who have done a breathwork facilitator training. Which is great, but we’ve realized that there are a lot more amateurs than there are pros.

We’ve learned that the quality of the experience for the participant is generally correlated to the experience of the facilitator.

We say this having been humbled over and over again by incredible breathwork facilitators (we go to breathwork class too, y’all). Breathing with teachers like Patrick Merle Sellin, George Ramsay, Ally Maz and others have proven that personal breathwork experience is what separates the good from the great. It’s not the technique, amount of knowledge, or how many followers one has on instagram. It’s the raw, unglamorous experience & hours spent in the practice that allows for the depth of the experience for the individual.

This is why we are always tracking and sharing how many classes we’ve done. We definitely felt like amateurs when we had a low count - and frankly we still are. However, after our 50th class things really started to shift. It became less about us doing or saying the right thing and become more about reading the room to provide an experience for the particular group that shows up. This means every single breathwork session is different based on the group that shows up, even just slightly.

The Class is the Tip of the Iceberg

We host a minimum of 2 classes a week and each class is 60-90 minutes. On a surface level, it looks like we only work 2-3 hrs a week. But honestly… each class has hours of prep work.

Social media. Conversations with studio owners. Making playlists. Landing page copy. Curating class themes and workshops. Inviting people directly. All of this adds up. Honestly, teaching the class is the easiest part. Getting people there is the hard part.

Breathwork can be a tough sell to those who have never tried it before. But it is all worth it for even just one person to reharmonize with their breath, this ever present function of the body that is constantly giving and taking this thing we call air. Your breath is there from the moment you’re born until the moment you die. Connecting with it is debatably the most powerful thing we can do in our life.

So if you’re reading this and enjoy what BRB is doing, please share it. Like the facebook post, bring a friend to class, try the digital recordings. These little things are the best ‘Thank You’ we could ask for.

Thank you for reading this.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for breathing.
Thank you for being.

Love,
Alex & Deagan