Noticing the pause – Breath work with Matt Freer

Gillian: Welcome to the GoHealth podcast. I’m Gillian Straine, chief executive of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. On the podcast, we love to have great conversations to inspire us all to connect health and faith in our everyday lives. And I’m delighted that my guest today is Matt Freer, who is a breathwork coach. Matt, welcome to the podcast. How are you this morning? 

Matt: Very good, thank you. It’s lovely to be here. Thanks for having me on. 

Gillian: I want to tell a story first about why you’re here. As listeners may know, I went to Greenbelt this summer, and I was setting up three tents: one for me, one for my son and one for Theresa, who’s also part of the team. My tents are the kind you put up on the side of a mountain. They’re not really festival tents – they’re survival tents. I could put them up by myself, in time, with plenty of, you know, fruity language. I don’t put up tents very often, but I was getting there. 

Then, as I was doing this, this chap started setting up a tent next to me. There’s always that awkwardness at festivals. You want to be friendly – it’s a Christian festival – but you’re also trying to work out space and guy ropes and trip hazards. Anyway, this guy’s tent was amazing. It was like a yacht, or a circus tent – white canvas, very, very complicated. I was sweating and struggling with mine, and this person was just putting his up with ease and seemed totally chill. There was some tent jealousy going on, I have to say. I was so distracted with my tent that I hadn’t noticed it was my friend Matt Freer. Our paths crossed a few years ago, didn’t they, Matt? 

Matt: That’s right, yeah. Our paths crossed when we were both in Oxford, when I was working for the diocese. It was lovely to be putting up the bell tent and to look over and see a friendly face. I was like, “Oh, there’s Gillian – I’ve not seen her for years.” 

Gillian: Thank you for saying that. I don’t think I was feeling friendly at the time! But as soon as I recognised you, I just had a brain switch: “Oh my God, it’s you.” We’d  connected through environmental work. I was a curate at that time, and you were working for the diocese. And as these things happen – and I feel this was a God thing as well – I started asking, “What are you up to? What have you been doing for the last 15, 20 years?” And Matt, you started telling me about your breathwork, this world you’ve ventured into. It just so happened we’d won a bit of funding to do breathwork within the organisation. So I thought, thank you to God that our paths crossed. These things do work out this way, don’t they? So, Matt, tell us a bit about your story and how you got into breathwork. 

Matt: Yeah. So I left Oxford and moved to the England–Wales border to live on a smallholding with my family. I discovered breathwork a few years ago through other courses I’d been involved in, and it was life-changing, really, for me, I would say. 

Gillian: Okay, that’s a big word. So what changed your life? 

Matt: Well, to backtrack a little, in my 20s I suffered from burnout. I was an activist – I worked in the area of campaigning – and I hit burnout quite early on. I was forced to slow down and to accept that I couldn’t change the world, or certainly couldn’t change the whole world. That led me into exploring more of the inner journey. I’d been very active in my outer journey – my outer trail, as I like to talk about it – and then I was forced, really, to look at the inner trail, and to moving from an attitude of doing to exploring more of an attitude of being. I was really attracted to contemplative practices – prayer, meditation, mindfulness – which I found really helpful. But then I discovered breathwork because my wife, who is a counsellor, happened to go to a session and said, “I think you might like this.” 

Gillian: So there was a moment where you hit burnout. You were doing too much, and it sounds like you were exploring different paths and stumbled across breathwork. Can you define breathwork for me in one sentence, for people who haven’t heard of it? What’s it all about? 

Matt: Breathwork is one of those catch-all terms that covers a whole load of different breathing techniques. But at its simplest, breathwork begins when we consciously become aware of our breath, and we apply some effort to maintain a certain style or to alter the breath a little bit. That’s ultimately what breathwork is, but it covers a whole variety of different techniques and approaches. 

Gillian: Okay. So it’s a way of breathing that can help our overall wellbeing? 

Matt: Yes. 

Gillian: And help our connections with ourselves and the world together? 

Matt: Yeah, yeah. It’s about coming to a place where you’re noticing the breath. And then there are lots of different objectives you might have for breathwork. It may be what’s called breath hygiene… 

Gillian: Okay. 

Matt: …which would be restorative, relaxing breathing patterns – slow, deeper breathing. Often that involves breath counts and timings of how you’re exhaling and inhaling. Then there are more functional breath techniques, which are more about performance – a lot of athletes do that sort of thing. And then there’s deeper exploration breathwork, which is what I tend to do most of. I use something called conscious connected breathing, which is a really simple technique, but it can bring about profound changes. 

Gillian: I mean, breathing is something we all do every day. It’s the very first thing we do in our lives – that moment when a baby’s born and you’re waiting for the first breath and the cry, and then you know it’s going to be okay – until the very last thing we do. And most of us don’t pay any attention to it at all. So what happens, at a very basic level, when we begin to pay attention to something so everyday? 

Matt: Well, I guess the key thing in all of that is, that you’re right, it’s the thing that’s constantly with us, and yet we probably pay very little attention to it every single day. So just the act of paying attention to the breath, just noticing it, brings about a change. Usually, if you’re feeling anxious and you manage to bring your attention to the breath, what will happen is that you slow the breath down. And that has an impact on the nervous system, and on how we show up in the world. 

Gillian: So how does the breath affect the nervous system? Can you tell us a bit more about that? 

Matt: Yeah, sure. The breath is very connected with the nervous system. Breathing through the nose will tend to activate the parasympathetic nervous system – the “rest and digest” state. If we’re mouth breathing, that tends to activate the sympathetic nervous system – the fight-or-flight response. So even just changing whether you’re breathing through the nose or the mouth brings an activation to the nervous system. And obviously if you’re panicked, you’ll be breathing through the mouth. 

Gillian: Yes.  

Matt: That’s what we naturally end up doing. And there’s a balance as well between the inhale and the exhale. The inhale is more activating; the exhale is more relaxing. And those have impacts on the body and on the nervous system. 

Gillian: Tell us about those impacts. In your own experience, how has this made a difference to you? 

Matt: Well, I guess this gets us more into conscious connected breathing. As I said earlier, different techniques bring about different impacts on the body. Slow breathing tends to bring balance to the nervous system because it increases the parasympathetic response. It tends to have a positive effect on heart rate variability, so it’s really good for us – it can improve our cardiovascular function. And for me, that’s what I needed and what I need, so I start every day with that balanced, slow breathing. 

The conscious connected breathing that I teach and share is very different. It tends to be an over-breathing, so you’re breathing more than you normally require. That increases the oxygen levels in the body and changes the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide. Without getting into the technicalities of all that, what it’s doing is turning down the “monkey mind”. It’s helping the brain to switch off from the doing, thinking, reactive part of the brain, and allowing a more relaxed, emotionally regulated part of the brain to be activated. 

Gillian: So to give us a picture of conscious connected breathing, what does a session look like, very briefly? What do people actually do when they’re with you? 

Matt: A lot of it is about creating a place of safety, so that people feel comfortable and safe. We’ll do some exercises that help the body down-regulate. Often you’ll be lying down, and then, for varying lengths of time, with or without music, you’ll be talked through this conscious connected breathing pattern, and you’ll just breathe in that way. 

Gillian: So that’s the over-breathing you mentioned? 

Matt: That’s effectively what’s happening, but you don’t need to worry about that in the session, in that moment. It’s about just noticing the breath and breathing with it. You’re breathing without pauses between the inhale and the exhale, so it’s a connected way of breathing. We’re obviously being conscious to each breath. And then, importantly, we’re really letting go with the exhale. You end up having an experience which, for the vast majority of people, is really relaxing. It’s a letting go. And you can enter transcendental states of consciousness because of what’s happening in the brain. 

Gillian: If you’re turning down your reactive self, you make different connections. 

Matt: Yeah, exactly. 

Gillian: Okay. So your breathing affects your physiological state. 

Matt: Exactly. And for some people, because we’re letting go and relaxing with the exhale, emotions can come up that you may not have expected. Different sensations in the body can come up. And we’re always trying to breathe with whatever comes up for us. 

Gillian: So what’s that about? Why are things popping up in the body? 

Matt: Because you’re experiencing a different way of being in the brain. The brain is working in a slightly different way than it normally would, and it’s allowing the thinking mind to switch off. Often people will feel a connection with themselves in a new way, or a connection with the whole world and the earth, or with the divine. All those sorts of things can come. 

Gillian: Is that what you meant by transcendental earlier – this interconnected feeling? 

Matt: With the transcendental impact, you’re often entering a different level of consciousness. That’s not to say it always happens. Sometimes it can just be really deeply relaxing and not a lot happens. Other times you can have a moment of realisation, or clarity can come, and you enter a different sort of space. 

Gillian: I thought you were about to say earlier that people can connect with things they’re not consciously aware of. So I’m wondering: is this trauma healing for people as well? 

Matt: Yeah, it can be. Often what we do through traumatic experiences and life experiences is hold our breath. That’s a very common experience, all through life. And allowing ourselves to breathe in this way allows some of that release to come. Those traumatic events could be little-t traumatic events – they don’t have to be big things. They get stored in the body, they get held in place by tension, and we end up reflecting that in the way we breathe. We do that completely unconsciously; we won’t be aware of it. And by opening up the breath, by connecting with it in a different way, we can start to cut through those patterns of restriction. 

Gillian: It’s also part of being human, isn’t it? If you’ve had a bad day or a stressful day, you’ve got to keep going, keep going – you’ve got a busy life. Then you sit down in the evening, you relax and go, “Oh,” and it all comes out. Our bodies hang on to things. So I wonder whether breathing helps us connect with our bodies, and with the things we’re carrying and aren’t able to put down until we stop. 

Matt: Yeah, you’re right. We all have those experiences. Even just focusing on your exhale, you’ll notice that your body responds – your shoulders dropping is one of the things you’re most likely to notice straight away. So there is that sense of letting go, of being able to allow stuff to drop away. And it’s the thing we have with us all the time: our breath. Every single one of us has access to it. 

Gillian: Before we go on, Matt, can I just ask: are there any health cautions? When you’re doing this type of work with people, what are you thinking about in terms of keeping people safe as they go into that space? Because they don’t know what they’re going to be accessing through their breath, and something might bubble up. How do you manage that? 

Matt: Yes and no. There are some cautions. Obviously we all breathe, so we’re all able to breathe in that way, and by bringing our conscious awareness to the breath we’re experiencing the present moment and being open to new things. But using a breathing pattern that we wouldn’t usually use for a sustained period of time isn’t for everybody. Conscious connected breathing is usually practised in a supervised setting, particularly when the goal is a breakthrough in feeling or a particular state. So that style of breathing isn’t appropriate for everyone. But generally, a lot of the other breathing techniques are just about noticing the breath and maybe tweaking the response slightly. 

Gillian: Thank you for naming that as well. I think it’s important. I practise Zen meditation alongside my own Christian practice, and – full disclosure – I’m not very good at keeping things up. I hadn’t done it for ages and I was feeling stuck, so I thought I’d just try a sit. And I couldn’t breathe properly. I couldn’t breathe into my lungs; I couldn’t get comfortable. So I thought, “I’m interviewing Matt on breathwork – I’ll do some breathwork.” I found an online breathwork session, and it helped me to breathe in a different way. And I suddenly found myself sobbing – properly crying. Nobody else was in the house, thank goodness. I wasn’t even feeling sad. Then I went back to the meditation and I could really feel the bottom of my lungs again. I had no idea that was what was happening. From your point of view, can you share some of the experiences you’ve had of breathing helping with that everyday presence in our own bodies? 

Matt: Yeah. I think it’s always a very personal experience – like the one you’ve just described, which is very personal to you. But the breath is so often seen as a doorway to presence and connection, and there are a lot of things that come up for people. I’ve mentioned it can be relaxing, it can be releasing; we’ve talked about emotions. You’ve mentioned tears and grief, and that’s something that happens quite a lot for a lot of people. Just by doing a breathwork session there’ll be tears, and people won’t necessarily know what they’re about or where they’ve come from. My understanding is that it’s allowing the body to let go and release. Sometimes grief will come up; sometimes tears will come up. 

Gillian: And how does it help you, Matt? You started by saying it changed your life. 

Matt: I think it’s one of those practices I won’t be without for the rest of my life, now that I’ve discovered it. If I’m feeling a little bit jangly and edgy, I’ll think, “Oh, I haven’t done a breathwork session,” and I’ll go and do one. It’s almost a resetting for me now – a kind of cleansing process, in a way. I used to be one of the world’s worst decision-makers, and I really find that it brings insight and clarity. In a breathwork session, I’ll often invite people to bring an intention. And a number of times I’ve thought, “I want to be able to make a positive decision about this thing in my life,” and do a breathwork session as part of it, and clarity has come. There’ll be an insight, and I’ll come out of it thinking, “Oh, I just need to do this.” It seems so obvious at the end of the session, whereas before I would have been pulled in different directions. There are lots of examples of that. 

Gillian: So it helps you think more clearly. Those are one-off examples, but you said life-changing. So how has it changed your life? It’s changed how you make decisions, you’re less jangly… 

Matt: Well, obviously we’re all on a journey, so there’s not necessarily one thing that’s going to fix everything – we know that. Over the past however many years, I’ve been doing lots of different things. But with breathwork, I would say it’s helped me connect with myself in a way I hadn’t done before. 

Gillian: That sounds profound – connecting to your deepest self. Where does God come into this? When we think of breath and Christianity, right now I’ve got the hymn “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” in my head. Breath runs so much through our biblical tradition – Jesus breathed on his disciples, and there’s the Holy Spirit as well. There’s a lot of breath going on. Is that a link in your mind? How has breath been part of your spiritual journey? 

Matt: Yes. I think the root of the word “spirit” is “to breathe”, and in most languages that’s the case. So yes, I think it’s really important. I wouldn’t want to over-theologise about it, because that’s for other people to do. 

Gillian: But what do you do? I’m not asking you about other people. I’m asking you about you. 

Matt: I guess for me, the breath is the one thing that we all do, so we’re unified through it. And because of the impact it has on our bodies and our minds, it helps bring about a connection to ourselves, to others, and to what we experience as the divine. It can’t be any accident that has happened, because if you look at most religions, breath is really important – it’s talked about in some way. 

Gillian: Is breathwork prayer for you? 

Matt: It’s an interesting question, and obviously it depends on how you define prayer.

 

Gillian: How do you define prayer? 

Matt: I’m not sure I know the answer to that question! But because it opens up communication and an experience of the divine, I would say yes, breathwork is enabling that. It puts us into a state where we can access that, and perhaps communicate more clearly with the divine. Interestingly, breathing has often been described by many of the Christian mystics, and mystics from other faiths, as the ultimate way to centre the heart in preparation for prayer. So I think it’s a really helpful starting point for prayer. And I’ve mentioned that in a breathwork session we would take an intention into the session – I think you could use the word “prayer” for that intention. 

Gillian: I think this is the really exciting edge of this very everyday practice we all do all the time – we’re in bother when we don’t breathe, right? – and its potential for connecting with the divine, however we want to put it. For me, I’m a head person. I stay in my head way too much, and I don’t connect to my body at all. So I find breathing, particularly in prayer and meditation, so powerful. The practice of simply stopping, pausing, breathing and connecting with my body – as poorly as I do it; I’m a give-it-a-go kind of girl – is like a slap in the face. Because when I do find the time to get just a tiny bit more presence in my own body, God is there already. I have the sensation of, “Oh yes, I’m in prayer.” So the practice of breathing is like an orientation to seeing that God is already next to me as I go along. Because for me, that’s what prayer is: reconnecting. My experience has been that breathwork is a really powerful slap in the face – “Come on, God’s here already.” 

Matt: I think that can be the case. It can be a real slap in the face. That’s an interesting way of wording it, because perhaps it’s a bit uncomfortable, but sometimes that can be helpful, can’t it? It’s a direct experience. And I’ve probably spent most of my life in my head as well – I think a lot of us do. Coming to the breath helps us switch off a little from that. These different techniques help the brain switch off from that doing, thinking process, and allow us to connect to the heart. 

Gillian: It’s a practice of presence, isn’t it? I’m thinking now of having a stressful day and just taking a breath. What that means is: remember who you are, come back into your body in the present. And if you’re having a panic attack, or you’ve been triggered because of trauma and you go into fight or flight – these are really difficult places to be, and I’m not minimising them – we’ve gone somewhere else in our heads. We’re panicking, or we’re back in the trauma, or we can’t get hold of ourselves in the present moment. For some trauma recovery, and certainly for panic attacks, the practice of breathing really helps that person come back into the present, doesn’t it? 

Matt: Yeah. If you look at most techniques for coming into the present moment, they involve focusing on the breath. It’s the one constant we have in our lives. It’s always with us. As you said, it’s there at the beginning of life and it’ll be there at the end of life. And yet throughout life we can pay very little attention to it, because it’s both a conscious thing and an unconscious thing the body is doing. So I think it centres us, just coming to notice it. And often that’s all we’re doing: noticing the in-breath and the out-breath – not even working anything out, just noticing it, just being present to it. 

Gillian: You know what, Matt? I would love for you to take me through a bit of breathing, very quickly. Can we do that? This is a podcast, so no one’s going to be able to see what I’m doing or what you’re doing, so let’s not have heaps of silence – but just for a little bit, talk me through some breathwork. I’ll do the practice, and then we can chat about what I experienced. Shall we do that? 

Matt: Okay, yeah, that’s great. So just sit back. Feel the ground beneath your feet, and the support of the chair or whatever you’re sitting or standing on. And just notice the breath – not changing anything, just bringing attention to it. Attention to the in-breath and the out-breath. 

And then what I’d encourage you to do is, as you breathe out, notice the shoulders drop. There’s a letting go, a releasing, in the out-breath. 

And then, just for a few moments, spend some time in the pause at the end of the exhale. Not forcing anything – just allowing the exhale to happen, and then noticing the pause, before there’s a little flutter in the body telling you that you need to breathe back in. And then breathe back in. 

Breathing out, enjoying the pause. 

The pause can be as long as you like. It’s not forced. There’s just a little flutter of, “Oh, I need to breathe in” – and breathe in. 

Just enjoying that pause at the end of the exhale can be something we don’t do very often. We don’t hang out in that pause. So we just bring our attention to it. 

And then allow your breath to return to normal, and come back to the screen. Open your eyes again. 

Gillian: That was really interesting, Matt, because when you said, “As you breathe out, notice your shoulders drop,” I realised my shoulders were up somewhere near my earlobes. I hadn’t noticed that until you pointed it out. And as I began to slow my breathing down and keep it in my nose, I felt tingling in my hands and feet. It might have been there before, but I wasn’t aware of it. I really enjoyed the invitation to pause at the end of the breath, the drop. I felt quite a sense of spaciousness in that – like, “Oh, I didn’t know this was there” – a really nice feeling. And then, as I was waiting for my body to breathe in again, I was aware of my body doing something automatically. I had a sense of gratitude that it just does that – it’s happening automatically and I wasn’t even aware of it. So I feel like I got a lot out of that. 

Matt: That’s a very simple technique, generally referred to as the drop breath. By doing it, you’re slowing down and noticing your body. If you were to do it for a few minutes – because you’re lengthening the exhale just by bringing attention to it, and then hanging out in that space in between – it brings about a parasympathetic nervous system response, the “rest and digest” response. 

Gillian: Yes. 

Matt: So it just helps you to settle. The reason I really like that technique day to day is that it’s something you can come to when you’re putting the kettle on and waiting for it to boil – just noticing that pause. Like you said, it brings about a spaciousness. 

Gillian: You notice the space. And it’s so everyday. So when the teenagers get home tonight, I’m going to be employing this, Matt! And I love what you said earlier: nose breathing is rest and digest; mouth breathing is activating. I think that’s such a powerful little nugget. I used it last night, actually, when I was trying to wind down at the end of the day – just breathing through my nose. 

Matt, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been wonderful to connect with your work and your ministry. We’ll put links to your website and your work in our show notes if people want to follow up with you. 

If you’ve been to our GoHealth gatherings and training courses recently, you’ll know that we’ve been developing breath prayers for use in our churches and by individuals. We’ve had some funding come in to develop that work, and we’re really excited about it. How can we breathe in our church spaces and in our communities – not only to help us worship God, but to connect with the wider community? There’s so much stress out there. There’s so much need for people to be connected to their bodies. How can our churches be even more a place of healing for the whole community through the use of breath prayer? So look out for that in 2027. 

We’ll pick up this very conversation about breathing over in the GoHealth community, where we gather once a month. Our members also receive all of our reflective journals and weekly inspiration to connect health and faith in their lives. You can find information about our community on the website. 

A huge thank you to Rosie Dawson, who produces this podcast, and to Wendy Lloyd, a member of the GoHealth team, for all her work on the podcast and in the GoHealth community. 

So until next time, thank you for listening. Do take the opportunity to breathe when you can, and may you know that you are a healing presence in the world and that God loves you. 

[Closing guided breath] 

Matt: So we’re just noticing that pause at the end of the exhale, before we breathe back in. Allowing the attention to rest in that pause, in that space. 

And then the first flutter of a feeling of, “Oh, I need to breathe in” – breathing in. 

And then letting go of the out-breath. 

And then just noticing that space. And then, with the first flutter, we breathe back in. We’re not forcing anything; we just breathe like that for a little while, enjoying the pause at the end of the exhale. 

And when you’re ready, allowing the breath to return to normal.