When I teach conscious breathwork, or indeed embodiment practices of deep meditation, I always talk about the power of systematics.

Systematics is really simple, it is like your A-B-C’s.

My grandson has taught himself the alphabet song. I was talking to his Mum - my eldest daughter, about him learning to read. He has already grasped that the letter shapes have names. He has grasped that the letter shape A is called Ay. The letter shape B is pronounced Bee, and so on. He’s also figured out that the letter A has a phonic associated with it. He’s a smart boy!

Unlike some other languages, which have different letter shapes for each phonic - in English, we don’t have that clarity. So a child has to learn that the letter shape A or a, has different phonics attached to it. Which phonic it is then depends on the context of the word it’s used in, and what the surrounding letters are.

This is the power of systematics. If you miss a piece out of the learning curve, it is harder, if not impossible to learn a skill. This is why systematics is so important.

Breathwork, meditation and embodied awareness are all skills, natural skills indeed, but skills that also have to be learnt and practiced at depth. The learning is largely practical and experiential, but learning it is.

Key elements of learning (and there are many), include play, exploration, curiosity, frequency of practice, repetition and encoding and entraining the learning into the body.

If you are going to practice the skills of conscious breathwork and your diaphragm is tight or weak, if the pelvic floor is unconscious, if the shoulder blades are medially rotated, then what you can practice and the results of practice will be limited.

We have to work with those restricted areas first, slowly, steadily - building up over time to address the key respiratory structures and explore how to access, release, strengthen and integrate these structures into awareness.

This can all be done through the breath! And all the while you are also integrating your learning into the body, as well as your daily experience of breathing.

Today in our digital age we can be so impatient, we expect results now. Yet learning a skill well, so we have access to subtleties, nuances and shades, takes time.

Just as we might learn to play the flute, we first learn the feel of the instrument in our hands. Then we get the mouth shape right, so that the instrument makes a noise. Then we learn to read music, or we may just learn through touch and feel and experience. Then we learn to play the melodies of the heart, and the stillness of our own nervous system and body shapes the music.

When you are driving a car you will want more than one gear. When you are doing a carpentry job, you will want more than just a hammer. With conscious breathwork, through the power of systematics, you learn to play the full orchestral power of your body-mind.

Just like learning to read gives you access to all the books written in the language you are learning (extended by Google translate of course!), when you learn the Magic Key of the Breath, incrementally, systematically from where you are at to what you can be, you are touching into the power of systematics.

Without systematics, breathwork becomes a one trick pony. I want you to be able to access the power and potential available naturally to you. This is why I teach the power of systematics in conscious breathwork.

If you're interested in delving deeper into breathwork, but don't know where to begin, book a free 1-1 discovery call with me. Or you could start out with the 7-day breath challenge.