Does breathwork help with anxious attachment? In my experience, yes. Here's what I found.
Breathwork has been a huge part of my journey, to the extent that I even trained to be a breathwork coach.
What breathwork actually unlocked
I explored the modality and the practice within it, and found it helped with so much releasing of deeply held emotions that were sitting in my body. There was a lot of grief. There was a lot of anger that came out following the breathwork. It allowed a deepening connection to the body. That wasn't a full process on its own. I've had to do a lot more embodiment work since, and I'm still in the process of doing it. But the breath seemed to unlock a lot of the unconscious for me, a lot of what was going on underneath the conscious beliefs of the mind.
At the moment there are formulaic ways to explore the breath, certain patterns you'll see everywhere. Extending the exhale to bring yourself into a parasympathetic state, all that sort of stuff. And it's all great. It's not just great, it's fantastic. It really is. Those were all really useful tools. But something that's not spoken about as much is how powerful it can be to connect to those deeper layers, and what the journey is then.
Why breathwork alone wasn't enough
I also find that with breath, it was easy for me to dive in and do a lot of excavation. But I needed to make it more subtle eventually, and learn to attune more to my body rather than forcing big releases. At some point those releases just stopped happening in that way. My body almost became a little resistant to doing deeper sessions like that. I became much more subtly attuned to the sensations and energies in my body, and then doing IFS and parts work and somatic experiencing as well, which I'd touched on a bit before the breathwork. But it then deepened that connection, that felt sense with the body.
Don't follow someone else's prescription
What I'm trying to say is, don't listen to anybody else's experience or prescription of what breathwork should be for you. It's going to be unique. Your journey with it is going to be completely unique.
For me, having the music element was really big. There was something relaxing about having music that spoke to my soul. The lyrics that were speaking to those core parts that were wounded, that mirrored those inner patterns and that inner world, were sometimes the most powerful part of a session.
So you don't necessarily need to follow a script. Your own body is its own unique script. Your own experience is your own unique experience. You're coming at it from your own unique place. So explore it with that open-minded and open-hearted seat as much as you can. Keep coming back to that. Keep exploring the edges, your relationship with the breath, your relationship with your body. What do you need?
Working with resistance
Sometimes the resistance is asking us to listen to it, to acknowledge it, to hear its story, to hear what it's trying to stop us from feeling. And sometimes we need to discern that actually that resistance is something we need to push through with the breath. To go beyond, and connect to what's on the other side of it.