Inhaling Inspiration: breathwork and embodiment as a creative practice

Inspiration. A sudden spark of creative imagining but also ‘a sudden intake of breath’. Every breath we take is a creative act, a beginning, a transformation. We can also chose to work with the breath more deeply as a creative tool, playing with its capacity to place us in our most creatively fertile states and open doors of intuition.

Reclaiming our ability to take a full, relaxed breath is the first step towards living a full and relaxed life. A life where we can dream big dreams and feel that they can become real. A life constantly attuned to creative possibility.

All the best ideas come from staring into trees.

An experiment placed mice in a maze and put some of them in a state of stress (by stimulating their heart rate). The stressed mice did not explore as far into the maze as the non-stressed mice. Starting from a sense of calm and safety is a the place where we are willing to take bigger risks, initiate bolder creative leaps.

Understanding how to use your breath to resource yourself can unlock more creative states of being. Try it now, roll your shoulders a few times, unclench your jaw and stretch your mouth wide. Move your breath to your belly and ribs. Take soft, slow breaths through your nose. Extend your inhale by second or two, your exhale by a second or two. For a few minutes, just feel your breathing.  And now imagine…

But where does our imagination bubble up from? Not our rational, noisy mind. Somewhere deeper, somewhere that only speaks when that bit of your brain is quiet. Creativity stirs in your subconscious, in emotions and feelings. Journeys with practices like conscious connected breath are doorways to those places. They help us unearth deeper insight, they ignite creative fire. They let us dream bigger than our normal states of consciousness might allow.

An exciting new study that I took part in last year* shows that conscious connected breathwork can result in mystical experiences and a sense of ‘oceanic boundlessness’, a glimpse of your awe filled connection with it all. I don’t think I’m alone in experiencing profound states of awe during CCB sessions, of having sudden moments of inspiration, of wild ideas surfacing but also feeling like something that is certainly going to happen. You’re imagining your reality into being.

But just as it can show us the mystical, connecting to your breath and feeling it move your body, opens another door, the capacity for full body creativity. Embodiment bring us into dialogue with our intuition, it lets our bodies speak in ways we’ve maybe forgotten how to hear.

The cultural conditioning that tells us our bodies are machine-like and broken down into separate parts, has stifled our somatic intelligence into silence. But if we connect with our bodies as a single, sentient totality, intricately connected by our neuron-laden fascial network – then we can hear the whispers. Connecting with body is connecting with intuition, it’s imagining (and making decisions) with your whole being, your gut feeling, your heart.  

Ideas ferment and take shape in deeply embodied states of movement or meditation, where there is space for full body intelligence to make itself heard. Embodied creativity is a slow process, like all things that are worth doing tend to be. It’s not a lightbulb moment, more a slow sunrise of a realisation. We need to slow down so we can listen, rest is a creative practice.

So how can we use our whole being to imagine?

Þ    Build a relationship with your breath as a tool for anchoring in safety, the place where creativity can flow

Þ    Explore conscious connect breathwork to access deeply intuitive, mystical and creative states

Þ    Make time for slow embodied practice and intentional rest to create space for ideas to ferment and be felt

I’ll be exploring CCB as a doorway into the imagination in an online session on the 17th March , I also run workshops on Embodied Creativity and have in person workshops coming up in Brighton which you can in the workplace and events sections of the website.

*Guy Fincham 2025, Airways to Alteration (A2A): a randomised controlled trial exploring effects of breathwork on conscious state