The Breath Psychologist-Elif Clarke

The Breath Psychologist-Elif Clarke As a senior trainer and facilitator in Transformational Breath®, I share ideas about how to achieve

A day to breathe, reconnect and realign.This Saturday, I’m opening the space for a one-day practitioner immersion in Lon...
31/08/2026

A day to breathe, reconnect and realign.

This Saturday, I’m opening the space for a one-day practitioner immersion in London — a practical and experiential day for anyone who works with people, breath, body or nervous system awareness.

Whether you’re a breathwork facilitator, therapist, coach, yoga teacher, bodyworker, space holder, or simply someone wanting to deepen your relationship with your own breath, you are very welcome.

We’ll spend the day learning, practising, exploring and receiving.

We’ll look at how the breath communicates with us, how the nervous system shapes our breathing patterns, how to work more safely and confidently with activation and emotion, and how to bring greater sensitivity and skill into the way we support others.

There will also be space to practise with each other, experience the work in your own body, ask questions, share cases and reconnect with yourself.

Not just another training day.

A day to step out of doing, come back into your body, and remember what it feels like to breathe, receive and be supported too.

Saturday 5 September 2026
Vauxhall, London
10am–5pm
6 hours CPD
BRCP Verified CPD

A few places are still available.

If this feels like the kind of day you need, I’d love to have you with us.

Can resourcing become a hindrance in trauma work?Resourcing is essential — especially early on, when safety, grounding, ...
28/08/2026

Can resourcing become a hindrance in trauma work?

Resourcing is essential — especially early on, when safety, grounding, connection, choice and enough nervous-system capacity to stay present are usually needed before deeper material can be approached.

But there’s a side to resourcing we don’t talk about enough. The resource itself can start to function as an escape.

If every time sadness deepens, anger rises, fear appears, or the body trembles, we immediately bring the person back to grounding or a “safe place,” we may interrupt a process that was starting to move. The message can become: this feeling is too much, let’s get away from it. Resourcing can quietly turn into another form of avoidance.

There’s a time to reach for the resource. And there’s a time to ask, together — can we stay a little longer. Can we feel a bit more. Can the breath move here. Can we stay connected while this unfolds.

This isn’t about flooding anyone or pushing past what they can manage. It’s about recognising, together, when enough safety has been built that going a little deeper becomes possible.

The purpose of resourcing isn’t to keep us permanently comfortable. It’s to offer enough support that what once felt too difficult to meet becomes something we can meet.

Eventually the question shifts — from how quickly can I get back to safety, to can I stay connected to myself while I feel this.

Sometimes healing needs a resource. Sometimes it needs us to put the resource down.

26/08/2026

What happens when a breathwork practitioner learns not only how to work with the breath, but how to listen to what the nervous system and body are communicating?

I was touched to receive this testimonial from a practitioner who recently completed my six-week Breathwork & Trauma programme:

“I’ve certainly got a lot of takeaways, particularly to do with the polyvagal nerve and connecting more deeply with how you’re feeling in your body. I highly recommend it.”

She joined wanting to deepen her understanding of trauma so she could better support her own clients. What she found was that the work helped her understand herself more deeply too, alongside practical tools she could take straight into her practice.

This is at the heart of how I teach. Breathwork isn’t only about getting someone to breathe more deeply. It’s about learning to notice: what happens to the breath when something difficult is spoken about, where the body braces or withdraws, when someone needs support and regulation, and when they’re ready to go a little further. It’s learning to work with activation without overwhelming the nervous system, and to listen to the body rather than impose a technique on it.

I’ve brought some of the most important principles and practical skills from my longer training into a focused 6-hour advanced professional training day.

The Language of Breath & Body™
Trauma-Informed Advanced Skills for Breathwork Practitioners & Helping Professionals

For breathwork practitioners, therapists and other professionals who already work with breath, body or nervous-system awareness, and want to build greater confidence, sensitivity and skill with clients.

We’ll cover nervous-system awareness, breath and body cues, regulation and activation, practitioner presence, working safely with emotional material, and practical ways of responding to what unfolds in a session.

📍 London
📅 Saturday, 5 September 2026
⏱ 6 hours professional CPD
✓ BRCP Verified CPD

Link in bio to book.

For the last five weeks, I’ve had a little cat called Bella living with me.She appeared outside my house unexpectedly. I...
25/08/2026

For the last five weeks, I’ve had a little cat called Bella living with me.

She appeared outside my house unexpectedly. I had been leaving some food outside for the foxes, and I noticed her eating it. She started staying on the landing next door where she felt safe, and gradually we began to connect. Eventually I brought her inside, fed her properly and helped her recover.

And she has become such a bundle of joy.

She follows me everywhere. The moment I open my eyes in the morning, somehow she knows and comes running. She wants breakfast at 4.30 or 5am, then she wants to play. In the evening, just when I am ready to slow down, she is ready for another couple of hours of activity. She is young, happy, affectionate and completely full of life.

I love having her here.

But I also have a nine-year-old cat, and she isn’t happy. Bella is becoming more confident and beginning to take over the house, and I can see my older cat withdrawing.

Years ago, I might not have paid enough attention to that. I brought new cats into the house before and assumed eventually they would work it out. I don’t feel able to do that now. I can see that my older cat needs me to consider her too.

And I also have to consider myself. Looking after a young cat takes energy. My mornings, evenings and sleep have changed. At this stage of my life, I know deep down that keeping Bella isn’t the right decision.

So I have decided to find her a loving home.

And I am really sad.

I notice how quickly my mind wants to do something with that sadness. What does Bella’s arrival mean? Why did she come into my life now? What is she teaching me? What does letting her go represent?

I know this pattern well. I caught myself doing exactly what we all do sometimes: intellectualising the feeling rather than feeling it.

Meaning can be important. But sometimes meaning-making can also move us away from what is actually here.

And what is here for me right now is grief.

I love Bella and I am sad to let her go.

I also feel some relief when I imagine having my quieter home back and seeing my older cat settled again.

Your Breath and Body Are Talking to You is now a BRCP Verified CPD Course.A meaningful step in bringing breathwork, body...
20/08/2026

Your Breath and Body Are Talking to You is now a BRCP Verified CPD Course.

A meaningful step in bringing breathwork, body awareness and nervous-system-informed practice into professional therapeutic education — with ethics, safety and trauma-informed practice at the heart of it.

5 September 2026 · London · 6 CPD hours

19/08/2026

There’s something I really want us to understand about the relationship between our emotions, our nervous system and our physical body.

Just because we don’t allow ourselves to feel something doesn’t mean that feeling simply disappears.

Maybe you experienced grief, fear, anger or sadness at a time when it didn’t feel safe to feel it.

Maybe you had to carry on. Look after everybody else. Go back to work. Be strong.

Or perhaps what was happening was simply too much for your nervous system at the time.

And so, the body adapts.

You might hold your breath. Tighten your jaw. Brace through your diaphragm. Contract your belly. Become very still. Or perhaps you keep yourself constantly moving and busy.

And when these protective responses happen again and again, they can become familiar patterns in the body.

Prolonged stress and nervous-system activation can influence our digestion, our sleep, muscle tension, pain, breathing and many other processes in the body.

So sometimes we need to become curious about what the body has been carrying.

And this is where breath, sound and movement can become incredibly powerful.

Breath helps us notice what is happening inside.

Sound can give expression to something that perhaps hasn’t had a voice.

And movement allows the body to respond rather than simply remaining braced or shut down.

But we’re not forcing an emotion to come out.

And we’re not trying to release everything.

We’re creating enough safety and enough capacity for the body to feel what it is ready to feel.

Your nervous system decides if you’re safe before your mind ever gets a vote.It’s called neuroception, and it happens th...
18/08/2026

Your nervous system decides if you’re safe before your mind ever gets a vote.
It’s called neuroception, and it happens through three pathways: what’s going on inside your body, what’s going on around you, and what’s happening between you and another nervous system in the room. No words needed for that last one. Your body already knows.
This is what I’m reading every time I do a breath analysis. Breath stuck high in the chest. Breath pulling into the back instead of the belly. Tension gathering at the diaphragm, right where fear likes to live. None of it is random. It’s your body’s ongoing report of welcome and warning, held in the tissue because it was never safe enough to process any other way.
We’re wired to notice the warnings first. That’s just biology. But the welcome is in there too, quieter, easier to miss. The place that’s already open. The exhale that already moves freely. Finding that is often where the real work starts, not the hard part.
Your breath is always telling the story. This is how I learned to listen to it on purpose.

Every breath is already telling you the truth.I don’t teach people to fix their breath. I teach them to listen to it — w...
13/08/2026

Every breath is already telling you the truth.

I don’t teach people to fix their breath. I teach them to listen to it — where it moves freely through the throat, where it catches, where it drops fully into the belly, or stays held in the chest.

Every constriction isn’t a flaw. It’s intelligence asking to be heard.

This is at the heart of what I offer: helping people learn to listen to their own breath, so they can access their own healing intelligence — not mine.

It’s the same intelligence a caterpillar carries into the cocoon. Even as its old form breaks down, it already carries within itself what it needs for the transformation that follows.

That’s what I help people find.

Not another technique, but a deeper ability to listen to and trust the intelligence already within them.

Breathing into becoming. 🦋

11/08/2026

Becoming the butterfly isn’t gentle.

I never thought transformation meant getting stronger, more together, more resolved. But I didn’t have the courage to actually go through it. Not at first.

Because what the cocoon asks for isn’t effort — it’s dissolving. The caterpillar doesn’t grow wings. It breaks down completely. No shape, nothing to hold onto, nothing left to identify with. Just mush.

That’s what my own transformation felt like. And it’s what I watch happen in my clients too.

But I want to be honest about something: it wasn’t a decision I made one day and simply arrived at. It was a journey — through breathwork, through medicine work, through yoga, through learning to actually feel what I’d spent years avoiding, and through the support of other people who held me while I went through it. It was painful. It took real courage, and it took time.

The moment I could finally let go of the strategies I’d built to feel safe — every version of myself assembled trying to become somebody else — I wasn’t left with a better me. I was left with nothing. No walls. No control. Just raw feeling, with nothing to hide behind.

That’s the mush stage. It doesn’t feel like growth. It feels like falling apart.

And it isn’t easy — if it were, everyone would do it. What gets you through isn’t willpower. It’s support, and it’s staying, again and again, instead of reaching for another strategy to control it.

Stay there long enough, supported, and what’s underneath isn’t destruction. It’s your authentic self. Your beautiful self.

The butterfly. 🦋

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Milton Road
London
SE240NP

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