What is Breathwork?
Breathwork utilizes the breath to unlock the psyche, revealing truth, insight, spiritual connection, and essential knowledge for problem-solving, healing, and personal growth.
Breathwork is an ancient and potent tool, helps release habitual patterns, traumas, addictions, anxious and depressive symptoms by harnessing the body’s innate power of breath. Thousands have experienced its benefits, including the release of stuck energies, processing old memories, and improving physical health in a single session.
To simplify it. Conscious connected breathing involves inhaling into the belly and chest, followed by a passive exhale. Connected breathing, boosts oxygen levels, alkalizing the body. This process also stimulates the hypothalamus triggering endorphins and other chemical reactions that induce deep calm and relaxation. As the thinking mind slows down, the subconscious opens up. Breathers gain a third-person perspective, observing stuck emotions moving freely through the body, ultimately leading to cathartic release.
What is Libre Breathwork?
Libre Breathwork is a one-of-a-kind program that helps you achieve insight, wellness, and freedom from the inside out. It uses breathwork and other proven methods to help you improve your mental, physical, and spiritual health. It helps you conquer anxiety, trauma, addictions, limiting beliefs while regulating the nervous system. Libre is created by Gladys Villa, a mental health expert and founder of Zumaya Behavioural Health Specialty Group.
​How It Works
Breathwork. The Healing Potential of the Body
Deep, rhythmic breathing accompanied by evocative music profoundly impacts the subconscious, provoking non-ordinary states of consciousness- also known as expanded states of consciousness. These states involve intense emotions, shifts in sensory perception, and altered thought processes, often accompanied by psychosomatic changes. They hold the potential to transform conscious awareness by revealing new insights, and answers to past and present challenges. Beyond mere logic and post-natal experiences, these states transcend Western science, embracing transpersonal and spiritual psychology as an integrate approach to healing emotional and psychosomatic disorders.
For personal inner work, no other natural technique taps into the body’s intuitive healing power quite like this. During this process, the breather receives clues, new perspectives, and answers-like being the main character in their own movie.
Breathwork as a lifestyle health choice provides impressive physical health benefits while also regulating the nervous system for mental health, meditation, and relaxation. It can boost immune function, lower blood pressure, reduce cortisol levels and enhance heart rate variability-associated with better heart health and resilience.
What To Expect
We teach dynamic breathing techniques alongside evocative music to activate the body’s healing mechanisms. This allows for sensations, body movement, visuals, spiritual experiences, energetic sensations, and emotional releases.
Our program alternates 50-minute integration sessions with two-hour breathwork sessions tailored to individual needs. Whether virtual or in-person, the process includes preparation, somatic experiencing through breathing, and integration work. Integration ensures that self- discovery leads to lasting, positive changes.
The breather’s aim is to trust their inner healer and embrace the process. Each unique mat experience reflects what’s needed at that moment, fostering inner awareness and sustainable life changes.
Libre Breathwork
A life-changing experience awaits you at Zumaya. Whether you are curious about breathwork for healing or personal growth, their offerings are truly extraordinary.
Expertise. Gladys Villa, your breathwork facilitator, is an experienced licensed mental health therapist and addictions counsellor. With over 10 years of experience, she combines somatic approaches and evidence-based therapeutic techniques to create a healing space for individuals struggling with talk therapy, ineffective psychiatric medication, and somatic symptoms related to trauma responses or stuck emotions.
Gladys is a certified Neurodynamic Breathwork facilitator, offering this transformative modality both online and in-person. She received direct training from Michael Stone, founder of Neurodynamic Breathwork and certified Holotropic Breathwork facilitator.
Our approach to breathwork is grounded in nervous system science and holotropic theory developed by Dr. Stanislav Grof, cofounder of transpersonal psychology, and investigator of exceptional human experiences. Gladys unifies the natural healing power of the body with effective methods rooted in psychodynamic, humanistic, cognitive, and behavioural approaches strengthening new neural pathways for profound inner healing and personal growth.
Why Breathwork? Gladys, having worked in a ketamine clinic, knows that there is no magic drug to cure mental health struggles. She developed a clinical program to aid people in integrating their experiences. Witnessing the medication’s harsh impact on both body and mind, she recognizes its limitations: long recovery, variable effectiveness, short-lived benefits, and insufficient support for integration. Additionally, there is an elevated risk of psychological dependence on ketamine.
No drugs required. Gladys, driven by her belief in the body’s healing power, sought a natural tool to foster body-mind connection, inner awareness, and lasting emotional healing. She emphasizes that our emotions carry messages for problem-solving. Ignoring them prompts the body to intervene-manifesting as headaches, chest pressure, stomach aches, or other hints. This inner guiding intelligence exists within us all, yet learning to listen to it remains untaught.
Who Is Right For This?
Adult beginners and experienced breathers are welcome. Participants are screened for health concerns. Though breathwork is a natural modality, prolonged heavy breathing might exacerbate certain health conditions.
Contraindications - You should not participate if any of these are issues:
If you are underage of 18, without parental consent.
Pregnancy
High Blood Pressure not controlled with medication.
Cardiovascular disease
Aneurysms
History of strokes, seizures
Epilepsy
Detached Retina
Glaucoma
Brain injury or other neurological disorders
Osteoporosis, only if moving around could cause physical damage to your body.
Bipolar with psychosis
Schizophrenia
Psychiatric hospitalization or serious emotional crisis in the past 5 years
Prior physical injuries that could be re-injured through intense movement.
If you are taking prescription blood thinning medications such as Coumadin
Asthma, must have an inhaler available.
Any medical, psychiatric or physical conditions which would impair or affect ability to engage in activities involving intense physical and/or emotional release.
Guiding Principles
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Trust. Let yourself be surprised. Listen, honor and get to know your inner healer. This is an opportunity to practice self-trust, let go of the thinking mind and expectations.
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Surrender. What you resist will persist. The moment you stop resisting, the blocks and stuck issues begin their release. Give yourself permission to feel discomfort, pain as well as joy. The way past is through, not around.
There is no way to predict exactly what type of experience you will have. Every individual journey will be unique and self-guided by your own inner healer.
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Live outside. Harness your consciousness and transform your life.