"I Thought I Understood the Mind-Body Connection. This Went Deeper."
Emer O'Brien: Pilates Teacher. Running Coach. Corporate Wellness Facilitator.
A decade into teaching Pilates and running technique, Emer O'Brien already understood the mind-body connection — until Oxygen Advantage® gave her a completely new way to read it, from the studio floor to the boardroom.
Emer O'Brien had already spent over a decade in the wellness space — teaching Pilates, coaching running technique, working with clients on fitness and recovery — before she came across Oxygen Advantage® during the pandemic. She trained online in 2021, expecting a useful addition to her toolkit. What she got was a shift in how she saw the breath entirely.
The change in her own body came first. Long-standing sinus issues and seasonal allergies she'd lived with for years started easing almost immediately.
That was enough to make her go deeper. She travelled to train in person with Patrick McKeown in Galway — an experience she describes as transformational in a way the online course hadn't fully prepared her for.
"Being in the room brought it all to life."
Today, breathwork sits at the center of everything Emer teaches. In her Pilates classes, she's moved away from the intense breathing patterns often taught alongside movement work, using gentle, functional breathing instead to relax the nervous system before asking the body to do anything else. Her students, she says, often don't want to leave the room afterward.
As a running coach, the shift has been just as significant — nasal breathing and altitude-simulation techniques now help her runners breathe more efficiently, reduce side stitches, and build real endurance rather than just mileage.
She's carried the same principles into corporate wellness work through The Wellness Tribe, running workshops that give busy teams simple, science-backed tools to feel calmer and more focused during the workday — a space she's watched shift from niche interest to genuine employee wellbeing priority.
What changed most, Emer says, is how she reads a client at all. Oxygen Advantage® taught her to assess breathing not just mechanically — chest versus diaphragm — but chemically and neurologically: patterns of breath-holding, over-breathing, tension held around the shoulders and chest. Small signals that tell her far more about a client's internal state than posture alone ever did.
"The breath is at the core of it all."