"I Was a Wellness Coach Who Didn't Know How to Breathe" | Oxygen Advantage®

July 13, 2026 | 11:11 AM GMT | Sponsored by Oxygen Advantage®

Caroline Boyle • Breathwork with Caroline • Oxygen Advantage® Certified Instructor

Six years ago, I was working as a nutritional therapist and wellness coach. I thought I understood health. And then, within the space of a month, everything changed.

It started with a podcast. I came across Patrick McKeown being interviewed by Rangan Chatterjee, talking about how nasal breathing could change your life. Around the same time I read James Nestor's Breath. For the first time, despite working in the wellness space, I realised that this thing that happens 25,000 times a day — automatically, invisibly — was something more than just something that happened to me.

I became breath curious. And then I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Respond, not react

In the moment I received that diagnosis, I felt my nervous system go completely out of control. That feeling that you simply cannot cope. So I turned to the breathwork I'd been learning about and started practising every single morning — cadence breathing, 5.5 seconds in and out — and the difference it made was mind-blowing. It changed everything about the way I felt.

What I noticed most was this: when you're waiting for a medical appointment, your mind races to the worst possible outcome. You stop hearing what's actually being said to you. You can't ask the questions you need to ask. Just a few moments of slow nasal breathing changed all of that for me. It helped me respond rather than react. To be present in some of the hardest conversations of my life.

That tool has never left me.

The sessions worked. The breathing didn't change.

I went on to train as a conscious connected breath guide and began running group sessions. People were having powerful experiences — real moments of clarity, release, a sense of calm that surprised them. The sessions were working. But I kept noticing something that troubled me.

As soon as they left, they went straight back to breathing dysfunctionally.

Whatever shift had happened in the room, their underlying pattern hadn't changed. And I realised that if I was going to make a real, lasting difference to the people I worked with, I needed something more. That's when I found the Oxygen Advantage.

The functional breathing retraining I learned through OA changed my practice entirely. And the results I'm seeing now — I still find them remarkable.

From age 11 to 81

I work with clients from age 11 to 81. One young woman, 19 years old — lovely girl, but she hadn't been leaving the house because her anxiety was so severe. She'd seen counsellors, she'd tried everything. We had one session together and I showed her the nose-holding technique. She wrote to me afterwards and said it was the first time she had ever left somewhere feeling she had a tool she could actually use. Something she could reach for in the moment, when the spiral started. Not something that required a therapist or a room or an hour set aside. Just her breath.

That stays with me.

At the other end of the scale, I work with an 81-year-old woman with Parkinson's. She's incredible — so determined. With Parkinson's, a lot of the tension shows up in the diaphragm, and that's where we work together. Diaphragmatic breathing, breathing into that tension, learning that she has control over something in her body. The shift that creates — in how she feels, in how she carries herself — is profound.

Because I lived it

I also volunteer every week for Penny Brohn Cancer Care, running online breathing sessions for around 50 people. I do this because I lived it. I know what it is to sit with a diagnosis and feel your nervous system spiral beyond your control. And I know what it is to find, in the middle of all of that, something that brings you back. Functional breathing, then a guided practice. Week after week, I watch people discover that whilst they may not be able to change what is happening to them, they have something within them that is always there, always available, always free.

That's the breath.

Once you learn it, you have it for the rest of your life.