Review: Breathwork and Psychotherapy: Clinical Applications for Healing and Transformation by Jessica Dibb, published by W. W. Norton in August 2025

By John Passacantando

When it comes to practicing the internal arts (yoga, Tai Chi Chuan, qigong), you might feel, as I do, that these forms give some ineffable positive feelings, and the traditional explanations around chi and energy flows sometimes make sense and at other times sound mystical. Much of the time, going with the mysterious is a wonderful thing. And sometimes it’s fascinating to read how science is starting to explain the efficacy of these ancient practices.

That’s where Breathwork and Psychotherapy comes in. Dibb is codirector of the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance, which helps shape international breathwork training standards and ethics. She also draws on her work as spiritual director of the Inspiration Consciousness School, where you can find classes that use an integrated model of psychospiritual healing through breathwork. 

In the book’s forward by Daniel Siegel, MD, perhaps the only thinker in this field bigger than Dibb, he quotes poet and philosopher John O'Donohue saying that those who work on consciousness and awakening are all mystics, because mystics are people who “believe in the reality of the invisible.” The core concept of Breathwork and Psychotherapy is “conscious breathing” (breathing based on various counts and patterns combined with focused awareness on the breath) and its effectiveness for promoting health and well-being.

According to Siegel, Conscious breathing lets us develop the interoceptive monitoring that research suggests promotes emotional awareness and regulation and enhances empathy and social intelligence. We also learn to modify the energy of breathing as we shape the rhythmic cycles of the breath, a process available at any time of the day! In this way, breath practices can strengthen the mind’s capacity for regulation by stabilizing and strengthening both our monitoring and our modifying ability.

Siegel believes that breathwork builds the three pillars of mind training: focused attention, open awareness, and kind intention. He supports the theory that the mind is, an ‘emergent property’ of something that is both within the head’s brain and in the whole body, and that this ‘something’ was also extending beyond the individual’s body and in relationships with people and the planet… Where Siegel, and then Dibb later, is going, is to try and prove, by stacking up many peer reviewed studies and case studies from working with their patients, that through conscious breathing, an integrated and healthy mind can be supported, as it is perched between chaos and rigidity, exhibiting the qualities of curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love.

Dibb goes on in the next 300+ pages to pull together all the resources and documentation she can find to argue for the powerful role that conscious breathing can have in mental health. It is a breathing centered world view. She even argues that the great practices of yoga, tai chi chuan, qigong, and other internal arts, started out first as breathing techniques that later added movement, implying that the breath is of primary importance.

Dibb’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, especially since you can try these techniques by yourself, with zero downside, or you can add them to practices you prescribe for patients. You can aspire to greater mental health or maybe work through trauma. Conscious breathing seems to help with everything. According to Dibb, For cultivating wholeness and embodying presence, wisdom, and love, Conscious Breathing is the most accessible, egalitarian health equity and force multiplier on the planet.She calls conscious breathing a universal medicine. That reflects her boundless enthusiasm for breathwork.

While there are classes for which you can sign up, she is happy to just explain the techniques. What techniques you may wonder? That’s chapter 7: A Breathwork Kit for Whole Living. Dibb meticulously describes 11 techniques, some help you get energized, some help you fall asleep, some are to enhance focus, others change your body temperature or bring calm.

The key here is breathing with specific awareness. Taking breaths, in and out, for various durations, combined with holding your awareness on parts of your body, or your emotions, or universal notions, or powerful visualizations. You are having a direct response on your nervous system, regulating it up or down. The world is not just happening to you. You are directing your breathing. Dibb describes several of these techniques in her interview on the podcast, the Good Life Project.

At its most simple, Dibb’s work has made me a more conscious breather in general, especially when I am practicing internal arts. Her book is illuminating and allows you to go as deep as you’d like on the subject, with the supporting science clerarly explained for the lay reader.