If you search for how to become a Breathworker, you will find quite different answers. Some train at one school, others combine multiple trainings, and some learn for years alongside a more experienced professional. This is not strange: Breathwork is a broad and relatively new professional field, with many schools and different roots.
What helps clarify the landscape is to distinguish three things: training, the certificate issued by a school, and independent professional certification. At Breathflow, when we talk about international professional certification, our main point of reference is the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance (GPBA).
In this article you will read
- How a Breathworker can be trained
- What the basic terms of Breathwork mean
- What GPBA is and what it examines
- How the Breathwork Academy is structured
- How a Breathflow graduate can proceed towards GPBA certification
How a Breathworker is trained
Breathwork training can largely be described as non-formal learning: organized training with specific goals, hours, practice, and guidance, outside the classic university system.
There is no single path. One can complete a multi-year program at one school, combine different trainings, or develop through education, personal practice, apprenticeship, and supervision. As the journey progresses towards a professional role, experience with people, ethics, supervision, and the ability to document what has actually been completed become increasingly important.
Some terms you will encounter
- Breathwork: the broader term for many different practices and schools that consciously work with breath.
- Conscious Connected Breathing (CCB): a continuous cycle of inhalation and exhalation without intentional pause. It is the main practice we use at Breathflow.
- Rebirthing: one of the historical schools of conscious connected breathing and a significant root of the Breathflow approach.
- Pranayama: the large family of yoga breathing practices. It is connected to the broader field of conscious breathing, but it is not the same thing as modern professional Breathwork training. At Breathflow, we practice various Pranayama techniques.
- Breathworker: the person who has been trained to support Breathwork practices or sessions.
What Breathworker certification means
A school certificate and an independent professional certification are not the same thing.
A school can issue a certificate of attendance, which records the hours, topics, and practice completed by a student. This documents the training undertaken.
GPBA professional certification is an additional, independent step. The GPBA examines whether a candidate’s overall training meets its own professional standards. Its official title is GPBA Certified Professional Breathwork Practitioner.
What GPBA is and what it examines
The Global Professional Breathwork Alliance was created through international collaboration of schools and Breathworkers. The professional training standards were validated in 2003 so that different schools could maintain their own methods, but there would be a common reference point for the depth of professional training.
The core curriculum includes at least 400 hours over at least two years, along with personal practice, theory and experiential learning, supervision, ethics and boundaries, anatomy and physiology of breathing, communication, and practice with people.
The GPBA can assess graduates of schools it has already evaluated, as well as graduates who trained at schools it has not yet evaluated. In the latter case, the candidate submits detailed documentation of their training through the individual assessment pathway that the GPBA calls “Other Training”.
The Breathwork Academy
The Breathflow Breathwork Academy is designed as a gradual journey that can start from personal experience and, for anyone who wishes to continue, reach a professional role.
Our approach is rooted in Rebirthing and uses Conscious Connected Breathing (CCB) and mindfulness as its core practices. Around these, personal experience, body observation, communication, gradual assumption of responsibility, practice with other people, and ethics are built.
Stage 1 — Entry into the world of Breathwork: 40 hours of personal development, basic breathing theory, and autonomous nervous system function.
Stage 2 — Explore Your Depth: through inner child work, through the Rebirthing perspective on trauma, improving communication, boundaries and interpersonal relationships, practice in pairs, and active support from the Breathflow trainee community.
Stage 3 — Professional training: acquiring skills and experience in supporting individual and group Breathwork sessions, deepening physiology and embodied practices, client sessions, supervision, and ethics training.
The full professional pathway is designed for 400+ hours over at least three years and has been organized based on GPBA professional standards.
Upon completion of each Stage, the trainee receives a certificate of attendance and a signed detailed PDF file with the hours, modules, and practice completed.
From Breathflow to GPBA certification
The professional pathway is built towards the proposed professional identity “Breathflow Professional Breathworker”.
After the full professional pathway and the final criteria of Stage 3 are completed, the graduate will be able, if they wish, to use the detailed documentation of their training for a personal application for assessment to the GPBA.
Breathflow within the international community
There is a broader international community around Breathwork. The International Breathwork Foundation (IBF), established in 1994, primarily functions as a network for collaboration and exchange among Breathworkers, schools, and organizations. Additionally, there are national associations and many different schools worldwide.
The founders of Breathflow, Grigoria Natalia Nikolacopoulou and Haris Savvoglou, are GPBA certified professional Breathworkers, IBF members, and active members of the Breathwork Association of Greece.
For us, participation in these communities is a way to stay in touch with the broader field, to learn, and to evolve our training along with other people who work with breath.
If you are starting now from Stage 1
You don’t need to know from the beginning how far you want to go. Stage 1 is a complete 40-hour experiential cycle.
If you later wish to continue, the hours and what you have learned are integrated into the larger Breathwork Academy journey. This way you can proceed step-by-step, without having to decide from day one if you want to become a professional Breathworker.
