Why Breathwork Is the Next Step After Yoga

You have been doing yoga for a while now. Maybe months. Maybe years. You know what a good class feels like. You have learned to breathe with movement, to hold poses that used to feel impossible, to find some version of stillness at the end of a session. Yoga gave you something real and you know it.

And yet there is a ceiling you keep bumping into. A place where the physical practice cannot quite reach. The tension you still carry despite a strong practice. The thoughts that still run during savasana. The emotional weight that shows up on the mat but never fully leaves.

That is not a failure of your yoga practice. It is the edge of what postures alone can do. What lies past that edge is where breathwork begins.

What Yoga Gave You (And Why It Matters)

Before going any further, this needs to be clear: breathwork is not a replacement for yoga. It is an extension of it. Everything yoga taught you is preparation for going deeper.

Yoga gave you body awareness. You know what your shoulders do when you are stressed. You know where you hold tension. You learned to feel your body instead of just living in your head.

Yoga gave you breath awareness. Through pranayama and cued breathing in class, you learned that how you breathe changes how you feel. That was a huge step. Most people go their entire lives without making that connection.

Yoga gave you the ability to stay with discomfort. Holding a deep hip opener or a long warrior II taught you that discomfort is not danger. That you can breathe through things instead of running from them.

These three things, body awareness, breath awareness, and the ability to stay present with intensity, are exactly what make a yoga practitioner the ideal person to try dedicated breathwork. You already have the foundation. Breathwork uses that foundation to access layers that postures cannot.

Where Yoga Stops and Breathwork Starts

In a yoga class, breath supports the movement. You inhale when you extend. You exhale when you fold. The breath is a companion to the physical practice. This is valuable and it works. But the breath is serving the postures, not the other way around.

In a breathwork session, the breath becomes the practice itself. There is no movement to focus on. No posture to hold. No sequence to follow. You lie down, close your eyes, and breathe in a specific pattern for 30 to 45 minutes with a facilitator guiding you through it.

Without the physical distraction of movement, things surface that yoga class rarely touches. Emotions that live deeper than muscle tension. Patterns you did not know your nervous system was running. The stuff that stays even after the best yoga session of your life because it was never really held in your muscles. It was held in your breathing patterns, your autonomic responses, the places where your body braces without you choosing it.

Breathwork accesses the autonomic nervous system directly. It is not going through the body first. It is going through the breath, which is the one autonomic function you can also control voluntarily. That voluntary access is the doorway to the involuntary patterns underneath.

What Pranayama Is and What It Is Not

If you practice yoga, you already do pranayama. Ujjayi breathing. Alternate nostril breathing. Kapalabhati. These are legitimate breath practices with real effects on your body and mind. They are part of the yogic tradition going back thousands of years.

But there is a difference between the pranayama practiced in most yoga classes and a dedicated breathwork session.

In class, pranayama usually takes 5 to 10 minutes. It serves as preparation for asana or as a closing practice. The intensity is moderate. The facilitator is guiding a room through postures, not holding space specifically for what the breath might bring up.

In a dedicated breathwork session, the breathing pattern runs for 30 to 45 minutes at a higher intensity. The continuous breathing creates physiological shifts that short pranayama sessions do not reach. Blood chemistry changes. The sympathetic nervous system activates and then the parasympathetic system comes through. Emotional and somatic releases happen that most people have never experienced in a yoga class, not because the yoga class is lacking, but because the container is different.

Think of pranayama in yoga class as learning scales on a piano. Essential, foundational, and worth continuing. Dedicated breathwork is playing the full piece. You need the scales first. But the music is something else entirely.

The Nervous System Gap

Here is the piece that connects everything. Yoga regulates your nervous system primarily through the body: stretching releases muscular tension, inversions shift blood flow, savasana signals safety. It works. That regulation is why you feel different after class.

But for many people, the body based regulation only goes so far. If your nervous system has been in a chronic stress response for months or years, if you carry anxiety that does not come from your muscles but from deeper autonomic patterns, the physical practice can bring temporary relief without addressing the root.

Breathwork works at the root. By changing the rate, depth, and pattern of your breathing, you directly activate the vagus nerve, which is the main communication line between your brain and your body. Extended exhale breathing shifts you from sympathetic (fight or flight) to parasympathetic (rest and digest) in minutes. Active breathing patterns can release stored stress and emotion that the body has been holding for years.

This is not theoretical. You feel it happening in real time. Your hands tingle as blood chemistry shifts. Your body temperature changes. Emotions surface without a story attached to them. Tears come and go without drama. It is the nervous system reorganizing itself, and it happens faster through breath than through postures.

What Yoga Teachers Say After Their First Session

I have facilitated breathwork for yoga teachers from all over the world. Koh Samui attracts them because the island has a strong yoga community and many teachers come here for retreats, training, or just to practice. Nearly all of them have years of experience. Deep body awareness. Strong pranayama backgrounds.

And nearly all of them say the same thing after their first full breathwork session: "I had no idea breath could do that."

Not because they were ignorant about breath. They know more about breathing than most people ever will. But because a 40 minute continuous breathing journey accesses something different from what they had experienced in pranayama. The depth surprises them. The emotional release surprises them. The fact that they could feel their nervous system shifting in real time, without any physical movement, surprises them.

Some of them add breathwork to their own teaching immediately. Others come back for the facilitator training because they want to understand the mechanics deeply enough to offer it responsibly. Either way, the experience changes their relationship with breath in a way that years of pranayama alone had not.

Five Signs You Are Ready for Breathwork

Not everyone needs breathwork right now. But if you practice yoga and recognize any of these, the breath is probably where your growth edge is.

Your body feels open but your mind still races. Your flexibility has improved. Your strength is solid. But the mental noise during practice has not quieted proportionally. Breathwork works on the mind through the nervous system, not through physical effort.

Savasana is the hardest part of class. If lying still and doing nothing creates more anxiety than a challenging flow, your nervous system is telling you something. It does not feel safe to fully let go. Breathwork teaches you to stay with that edge safely and gradually.

You carry stress that no amount of stretching seems to release. Some tension is not muscular. It lives in your breathing patterns, your jaw, your diaphragm, the places where your body braces against something you may not even be conscious of. The breath reaches those places directly.

You want to go deeper but do not know how. More advanced postures will not take you where you want to go. Neither will longer classes. The depth you are looking for is not physical. It is in your relationship with your own nervous system.

You have been curious about breathwork but keep putting it off. That resistance is worth paying attention to. Often the things we avoid are the things our system needs most. If the idea of lying down and just breathing for 40 minutes makes you slightly uncomfortable, that discomfort is the invitation.

What a Breathwork Session Is Like for a Yoga Practitioner

If you are used to yoga, here is how a breathwork session will feel different.

There is no movement. You lie on a mat for the entire session. If you are someone who processes everything through your body, this can feel unfamiliar at first. The stillness is part of the work. Without movement to channel your energy into, the breath moves it for you.

The breathing is active and continuous. Most techniques use a connected breath pattern where there is no pause between inhale and exhale. This is different from pranayama where breath holds and pauses are central. The continuous pattern is what creates the deeper physiological shifts.

Things will surface. Physical sensations, emotions, memories, or just intense energy moving through your body. Your yoga training in staying present with what arises is exactly what you need here. You already know how to witness without reacting. That skill transfers directly.

The rest period at the end is not savasana. After the active breathing, you return to natural breathing and lie still for 10 to 15 minutes. This integration phase is where your nervous system processes what came up. It often feels deeper than savasana because your system has been through more. Here is a full walkthrough of what happens in a session.

Yoga and Breathwork in Koh Samui

Koh Samui has a strong yoga community. Studios across the island offer everything from Hatha to Vinyasa to Ashtanga. If you are here for yoga, whether as a practitioner, a teacher, or someone who came for a retreat, breathwork is the natural complement to that practice.

The UNTAMED experience is designed for exactly this kind of deepening. It is a full day that includes movement, grounding, breathwork, ice bath, and time in nature. For someone with a yoga background, the breathwork portion hits differently because you have the body awareness and breath awareness to go deeper from the start.

For yoga retreat leaders who want to offer their group something beyond the mat, private workshops bring breathwork and ice bath to your location. Two hours of guided practice that gives your retreat participants an experience they will talk about long after they leave the island.

You do not need to choose between yoga and breathwork. They are different tools for the same work: learning to be present in your own body, to stay with what is uncomfortable, to let go of what you are carrying. Yoga opened that door for you. Breathwork walks through it.

Start Where You Are

If you want to explore breathwork on your own first, start with the basics. This guide for beginners walks through what to expect. A 10 minute morning routine gives you something to practice daily alongside your yoga.

But if you want the full experience, the kind that yoga teachers come to Koh Samui and say changed their understanding of breath, that happens in person with someone guiding you. Not because you cannot breathe on your own. But because when someone else holds the space, you can finally let go completely.

Keep Reading

• How Breathwork Resets Your Nervous System
• What Happens in a Breathwork Session
• Breathwork for Beginners: Where to Start and What to Expect
• Breathwork vs Meditation: Which One Do You Actually Need