Brooke Elliston Yoga

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Brooke Elliston Yoga Full Body Yes.

To embrace the whole Buffet of what it means to be human ~ from pleasure to pain, darkness to dawn, and every tune and tone and note and frequency in between.

18/09/2026

Many people who join the Advanced Breath Instructor Training have already done other breath trainings, but still feel there’s something missing. They want to personalise what they teach with greater precision, feel confident in their decisions and build a client base that trusts their work.

That’s what was looking for when she joined, and hearing her describe what she’s found here means so much to me 🫶🏼

Inside, you’ll find a community that cares deeply about teaching well, alongside frameworks that help you put your knowledge into practice and take the guesswork out of choosing what to offer, to whom and why. You’ll move beyond learning techniques by rote into understanding how to adapt them and explain what you’re teaching with confidence.

If that’s the depth you’ve been looking for, DM me TRAINING and let’s talk about you joining us. I’ve put years of study, practice and application into this training, and I’d love you to experience it.

17/09/2026

These are called small breath holds, a practice from the Buteyko breathing tradition that’s commonly used for anxiety, panic and hyperventilation

The physiology is quite interesting ☺️

When you suspend your breathing, CO2 rises a little and the urge to breathe gradually becomes stronger. That growing drive to breathe can bring sensations that overlap with the sensations people often find frightening during anxiety and panic, including air hunger and a sense of breathlessness. Breath holding has also been used experimentally to study these respiratory sensations in people with panic disorder.

The idea with these tiny holds is to introduce a very small, manageable dose of that breathing discomfort, then return to completely normal breathing.

Hence the framing: a teaspoon of anxiety.

You’re essentially practising meeting the knock at the door without having to immediately answer it

One important nuance - the Buteyko explanation often centres on increasing CO2 tolerance, but I wouldn’t claim that this alone explains why the practice may help anxiety. Research on breathing interventions for panic suggests the relationship between CO2 and symptom improvement is more complicated than simply more tolerance = less anxiety , and includes the brain’s predictions and prior learning about what different sensations mean

want the full practice? comment “anxiety” and ill send a short video

09/09/2026

Comment “ASSIST” to find out more 🫶🏼

Details below:

📍 Collaroy Beach, Sydney’s Northern Beaches

📅 November 10–13

⏰ Approx 9am–4pm daily

🍽️ yummiest lunch provided

🚗 Volunteer position - yoga teacher or bodyworker , you’ll need your own accommodation nearby and travel, so factor in the cost if you’re not Sydney-based

This is a once in a lifetime experience. It’s genuinely life changing, not just for the people receiving but for the people giving it. I guide you the while time but you also learn to work with and support your partner into an intuitive practice by the end of the week.

So many of our assistants come back retreat after retreat. It never ceases to amaze me how much we learn from them.

01/09/2026

I work with lots of osteos, physios, yoga teachers and Pilates teachers who are already seeing people with pain or coming back from injury.

They’re obviously using the tools from their own profession to help people move better and build capacity, but more and more of them are also starting to layer breathing into that work because they’re looking for ways to help reduce pain.

And breathing absolutely can help with that 🙌🏼

But if we only use it to help clients downregulate, we miss a much more interesting part of what breath can offer.

With persistent pain, pain intensity does not give us a precise measure of how much injury is happening in the body at the present moment. Sensations associated with pain can also become highly *salient*, meaning the brain gives them more importance and they capture attention more easily 👁️

So someone can become incredibly tuned in to sensation from an area that has hurt for a long long time, even as what is happening in the tissues heals or improves.

This is where I use breath awareness differently.

I might invite someone’s attention towards an area they have learned to protect - initially through the sensations of breathing - then gradually take that awareness into movement and appropriate load bearing.

I’m looking at whether they tense elsewhere in the body, whether certain areas are difficult for them to feel, whether pain takes up most of their attention, and whether they can still register neutral or pleasant sensations.

That gives us a much richer picture than simply asking whether breathing makes them feel calmer.

People with persistent pain often need real experiences of movement, loading and increasing capacity to update the brain’s learning about what the body is actually capable of.
And breath can sit inside that process and help someone broaden what they are noticing, become more accurate at reading what they are actually feeling, and give their nervous system more information about what their body can tolerate.

21/08/2026

If you teach breathing, air hunger is well worth understanding, because simply cueing someone to breathe slowly or deeply and expecting it to make them relax can sometimes perpetuate the very sensations that are contributing to their anxiety.

Air hunger is the uncomfortable feeling of not getting a satisfying breath or the feeling of needing more air. It can create an almost irresistible urge to take bigger breaths, sigh frequently, or keep reaching for a “full” breath.

Slowing respiratory rate alone doesnt necessarily reduce ventilation. If each breath becomes much bigger, tidal volume increases , and overall ventilation can remain high or even increase.📈

For someone already overbreathing (meaning taking in more air relative to their metabolic needs), this can maintain slightly lower than normal CO2 and contribute to sensations that further amplify the discomfort and distress.

This is why I often teach softness before timing, or at least awareness, basing the practice on felt experience rather than numbers. I invite people to relax into a quieter, subtler breath without forcing or controlling it with their breathing muscles, allowing their own felt sense to guide how much is enough.

Rather than imposing a prescribed cadence, which I am not against btw, we can work with the physiology and, especially in group settings, allow each person’s sensations to guide the practice.

Air hunger can have many causes and does not itself mean someone is overbreathing, but understanding it can profoundly change the way we teach the breath.

Explaining air hunger to students or clients can also help them develop interoceptive awareness and make sense of the paradoxical sensations that can arise when learning to breathe less, so the urge for a bigger breath becomes information they can notice and respond to with more agency, rather than something they immediately need to fix.

20/08/2026

Interoception is exquisitely nuanced. It is much more than simply being able to “feel into your body”.

At its most basic, interoception involves the nervous system sensing signals from within the body that provide information about our internal state and help regulate homeostasis - including signals related to hunger, thirst, heartbeat, breathing, temperature, fullness and pain

Then there is salience, how strongly a particular signal stands out as significant and captures our attention 👀

There is also interoceptive accuracy, which refers to objectively measured performance in detecting or discriminating internal bodily signals.

And these different aspects do not always line up neatly.

Someone might barely notice hunger until late afternoon, yet become intensely aware of the slightest change in their heartbeat. They might miss the early signals that they need to go to the toilet until they are absolutely busting 🏃🏽‍♀️‍➡️, while certain pain becomes impossible to ignore.

This came up this week when an osteopath inside my Advanced Breath Instructor Training shared that simply feeling pain, tingling or an unusual bodily sensation can quickly trigger anxiety and fear in some of her clients.

For those clients, that sensation may already carry enormous salience. It stands out, demands attention, and the meaning attached to it can shape how it is experienced.

Which is why asking someone to simply “feel into your body” is not as benign as it sounds.

For some students, turning inward may reveal signals they rarely notice. For others, we may be directing even more attention towards sensations that are already extraordinarily loud.

Noticing more is not necessarily the same thing as feeling safer.

As yoga teachers, or wellness professionals, understanding interoception helps us offer more choice around where attention goes, while recognising that more internal awareness right away is not always better.

19/08/2026

State dependent learning describes the way our internal physiological or emotional state during learning can become part of the cues associated with that learning.

When aspects of that internal state are present again later, they can sometimes make what we learned easier to retrieve or use.

This has interesting implications for the way we teach breath and regulation practices.

If someone only ever practises a breathing technique while sitting quietly, feeling calm and safe, we can’t assume they’ll have the same access to that skill when their physiology looks very different - such as when their heart rate is elevated, breathing has changed, air hunger is present, or they’re emotionally activated.

One way we can support transfer into real life is by gradually practising skills across the physiological states in which they may actually be needed.

That might mean learning a breathing practice while calm first, then later exploring it after movement when heart rate and ventilation have increased, alongside mild and tolerable air hunger, or during graded exposure to situations that create greater activation.

The aim is to give the brain experience accessing and applying the skill across a broader range of internal states.

Because ultimately, we don’t only want our clients to be able to use their tools while sitting quietly with us… We want those skills to become available in the messy, moving physiological reality of their lives.

12/08/2026

If you’ve always identified as the smart one 🧠, the intelligent one, the person who can analyse, reason and talk their way through almost anything, this may apply to you.

Here’s where I’d start.

Find a body based practice that gives you regular practice paying attention to your body. Yoga, martial arts, dance, anything that asks you to experience rather than analyse.

Then give yourself a few external reminders throughout the day to notice what’s happening internally.

Are you hungry?
Thirsty?
Do you need to p*e?
Are you tired?
Tense?
Restless?

At first, you may need the external prompt to lead you back to the internal one ↩️

And if you miss the signal, sometimes your behaviour will give you a clue.

Maybe you suddenly notice you’re snapping at everyone, and when you stop to check in, you realise you’re exhausted or hangry, and haven’t eaten for five hours.

Use the behaviour as a breadcrumb to lure your attention back towards the body…🧀

Over time, the practice is noticing those signals earlier, before you automatically override them.

That’s one place I’d start rebuilding self trust 🫀

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