I remember the first time I did water breathwork. It was in 2022, at a residential retreat with Jim Morningstar. I had been exploring breathwork for a few years by then, enough to know it could reach places that talking could not. That morning I came out of the locker room, and Jim was one of the first people I saw. He was already in the water, moving among the group, making sure everyone was comfortable, and getting ready to show us how the exercise would go. I had expected the teacher to be standing at the edge. That is how it usually goes. The one who knows the most stays dry and keeps an eye on the clock. Jim was in the pool.
We breathed in small groups, five or so to a pod with a facilitator in each. One person at a time put on a snorkel and face mask and lay face down in the water while two others held them up, kept the snorkel clear, and let them settle into the breathing. You breathed until something in you was ready, and then you rolled over and let the group hold you while whatever had come loose moved through. When it was done, you came out of the water into the arms of the other two, and they stayed with you while you came back.
My first time, it was hard to trust the snorkel and settle. It took a few minutes before my inhale and exhale found each other and fell into a rhythm, and ten minutes or so after that I rolled over, and the tears came, with my team holding me up in the water. In water the body cannot brace the way it does on land. You are held whether you decide to be or not, and the breath goes to places that holding yourself up had kept closed.
What I want to talk about today is quieter than all of that, and in a way more important. What has always impressed me about Jim is that he takes his turn. Before we left the pool that day, he put on a snorkel, lay down in the water, and let the others hold him while he breathed.
Jim did not have to do that. He had taught this work long before most of us in the pool had heard of it. He could have let his credentials do the breathing for him. Instead he got in the water and took his turn breathing like we all did.
I have thought about that many times since.
Most of us have watched someone we trusted drift away from the thing they taught. Maybe it was the guide whose private life no longer matched their words, or the mentor who built something good and then let ego dismantle it. When that happens, the ground shifts under our feet, and a part of us wants to throw the whole path out. I have been through that. It is why, for a long time now, I have looked for people who have been changed by their practice and have kept it.
What I found in Jim is a man who keeps himself in right relationship with his own breath. Whatever he asks a room to do, he is doing, and the practice is kept the way a fire is kept, by someone who keeps feeding it.
That is also why I am still his student. I have been doing this work for a while now, and I am still sitting in his supervision sessions, bringing him questions, and still getting in the pool when it is my turn. There is something in me that wants to be done learning, that would like to stand at the edge and be the one who knows. The breath keeps teaching me otherwise. Nobody graduates from breathing. The day I stop getting in the pool is the day I start working from memory.
That is why, when I saw that Jim was offering a free online breathwork session, I knew I was going, and I wanted you to know about it too.
On Saturday, November 14, at 11 a.m. Central time, Jim will lead a ninety-minute breathwork session online, open to anyone who wants to come. No prior experience needed. The hour was chosen so that people in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East could all breathe together.
Everyone is welcome, whether you have breathed with Jim for years or are just beginning to explore breathwork. I hope to see you there.
Register For the Free Breathe with Jim
Keith Rowe is a writer and teacher of somatic practice and walking meditation. He lives along Piney Creek in North Alabama and writes Vital Healing, where body and breath become the way home to the earth and the sacred.
You can listen to these essays on the Vital Healing podcast or watch the video versions on the YouTube channel. And if the work has been a gift to you, you can support it here.