Anyone here worked with Alan Dolan / BreathGuru?
Has anyone here worked with Alan Dolan / BreathGuru, or done his conscious connected breathing method for any length of time?
I booked a session after reading a very positive article about him. I have a longstanding pattern of waking in the night with anxiety, and the article described a pretty transformative experience with exactly that kind of anxiety.
The session itself was interesting and genuinely very relaxing. It involved continuous open mouth abdominal breathing with no pauses, eventually moving into repeated double inhales. I had a lot of tingling in my hands/arms and felt really heavy and calm afterwards.
There were a few things that made me skeptical, though. There was a lot of interpretation during/afterwards about childhood patterns, control, my ability to “receive,” energy, vibration, intuition and the universe. I was told that the breath mirrors how you live your life and that changing the breath can change the corresponding behavioural patterns.
Another thing that felt like a bit of a red flag in retrospect was how much he talked about publicity/PR and media coverage, including how getting press helped validate what he was doing earlier in his career. When I later searched for independent experiences online, I couldn't find anything about him that wasn't overwhelmingly positive or promotional.
I left the session feeling hopeful, but had exactly my usual anxious waking the next two nights despite doing the breathing practice. I emailed him afterwards (in reply to his follow up) to say I was disappointed and ask what I should realistically expect from continuing. I never received a reply.
Then I got an email from his address and was genuinely excited because I thought he'd finally responded. It turned out to be his PR team asking me to leave a review. Given my unanswered email and my existing unease about how uniformly positive his online presence is, that didn't sit particularly well with me.
I'm not trying to bash him, the session itself was relaxing and I'm open to breathwork being useful. I'm trying to separate the real physiological/meditative effects from the much bigger claims made around it.
So I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who've actually seen him or practised his method, including people who had neutral or negative experiences. Did it make a meaningful difference over time? Did anyone else have similar reservations?