Just Breathe Summit – Yoga Australia

This landmark event brings together leading voices in breathing practices – from traditional prāṇāyāma to clinical breath education and research. We aim to explore the therapeutic wisdom of classical prāṇāyāma while addressing the benefits and challenges of modern breathwork trends.

Key Summit Themes:

Scientific foundations of healthy breathing patterns
Clinical applications for health + emotional regulation
Scope of practice + ethical considerations for practitioners
Traditional prāṇāyāma as a comprehensive therapeutic system
Safety considerations + risk management in modern breathing practices

Your Summit Hosts:

Fiona Donohoe-Bales is Founder and Principal Teacher at Womb In Bloom and Bloom Yoga & Wellbeing. Fiona holds a Masters Degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy (MCAP) and is a guest lecturer on Mindfulness and Self Care For The Therapist for Torrens University. She also proudly serves on Yoga Australia’s Yoga Therapy Committee.

Rebel Tucker is a qualified naturopath of over 30 years and a yoga teacher of 11 years. She is a senior member with Yoga Australia and is a qualified yoga therapist. She serves on the Yoga Therapy Committee and hopes to support Yoga Australia in continuing to grow the community of teachers and therapists and further develop the resources and support available to members.

Speakers include:

Robin Rothenberg | The Science of Breath: Upgrading Your Pranayama Practice for Real-World Health

Pranayama is one of yoga’s most powerful tools — yet most teachers are working with an incomplete picture of how breathing actually affects the body and mind. Drawing on cutting-edge respiratory science, Robin will challenge common assumptions about breath, expose the gap between traditional practice and functional breathing, and offer concrete ways to bring evidence-based insights into your teaching. Leave with a sharper understanding of breath mechanics and a fresh approach to pranayama that genuinely transforms student health. Presentation will include a short experiential practice.

Robin Rothenberg is a Certified Yoga Therapist, Buteyko Educator, and author of the critically acclaimed book, Restoring Prana: A Therapeutic Guide to Pranayama and Healing Through the Breath. Robin has been assisting people in transforming their health using the teachings and practices of yoga for nearly 40 years. She offers teleyoga-therapy across the globe, as well as continuing education courses for yoga teachers and yoga therapists. Robin currently serves as President of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and is Program Director of Essential Yoga Therapy, an IAYT Accredited Yoga Therapy Training Program. To learn more about Robin’s trainings and individual work go to: www.essentialyogatherapy.com

Tess Graham | Let Go … to breathe just as nature intended

Tess will describe the physiological and biochemical impacts of unconscious dysfunctional breathing habits and how they and misinformed beliefs around breathing and its practice may contribute to anxiety, trauma and panic disorders and be barriers to their resolution through therapeutic interventions. Tess will deliver a practical session on undoing dysfunctional breathing habits and moving towards restoring a calm, efficient healthy breathing pattern – that is, breathing just as nature intended.

Tess Graham is a physiotherapist and accredited Buteyko breathing educator. She established Australia’s first dedicated breathing clinic in 1993 and has delivered breathing retraining programs to over 6000 people – from toddlers to octogenarians; from the bedridden or frozen with anxiety to Olympic gold medallists.

Sarah Ball | The Cost of Chasing Calm

Breath is often offered as the universal answer in moments of distress – a familiar pathway toward calm or emotional release. It can be profoundly supportive. It can also carry subtle pressure.

In this session, Sarah explores the quiet urgency that can creep into our teaching – the idea that settling, softening, or breaking open are signs that a practice is working. Together we’ll consider:

• Why breath is not always the most accessible or appropriate starting point
• How the pursuit of calm or catharsis can unintentionally create shame, strain, or emotional overwhelm
• What trauma-sensitive teaching offers instead – approaches that centre choice, context, and relationship

Rather than abandoning breath, this session expands how we hold it. Participants will leave with grounded, practical ways to work with complexity – supporting agency, trust, and steadiness across diverse nervous systems without implying that anyone needs to fix, force, or release anything.

Sarah Ball is a senior yoga teacher, social worker, counsellor, and educator based in Australia. Her work sits at the intersection of yoga, mental health, trauma-sensitive practice, and social context. With over two decades of experience, Sarah is known for bringing nuance, warmth, and practical depth to conversations that are often over-simplified in wellness culture. She teaches around Australia, online and internationally and facilitates advanced trainings for yoga teachers and practitioners who want to work skillfully with anxiety, depression, trauma, and complexity.

Liz Bennett | A Cultural Timeline

Patanjali’s classical yoga system describes eight limbs of practice, among them Asana (posture) and Pranayama (breath regulation). While yoga has flourished globally over the past fifty years, breath practices have largely remained in the shadow of the physical postures. The rise of Vinyasa yoga in gyms and studios worldwide positioned yoga in the Western imagination primarily as a demanding sequence of physical shapes — accessible, it seemed, only to the naturally flexible.

In the post-COVID era, breathwork has undergone a striking resurgence — attracting yoga and Pilates practitioners, gym-goers, influencers, and the corporate wellness sector. This presentation traces the cultural and historical forces that brought breathwork to the fore, and asks why, given its ancient lineage and proven efficacy, has Pranayama not achieved the same mainstream visibility?

Liz Bennett is a Yoga Therapist, private practice Physiotherapist and Pilates teacher on the northern Beaches of Sydney. She brings together studies in eastern medicine and Physiotherapy.

Liz is a member of Yoga Australia Yoga Therapy Committee.

Together with her business partner Amelia Disspain, Liz has been delivering Balanced Practice Yoga Teacher trainings and retreats for more than a decade. In her practice, Liz works with many clients with chronic conditions including hyper mobility syndromes, arthritis and persisting pain. Liz teaches yoga classes by the ocean at Warriewood. Liz ‘s teachers and mentors include Simon Borg and Bianca Machliss, Michael de Manincor, Ganesh Mohan, Leslie Kaminoff, Saraswathi Vasudhevan, Neil Pearson and Clive Sheridan.

Sri Shubha (daughter of TKV Krishnamacharya) | Breath, Lineage, and the Living Tradition

This session opens with a conversation between Sri Shubha and Yoga Australia CEO Josh Pryor, exploring her life within one of yoga’s most influential lineages and what it means to carry that teaching forward today. Sri Shubha will guide a short practice drawing on pranayama and chanting, followed by open discussion and audience questions.

A rare opportunity to receive insight directly from within the living tradition.

Sri Shubha comes from a lineage deeply rooted in Yoga and Indian philosophy. She is the daughter of Yogacharya T. Krishnamacharya, widely regarded as the father of modern yoga, and grew up in an environment where yoga was a way of life.

She studied under her father for many years and continued her learning through correspondence well into adulthood. For nearly six decades, Sri Shubha has shared these teachings with sincerity and dedication, guiding students through the traditional approach, where movement flows in harmony with the breath through a gradual and mindful progression.

Her teaching reflects the depth of this living tradition, emphasizing simplicity, mindful breathing, and a thoughtful progression in practice. Over the last couple of years, she has also begun sharing her experience online with students from around the world.

Brooke Elliston | The Breath Detective: Learning to Read Breathing Before You Change It

The way someone breathes reflects how the nervous system has been adapting to cumulative load over time, including sleep disruption, sustained stress, physical demand or training load, airway resistance and emotional strain. Everyone has a starting point. Gradually these adjustments consolidate into a baseline respiratory strategy that becomes visible to a trained eye. Without recognising that starting point, it is difficult to anticipate how any intervention may land.

In this session Brooke introduces the observational skills that deepen how yoga teachers work with breath. Participants will learn how to recognise patterns such as respiratory rate, rib position, the quality of the exhale and the overall cadence of breathing as reflections of the system’s current physiological state.

Breathing can be observed while someone is speaking, sitting quietly or moving through practice. With attunement, the breath begins to reveal how the system has been managing demand over time. Seen in this way, pranayama becomes something far richer than a collection of techniques. The breath offers a window into the state of the organism and helps inform the choice of practice so it meets the person with greater sensitivity and appropriate timing.

Brooke Elliston is a former lawyer turned breath educator and author based on Garigal land on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Brooke trains teachers and health professionals internationally, mentoring practitioners to become skilled facilitators through the lens of respiratory physiology, stress and recovery, and the roots of yogic breathing. Her specialty is translating complex evidence on the mind body connection into integrated practices that become part of how you live and teach.

Patricia L. Gerbarg, MD and Richard P. Brown. MD | Breath-Body-Mind™ for Global Mental Health and Mass Disasters

Dr. Gerbarg will discuss the science and research support for breath-centered mind-body programs that address global mental health issues for children and adults. Breath-Body-Mind™ provides brief, effective, practical programs during and after mass disasters, including the COVID epidemic, genocide in Rwanda, war in Ukraine, veterans in Australia, and schools in Ireland. She will briefly touch upon safety, precautions, and research issues. Dr. Brown will guide participants through a sequence of breath practices he developed based on his studies of yoga, Qigong, martial arts, and tribal practices as well as his knowledge of neuroscience and psychology.

Bonus content

Additional recordings featuring a variety of speakers sharing their expertise in Podcast style interviews will be available as part of the CPD short course. Robin Rothenberg, Brooke Elliston + more!

Access:

This is a one-day livestream event via Zoom. Recordings of each session will be transformed into a CPD short course, accessible on the Yoga Australia website approx two weeks after the live event.

Yoga Australia members will receive complimentary access to the CPD short course when the livestream ticket option has been selected (AUD $72).

Thank you to our sponsors