I’ve been doing this for over a decade. It began with a body that wouldn’t let go.
The way I am with another person today grew out of that path.
When I look at photos from my childhood, I see a joyful, active child. Quite soon that picture began to change. As a small boy I became sad and frightened — I would have liked to hide from the world. I was afraid to play with other children; every relationship took a great deal of effort.
Over time my body grew stiffer and stiffer — far stiffer than it should have been at that age. At five, I couldn’t sit cross-legged. My joints ached, I kept falling over. Nobody had a name for it back then. Sometimes I heard that I was oversensitive, but that was simply how I was. I didn’t understand then that I was taking other people’s emotions as my own.
What gave me a safe harbour was sport — first football, later basketball. Clear rules, play and competition. I loved it.
But inside there was a tension I couldn’t name. An ordinary conversation with another person frightened me. That was how it was, so I got used to it.
My mind is very flexible — it loves solving problems, building and improving things. From Lego bricks to games I made up myself. Perhaps that is what took me to the Cracow University of Technology, where I completed two master’s degrees and became an engineer.
I found work in industry, where I could do the same: build, improve and solve problems. Pros, cons, profits. Quick decisions, sometimes a lot of responsibility. Everything had to work and fit together. I was good at it.
For thirty-two years I thought I was feeling.
Right after university I felt an urge: besides sport, I needed something new. I signed up for contemporary dance — and something in me stirred. A joy of expressing myself appeared, one I had never known before.
I went to classes every day: after a full day at work I would take the tram to contemporary, contact improvisation, ballet. My body was tense, unlike most dancers’. I felt like a blacksmith tempering and forging iron. Out of this grew a passion that reached beyond my limitations. Along the way came performances on stage and outdoors, dance theatre and my first choreography of my own, which took me to the Solo-Duo competition in Budapest.
For the first time in my life I felt freedom — that in movement I am free. I am alone with myself, there is nothing around me, and I am free.
Next to supple dancers, every class was a fight with pain. When I tried to sit back on my heels, Japanese-style, my legs stopped at forty-five degrees — and had no intention of bending any further. My teachers were surprised and told me I needed to stretch more. And then I noticed something that has stayed with me ever since. I started listening to myself. A thought came:
I do things the opposite way to what I’m told — and they work for me.
It wasn’t resistance. I simply need to activate something first, to settle my body — and only then stretch into it. Years later, exactly this would become the first step of the method: first connection and settling, then opening.
I first came across conscious breathing at a workshop a few years earlier. I thought: it would be good to work with people like this. And the thought faded.
It kept coming back over the following years, and I kept putting it aside. In the background there was the struggle of everyday life. My body was sending signals I didn’t want to read.
The decision came in hospital. A weekend alone, among people in serious condition. I lay there with a tablet in my hand, with sadness and anger — and at the same time with compassion for the people around me, and for myself. I asked myself: what am I doing here? I decided I would go, no matter what.
I went on an eight-day Biodynamic Breathwork & Trauma Release System training. I came from a completely different world. Five minutes into the first session, there was screaming all around me. I was terrified.
I wanted to run away after the first day. But I stayed.
On the second day, for the first time, I felt myself. And for the first time I felt love — for myself, for another person, for the world.
That was when I understood what those thirty-two years had meant. What I had called feelings until then were names with nothing behind them — my emotions were described in my head, but not felt in my body.
To me, all of it was logical and made sense.
Module by module came practice and certification. First a thought appeared: what if I could make this my everyday work? In the end, the decision — I’m going for it.
After the course I started with nothing: not a single client, not a single collaboration. It was hard. For many years I had to keep ploughing on — fighting not against reality, but for myself.
That is how I entered the world of breathwork — through practice, not theory. I was invited to Beskidzki Instytut Psychoterapii, a psychotherapy institute in Bielsko-Biała — first to lead sessions, then to join peer supervision meetings. For nearly three years I was the breath person among experienced psychotherapists. Case studies, real people, real processes. My own training at the time was mainly in somatics and trauma work.
During that time I also assisted at trainings and at courses for future BBTRS facilitators — back where it all began. It was a school no book could have given me.
My early work was intense. Catharsis, deep emotional expression, fireworks in the room. It looked spectacular, and it worked. For a while I thought that was the whole point.
Then I began to see two things. The first: these processes ran close to burnout. They needed a long integration, and people walked out wide open into a world that wasn’t waiting for it. For some it was too much. I know that, and I remember it. The second was about me. The client would leave, and I would stay behind with a weight no one had taught me to carry. After a strong group session I would spend three days disconnected.
I was shedding layers I had taken on. It was a form of defensive reaction.
Everything I do today grew out of that. I started looking for something simpler, less effortful, more organic — a process that is safe and doesn’t send people out into the world cracked open. Integration was to happen during the meeting, not after it.
This isn’t gentleness as a leading style. It’s a conclusion drawn from my own burnout.
I led my first Breath Ceremony on 20 January 2017. The whole sequence — circle, connection, movement, breathing lying down, integration, closing — had appeared a few weeks earlier. Along with it came the playlist I still offer my instructors today.
Fourteen people signed up. Two hours later I led a second one — twenty-eight people in a single day. It was the first time I had ever led a group, yet I felt as if I had been doing it for ages. I was surprised by how both Ceremonies unfolded and by what they brought.
Over the next four years I led around seventy Ceremonies. I travelled across Poland and abroad: yoga centres, cultural centres, festivals, a historic building in central London, a small room in Brussels. There was no method back then. There was me and my Breath Ceremony.
The Five-Phase Formula emerged from that structure later. I recognised it rather than designed it — what I had been doing intuitively had its own logic: regulation of the nervous system, the field, relationship.
I didn’t invent it — it came to me. Piece by piece.
The name followed the same path. First Breath Ceremony, then DM Breath Ceremony — that’s what the first certificates said. Only at the very end did DMCO appear, and later what it stands for: Deep Mindful Cellular Oxygenation. I know — it sounds scientific. The same pattern as with the Ceremony and the Formula: first something appeared, and only afterwards did I understand what it was.
Teaching this work to others, I learned it all over again. The method I had recognised changed, one thing after another, everything I thought about leading.
For over ten years I have been leading trainings, sessions and Breath Ceremonies: in Poland, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. I also organise journeys to the Sahara, where breath meets the space and silence of the desert. Since 2022 I have been teaching instructors. More and more of them now lead sessions of their own.
The wave of breath is no longer something I do as an exercise. It has become part of my everyday life and switches on by itself — in conversation, in the sauna, at home. These days I practise less on the mat and more in life.
Not long ago I couldn’t sit cross-legged. Now people ask me if I’m a yogi. But this is about something other than range of movement.
Today I have access to myself — and I know how to accompany someone who is still looking for it.
And that is exactly what I want to share.
For a long time I was the task-driven one, the man for special missions. Today I know it is always a two-way meeting: I follow what is happening in the other person’s body.
I bring what I have worked through in myself — a calm I don’t put on for an hour like a role. Another person’s body senses it faster than words.
I don’t judge what happens. There is no right or wrong; there is what is available on a given day. I don’t interpret anyone else’s experience or add my own explanations to it.
This is how I see it: a guide who is truly present creates a space that does the work itself. My role is to be there attentively and not get in the way.
Each of these places can be a beginning.
Online practice every few weeks, about an hour long. Free to join.
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