Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT)

Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy,  developed by Lloyd Lalande, PhD, is a clinically oriented, psychologically grounded approach to breathwork that aims to facilitate deeper psychological change. It uses a specific style of sustained respiration to bring attention into direct contact with embodied experience—sensations, emotions, conflicts and aspects of self that may ordinarily remain outside conscious awareness. GRMT is not simply a breathing exercise or a technique added to psychotherapy. It is an integrated therapeutic methodology with its own theoretical foundations, clinical protocol, practitioner training and professional standards.

A central premise of GRMT is that psychological difficulties can involve more than the symptoms and patterns that are immediately accessible to conscious awareness. Beneath the Symptomatic Self and the adaptations of the Compensatory Self may lie more fundamental aspects of experience associated with the Real Self, separated from ordinary awareness by a Defensive Barrier. GRMT works with this deeper level through respiration, mindful attention and the therapeutic relationship. The process is deliberately non-cathartic: rather than encouraging emotional release, dramatic expression or acting out, the client is guided to remain mindfully present with the dominant bodily experience until it changes, subsides or gives way to something new.

What distinguishes GRMT is therefore not breathing alone, but the way respiration, mindfulness, embodied experience, psychological depth and practitioner presence are brought together within a coherent clinical system. GRMT places particular importance on practitioner formation, clinical fidelity, research and professional governance. It is intended to be practised as a defined methodology rather than freely blended or modified, so that its therapeutic principles, clinical safeguards and professional identity are maintained as it is taught and used by others. GRMT is not simply sold as a technique; it is entrusted within a professional system.

Explore GRMT

The pages in this section provide more detailed information about the development, theory and practice of GRMT, its research and evidence base, practitioner training and certification, and the professional standards and governance through which the methodology is maintained.