Devin Lebrun spent years appearing calm on the outside while chaos internally churned. He’d done the yoga teacher training, practiced meditation, worked his way through twelve years in the medical device industry, but he felt like a duck—seemingly calm above the water, but paddling like hell underneath the surface. 

Friends noticed the shift from his college days when they’d literally given him a “short fuse award,” a foam ball with a wick on it, razzing him about his anger. But that gap between how others saw him and how he felt himself pointed to a missing link. Breathing changed that, though it took him a decade to accept the new story of himself, and longer still to understand that this simple, almost too-simple thing was the foundation beneath everything else.

Devin Lebrun

Lebrun came to yoga in the late 90s as the only guy in class, pulled in by the anatomy drawings in Leslie Kaminoff’s Yoga Anatomy. He found a meditation center run by a man from India who’d burned out in tech and wanted to bring the gifts of his childhood to the Western world—heavy on pranayama, light on poses. Lebrun followed along, not totally understanding it, his breathing mechanics still poor. Then his friends started asking what happened to him. The short fuse guy had gone quiet and grounded. It took him ten years to fully believe that the new version of himself was real.

After 12 years in the medical device industry, Devin moved on to contribute his talents at Orangetheory when a close friend and co-founder called, needing his help. Lebrun joined and stayed to lead innovation and strategic partnerships. When the merger with Self Esteem Brands changed the mission, he negotiated his exit, used every breathwork tool he had to stay calm through the chaos, and took the runway he’d earned to figure out what came next.

Global Breath Network and the Global Breath Sync

After leaving Self Esteem Brands, Lebrun spent months in a park meditating on an empty copper bowl, turning down job offers and advisory opportunities, waiting for clarity. What kept was a pattern he’d watched play out across every room he’d ever sat in. The people doing the most meaningful work couldn’t get through the door, and the people holding the door open didn’t speak the same language. Breath was the throughline, and nobody was building the infrastructure to protect it, scale it responsibly, or ensure the people practicing it could actually sustain a career doing so. That’s the problem Global Breath Network solves.

Global Breath Network is a platform that connects breathwork facilitators with organizations and communities that need their work, while building the collective credibility the industry needs to sustain its growth. Lebrun structured it around three pillars of stewardship—each one addressing a different layer of what’s currently missing. The first is establishing the research foundation. The second is creating a global moment of unified practice. The third is bringing the right people into the same room.

The State of the Breath Report will aggregate peer-reviewed research, practitioners, products, schools of practice, and market data, giving the industry a shared body of evidence that doesn’t belong to any one school or method. This matters because the breath movement is fracturing right now—schools competing, everyone claiming their method is the only way—and without collective credibility, it risks being co-opted and commercialized, as yoga was when business interests outpaced the people who understood its roots. Lebrun’s position is deliberately neutral. Everybody’s right. The aggregate matters more than any single voice.

The Global Breath Sync on March 20th at 11:11 AM Mountain Time is that collective credibility made tangible through a coordinated three-minute pause across all seven continents on the spring equinox. Groups across five continents have already committed, and Lebrun is working on Antarctic research stations to complete the roundup. If you want to participate, you can join from wherever you are and breathe alongside thousands of people doing the same thing at the same moment.

The third component is a summit in Durango, Colorado, the same weekend. The draft State of the Breath Report circulates among them before its public release in late March, incorporating what emerges from those conversations. Lebrun’s guiding principle comes from studying the psychedelic research movement—independent groups doing meaningful work in isolation until people like Ram Dass brought everyone together and made it credible enough that the government felt threatened. He wants breathwork to hit that tipping point and sail past it before anyone can take it and make it singular.

Final Thoughts

March 20th is a call to pause, unite, and create something bigger than the hustle of everyday business. Lebrun is building something that doesn’t need him at the center to function—a global pause where no single person owns the moment; rather, it unifies the entire globe around one of the most basic functions of life. It costs nothing but time, attention, and breath.

Devin’s whole arc, from the angry engineering student to the guy meditating on an empty bowl in a park, has been learning that the foundation matters most. The breath, the nervous system, and the ability to sit still inside the storm while everything moves around you. Everything worth building starts from there.

About Elisa Edelstein
Elisa is a curious and versatile writer, carving her niche in the health and wellness industry since 2015. Her lens is rooted in real world experience as a personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder and extended out of the gym and on to the page as a writer where she is able to combine her passions for empowering others, promoting wellness, and the power of the written word.