What Is The Breathwork?

Breathwork comes in many different forms and flavors. Short 10 minute routines can set you up for a marvelous day or help you go to sleep at night. In the middle of life’s chaos with no one even knowing you are doing it, 90 seconds of purposeful breathing can shift your entire mood and actively change your emotional state. There are breathwork techniques for almost any aliment you can imagine including indigestion, pain, obesity, addiction, trauma, depression, ADHD, stress, high blood pressure, PTSD, and anxiety. Breath is medicine—with no side effects.

 

Although I plan to expand my educational base to include all of the incredible types of breathwork mentioned above and more, I am starting with Transformational Release Therapy. If ever there were a magic bullet to healing, growth, and recovery—this is it. My first 90 minute breathwork journey was like 5 years of talk therapy. I released so much sadness and anger (anger I was in complete denial of even having) in that first session, that I felt like a new person on the other side. I couldn’t believe such an amazing healing modality existed and decided right then and there that I need to bring this Breath Medicine to as many people who are ready to listen.

​

In our Western society, we are often encouraged to suppress our emotions. We are taught at an early age to “stop your crying” or it isn’t ok to be angry or afraid. Due to this conditioning, when these emotions arise, they make us uncomfortable, and we will do anything we can to stuff them down in a dark, deep place within us and simply ignore them – hoping they will just somehow go away. 

 

But guess what?! This doesn’t work. In fact, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep these emotions from surfacing. Staying numb is an active process. We distract ourselves with TV or entertainment; we take substances to keep those emotions suppressed; We keep scrolling until the time has passed and we never had to think about what is bubbling under the surface.  Even so, the underlying unhappiness, anxiety, stress is still there. We exert all this energy to stay numb because we have never been given permission to feel. 

 

This brings us to trauma. Every single person on this planet has experienced trauma. Heck, even being born is traumatic. Trauma is at the root of our stress, anxiety, depression. What is the science behind all this? In states of stress, our body goes into a sympathetic energy state—you probably have heard of it—it’s the Fight, Flight, or Freeze state. The body detects danger, and it revs up energy so you are ready to act. If you choose fight or flight, then that rev’ed up energy is used in your action. However, if you freeze, that energy built up in the sympathetic state is never discharged and gets stuck in our bodies. Now don’t knock choosing Freeze – sometimes we tend to negatively judge Freeze, but that’s not fair. Freezing is an absolutely necessary survival technique and your body was keeping you safe in the moment. The problem isn’t with freezing, it with what people don’t do afterwards. In the animal world after an animal chooses freeze and the danger is over, it will shiver and shake to release the built up energy and let the body know that the danger has passed. It is safe. No need for chronic anxiety here. And then the animal will go on its merry way like nothing ever happened. But people often don’t release that rev’ed up sympathetic energy – we often suppress it instead which leads to trapped trauma in the body that can cause anxiety, stress, depression, as well as that feeling that we are not safe.

​

The trauma remains emotionally unprocessed and even though the danger is gone, our nervous system doesn’t recognize we are now safe because the emotion has not been released. We have not processed the emotion. This means we carry the trauma around with us for potentially years to come. Many people (myself included) have had years and years of talk therapy addressing the mental side of past traumas and, don’t get me wrong, I definitely think talk therapy is beneficial, but all the talking in the world never got rid of that gnawing anxiety and depression deep inside that I simply could not think away. You have to release these unprocessed emotion in order to let your nervous system know it is ok now – you are safe. And that's where Breathwork comes in. Intense, connected breathing gets you out of your thinking mind so the trapped emotions can come to the surface and be released. You don't even have to revisit those past traumas in your mind because the breath sweeps them away leaving you feeling more peace and calmness than you ever thought possible. It is amazing, but words do not do it justice. You need to experience it for yourself. Now is your chance to do so.