When you come across a therapy that is measurably life-changing, you want to shout it from the rooftops. And, trust me, I rarely describe anything as life-changing.
So here’s the thing: breath work changed my life. So much so that I have now qualified as a Breath4Life™ Breath Work practitioner to help other people change their lives.
It’s not easy to put into words how powerful this process is. Suffice to say that the most effective tools are always the simplest – and you can’t get simpler than breathing.
The type of breath work I practise is nothing to do with yoga or rebirthing. It is a simple form of connected breathing that shifts your conscious mind out of the way so that the unconscious mind can do whatever it needs to do to help you move forward in your life. And this often means releasing and reintegrating long-suppressed emotions.
You simply have to experience it to understand its power. Failing that, the best way to communicate its power is to tell a story.
So here goes. When I was 16 years old, and about to sit my O-levels, my father (who was only 46 at the time) had a catastrophic stroke that left him partially paralysed and damaged his brain to the extent that it affected his personality.
He survived, but wasn’t able to function as a father any more. I felt desperately sad and angry, but wasn’t able to talk about my emotions to anyone – least of all my mother or my siblings, who were all dealing with the situation in their own ways. So these emotions became locked inside me while I gritted my teeth and carried on.
A constant, underlying sadness permeated my life. In my mid-20s I started seeing a psychotherapist because the sadness became overwhelming. But at the time I didn’t connect it to how I responded to my dad’s disability – I thought it was about my inability to sustain relationships with men. It would take a long time for me to join the dots.
I was in and out of therapy for years, while also visiting tarot readers, psychics and astrologers in search of meaning and answers as to why I felt this gnawing sadness and pain.
I’m not saying therapy was a waste of time – it certainly helped – but it never seemed to help me get to the root of the problem. There were periods of what I presumed was happiness, but they were often artificially induced by drugs or alcohol.
It wasn’t until I decided to train as a human potential coach at the age of 52 and had to undergo an intensive period of inner work that I began to realise that it wasn’t simply everyday sadness that I was feeling – it was grief.
Grief: that’s something you feel when someone dies, right? Wrong. You can feel grief about every loss in your life, however ‘small’. And I’d lost my father at 16 and never grieved.
My course director – a doctor – referred me to a colleague who specialised in breath work. This, he said, would help me process the suppressed emotion.
So I started to breathe. And it was extraordinary. I gradually started to empty the overflowing containers of sadness. I gradually gave myself permission to feel all this stuff that had been sitting there for years. And I felt lighter.
After fully committing myself to the process of breath work, I transmuted the sadness and grief until I hit rage. I was incandescent with rage over what had happened to my dad, and didn’t even realise it consciously. After all, I had been the girl who never got angry.
This was such a revelation. Because along with that suppressed rage, I had also suppressed passion. And with the suppressed grief, there was suppressed joy. When you suppress emotion, you suppress it all – positive and negative.
I used to get quite annoyed when people said they were ‘in bliss’. I didn’t know what that was or how it felt. But now, after allowing myself to feel it and breathe, I can easily access states of joy.
And I can talk about my dad, and my grief, in a story like this, and not feel as if I might start crying and never stop.
So, breath work changed my life. I can’t promise it will change yours, but what if it could? Wouldn’t you like to feel joy no matter what was going on in your life? Wouldn’t you like the sun to shine in your life 24/7, just as it does in the Land of the Midnight Sun (see photo above)?
Feel it and breathe: it’s that simple.
To find out more about Breath4Life™ Breath Work and the services I offer as a practitioner, click here.
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