Somatic Breathwork: How Deep Breathing Saved My Soul
Updated: Nov 22, 2022
3 Things We Dive Into In This Episode:
The power of taking SPACE instead of filling every moment of your life with a stimulus
The impact of releasing emotions that have been stored in your body through somatic practices like breathwork
What it means to have a regulated nervous system, and how somatic breathwork helps you reach nervous system regulation
📘Resources
Check out the Whole Full and Alive online course if you enjoyed this podcast!
Whole Full and Alive episodes:
Episode 6 - Intuition or Anxiety: How to Tell Which is Making the Decision
Episode 8 - Openness: Accepting Life As It Is, While Also Honoring Your Desires
Episode 12 - Feeling It All: Reflections From 6 Months of Heartbreak, Change, and Adventure
Episode 14 - A Healing Space: Things to Look For in a Therapist + More With Amanda Vasquez
Release restrictive dieting, break free from body shame, & create habits that help you live fully! Sign up for my nutrition coaching program and community, Whole, Full, and Alive, and get a FREE 20 Minute Discovery Call!
Connect with me and reach out to her to learn more about somatic breathwork on her website and Instagram
📌Episode Highlights
[02:46] No Shame About Who You Are
I've felt that I sounded too fiery in my past few episodes.
People are often too critical of themselves. However, being whole, full, and alive means showing authenticity.
My fiery side and softer side are both parts of me - and I feel no shame about being who I fully am.
[07:27] Losing My Soul
I felt like I lost my soul during the end of my time in New York and the closing of my last long-term relationship.
The soul is the intangible essence unique to every person. I needed an internal sense of safety and regulation to save mine.
On a recent retreat, I learned about the impact of somatic breathwork and started practicing it.
Despite the constant travel and change, I found a constant, healing relationship in my somatic breathwork sessions with my facilitator.
Somatic breathwork saved my soul. With it, I undid the limiting belief that I was inherently a bad person.
Caitie: “I feel like I could admit to mistakes that I've made in the past. I could admit to things that I feel shame about and know that I'm still good, that I'm still okay, and that I'm still lovable. These things are not actually unlovable about me. These things are actually things that I've learned from and grown from.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[19:37] Taking Space For Yourself
It’s rare for people to take the time to sit, be with themselves, and tune into their bodies.
Too often, people try to fill every part of their lives. We end up suppressing our emotions and pushing through them.
Taking space allows you to process, learn, and heal from your experience. It's in silence where intangible energy can be processed and exchanged.
When you take space, you don’t suppress, ignore, or distract yourself from feeling your emotions.
Another option is to have someone else hold space for you.
Caitie: “Having space gives you the ability to digest your experiences. It gives you the space to actually integrate all the things that are happening to you in your life. And learn something from them, heal from them and kind of crystallize them into wisdom.” - Click Here To Tweet This
[30:18] How to Practice Somatic Breathwork
There are multiple ways to practice breathwork other than somatic. Some types use over-breathing or relaxed breathing techniques.
When practicing somatic breathing, you first inhale and exhale through your mouth. This action stimulates your nervous system and helps you feel what needs to be released.
Next, hold your breath for a moment. During this time, you might feel an intense download.
Finally, go into the regulating phase. Inhale and exhale through your nose to regulate your nervous system.
[34:44] Releasing Emotions
The first half of your breathwork allows you to feel the suppressed emotions that have built up within your body.
If you don’t let yourself fully feel and integrate these emotions, your body will gravitate towards similar experiences.
I harbored feelings of deep sadness and unworthiness. Because of that, I tended to have relationships with people who treated me inadequately.
Your body stores traumatic experiences. No matter how much you intellectualize or try to think through it, it won't be processed until you fully feel it.
Somatic breathwork allows you to process and release that emotion that’s keeping your body in a survival state.
[40:03] Space for Both the Good and the Bad
As you practice somatic breathwork, you move from stimulation to relaxation of your body. A regulated system like this can help you feel soothed, safe, and at peace.
When I started practicing, I found I was more able to be neutral and look at my life experiences without getting stuck.
One of my facilitators was able to hold space for his parents. He talked about his parents' difficulties and how they loved him with grace and neutrality.
Somatic breathwork can help you achieve a capacity for things to be good and bad simultaneously.
[44:21] How Somatic Breathwork Helped Me
After I released so much, I could fully receive each experience of my life.
Breathwork also helped me stop avoiding my body. I could further process the emotions within me and feel safe.
Caitie: “When you take space to really just breathe, and let yourself feel and be with yourself fully, you're open to receiving life, you're open to receiving presence.” - Click Here To Tweet This
I could see the world without the lens of trauma.
Therapy can help you understand and process your experiences. It can help you navigate relationships, make decisions and create meaning.
However, your body continues to remember and hold everything. Breathwork allows you to release what you've experienced.
[50:56] Learning to Hold Space with Deep Breathing
Somatic breathwork was my anchor throughout my travels.
It changed my view of life and the world and helped me improve at holding space for my clients.
Through breathwork, I learned to stop rushing and to slow down to create space.
It's vital to trust that every person has an innate intelligence. Their body is trying to protect and regulate them.
Don't assume you know what's best and push your agenda. Instead, assess the other person's experience and give more space for them to be able to feel and release.
[54:09] This Week’s Processing Prompt and Actionable Experiment
Processing Prompt: What do you want to receive?
This question helps you focus on receiving rather than releasing. As you go through the process, the release will naturally follow.
It encourages an empowering approach to healing by taking shame out of the equation.
Actionable Experiment: Take space for yourself. Have a moment to sit in it and tune into your body without judgment.
Don't be afraid to reach out to learn more and discover how somatic breathwork can help. You can also research on your own but remember to be careful!
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Transcript
Caitie Corradino: Somatic breathwork gave me the ability to process emotions that were living in my body in a space that I knew was going to be safe. So I didn't have to be afraid of what emotions are living in my body anymore because I had this practice that I could use to safely process emotions. I didn't feel this tendency to kind of avoid my body anymore.
Welcome to Whole, Full and alive, a podcast exploring the art and science of falling in love with your life, with your story and with who you truly are underneath your titles, your resume, your relationship status, and your bank account. I'm Caitie Corradino, a registered dietician nutritionist , certified fitness and yoga instructor, eating disorder recovery coach, Reiki healer, and founder of Full Soul Nutrition, but underneath my titles and resume, a big fan of kitchen dance breaks, early mornings, all things chocolate truffles, world traveling and serendipity.
I'm here to share no bullshit stories and actionable tools to help you feel unshakably worthy. You have everything you need within you to feel whole, full and alive right here, right now. Let's get into it. Hey, welcome back to another episode of Whole, Full and Alive. I am back on the microphone solo for the first time in a couple of weeks, and today, I am finally ready to talk to you about somatic breathwork.
It is a topic that I've been alluding to for a couple of weeks. In multiple episodes. I mentioned it, and I've been wanting to do an episode about this for a while, but I wanted to sit on exactly how I wanted to share about this with you. There's a lot of layers to my experience with somatic breathwork and to the practice itself. Yeah, I definitely wanted to take or just give it the time it deserved to kind of think it over for a little bit.
Today, I am here on a Friday night in November being extra cozy tonight, snowing in Colorado, and I decided to finally sit down on the microphone and talk to you about this and just trust that the way it's gonna come out is the way it's supposed to come out, so yeah, definitely a shift in the vibe from the episode that you heard last week, or the two episodes that were released last week, actually.
Last week's episodes were about nutrition, and I was answering questions with my associate dietitian, Christina. When I was listening back on those episodes, I was thinking like, wow, I sound so frickin fiery. These episodes, I sound like a little bit on edge. I sound a little bit angry. The truth is, when I'm answering questions about nutrition, like very straightforward Q&A questions, sometimes I do get a little fiery.
Sometimes I get a little bit fiery, because there's so many nutrition myths out there, and there's so many people being misled, and so many people on restrictive diets and following nutrition pseudoscience. It just upsets me. When I was listening back on that recording at first, I was like, I shouldn't release this because I sound too angry. Like I'm not compassionate enough in these, and you might not think that at all.
You might not think that I don't sound compassionate enough at all. But I was listening back on it. Isn't it funny how we are so critical of ourselves sometimes, I mean, really just we don't cut ourselves a break ever as human beings. I was not able to cut myself a break in that moment, but I sat on that a little bit longer, and I was like, well, this show is called Whole, Full and Alive.
A big theme of this show is aliveness and what it means to be alive and what it means to live life fully, and who would I be to only show the people who listen to this podcast just one side of myself. Like if I don't feel like I'm being extra fluffy and sparkly and compassionate in a certain moment, okay, at least I'm being authentic. So I don't know if you even really noticed that I took that tone in those episodes, but that was something I was thinking about.
I was like, when I come on to talk about somatic breathwork, I'm definitely going to have a different and softer tone than when I talk about nutrition. Both these tones, both the sides of me are me, and that's just okay. I'm a human being that gets revved up and fired up in certain situations and feel softer and more gentle in other situations, and I'm certainly working on staying soft in as many situations as I possibly can. It’s a work in progress, I would say, but this is where I'm at.
Sometimes I do get a little fired up. I didn't say anything outlandish on the show. This is not an apology. Let's be clear. I'm not apologizing right now. I’m not releasing a statement, because I said something that was too intense or too fiery. I just noticed that my tone was a little more intense, and I'm like, woah, in my solo episodes, I definitely have a much softer tone, so I don't know.
Anyway, message from that is, don't be afraid to be yourself, all sides of yourself, to have a fiery side, to have a softer side and to not feel shame about that and not apologize for that. That's not what I'm doing right now. I'm just sharing. I'm just sharing a reflection. So anyway, somatic breathwork, gonna dive into that today. Before I do, I want to remind you that the online course that accompanies this podcast is now available.
It is an amazing resource full of quick but very value packed modules and journal prompts and actionable experiments and all kinds of things and resources that you can start implementing in your life today to cultivate routines and rituals that are aligned and intuitive and sustainable for you and let go of routines and rituals that are rigid or restrictive, or make you feel shame about yourself or your body in any way, shape, or form.
Some of the tools included in the online course are about nervous system regulation, which is what I'm going to talk about largely today. So if anything that I talk about on this podcast today is of interest to you, and you're feeling like you want to start to get your feet wet and doing some of the practices that I'm going to talk about today, the online course is definitely a really good fit for that.
It's an accessible option for people who might be wanting to do one-on-one work with me or with my associate Christina, and maybe that option is not accessible to you at this time, or you're not totally ready to jump into that yet, this online course is kind of a good starter for that. I'm really excited about it, and I hope that this resource serves you. So now, let's do it. Let's get into somatic breathwork. The title of this episode, I already decided.
I haven't even recorded it yet, but I already decided that the title of this episode is going to be How Deep Breathing Saved My Soul. Wooh, maybe that sounds a little bit cheesy, but it really did. Somatic breathwork saved my soul. I don't ever want to say that anything saved my life, because I've never been there. I've never been in a place where I have felt like I needed something to save my life. But I have lost my soul many times.
There have been multiple times throughout my life where I've kind of lost the intangible essence of who I am. That's how I define soul, the intangible essence of who you are, that cannot be replicated, that cannot be matched, that is unique to you. It's like this intangible essence. I've really lost touch with that multiple times in my life, and one of the most recent times that I felt like I was losing my soul was towards the end of my time in New York City and towards the end of my last long term relationship.
In Episode One, I talk a little bit more about why I felt like I was losing my soul by the time I ended my last relationship. In Episode Seven, I also talk about why I felt like New York City was making me kind of lose my soul or living in New York City, rather, was detaching me from the intangible essence of who I am. So I won't go down the rabbit hole of those two things, but suffice it to say that when I left New York City and when I ended my relationship at that time, I was in a very raw and vulnerable place.
I felt like I was losing my soul. I also knew that I really had been relying on my ex-boyfriend for a sense of nervous system regulation. Like I was relying on seeing him a lot to feel a sense of safety and a sense of regulation. Of course, in some sense, I was relying on New York City for a sense of safety and a sense of regulation because I had lived there for over 10 years. So it was my safe-ish, air quote, safe place.
So when I decided to leave both the relationship and the city, I knew that I needed to do something to find a sense of internal safety and a sense of internal regulation. I really, really needed to find something that was going to help me feel soothed because I knew walking away from this relationship, I was losing a source of soothing and walking away from the city that I’d always known, I was losing a sense of comfort.
So I was thinking about that. I was like, what can I do to source a sense of internal regulation now that I don't have this relationship anymore as a source of regulation? Now that I'm leaving the home, I've known for 10 years, and I'm going to travel around. How can I feel regulated? Believe it or not, believe it or not, I had a dream about one of the facilitators at a retreat I had gone on in San Diego about six months prior.
I talked a little bit about that San Diego retreat also on another episode, like whatever shouting out my other episodes here. But I had a dream about one of the facilitators there, and I remembered on the retreat that she had taught us some somatic breathwork practice that was really impactful for me. It was a super impactful practice. Like during this practice, I had reconciled with, sounds crazy but whatever, my inner child.
I felt like I had literally spoken to myself as a younger person and almost like to my parents as younger versions of themselves. I felt like I had found this sense of intangible and still kind of unspeakable healing in that session, and I was like, you know what, I really should see if Lindsey does one-on-one somatic breathwork sessions. That could be really cool. That could be something that maybe I should implement, kind of while I'm traveling.
So sure enough, I reached out to her, and we started doing one-on-one somatic breathwork sessions once a week. So starting when I moved out of my apartment in New York City in March and all the way through till the beginning of August, I did somatic breath work with her for 90 minutes once a week, every week. It was so cool, first of all, because Lindsay was with me everywhere that I traveled from March to August.
I traveled to Florida, Colorado, Montana, Texas, California, Boston, New Hampshire, Italy, and Portugal, and she was with me everywhere. I did somatic breathwork in all these different settings. Even though I was being exposed to so many new people, so many new things, so many new places, I have this constant in her. So that relationship in and of itself was really healing.
I always talk about the power of relationship with people, your therapist, your dietician, whoever it is. Beyond what they're teaching you, beyond the tangible skills that they're teaching you, the safety of the relationship that you have with them can be so meaningful and so impactful. I know for sure that beyond what I teach my clients about nutrition and about their metabolism, and about intuitive eating, I know for sure that just the relationship I have with them can be really impactful, and just having a healthy relationship with someone is in and of itself a really beautiful experience.
So I want to share that first because Lindsay really was such a healthy relationship for me. It was such a healing relationship for me. So in that sense, I got much more than what I expected to get from the somatic breathwork sessions, and in another sense, yeah, I got far beyond what I was expecting.
I went into this somatic breathwork practice, this three month venture of doing somatic breath work once a week thinking, okay, this is going to be a really good tool for me to have my nervous system regulated to feel calm, to feel soothed, to feel safe, to not feel like I need to cling to a boyfriend in order to feel safe, to not feel like I need to cling to a certain city, a certain apartment, a certain thing in order to feel safe.
It's going to help me source a sense of internal regulation, and it totally did do that. But it also, first of all, gave me this incredible healing relationship with Lindsey, my facilitator, and secondly, it helped me undo the most limiting belief that I held about myself for my entire life up to that point. For my entire life up to that point, I had been holding on to this very limiting and very heartbreaking belief that I am a bad person, and I have to prove that I'm good.
There's so many reasons why I had been holding on to that belief, just some stuff related to childhood trauma, some stuff related to my relationship with my caretaker and also, just being a recovering Catholic, essentially. I was raised in the Catholic Church, and the premise of Catholicism, unfortunately, is you are a sinner. You should feel guilty for your sins, and you need to repent for your sins.
That whole thing, and there's a lot about the Catholic faith that was good that I was able to somewhat hold on to, but for the most part, being raised in that culture was not a good experience for me personally. A lot of the experiences that I had in the Catholic church growing up really reinforced this belief that I'm bad. I am a sinner and I need to repent and I need to feel guilty.
So even though I had healed from so much, I healed from my eating disorder, I had let go of the yo-yo dieting cycle, restrictive eating and using exercise as a way to punish myself, I still kind of had this very limiting belief, very deep rooted that made me feel like I needed to over give to people constantly that made me feel like I was not worthy unless I was giving to someone.
That also made me kind of end up in relationships with not the best people for me, people that didn't treat me that well, because I had this very deep rooted subconscious, but also starting to come to the conscious as I had healed more. Believed that I wasn't good enough, and I would always have to do something to prove that I'm good. I'd always have to kind of be making up for this inherent badness.
Badness, I don't know if that's the best word. But anyway, it was just my deepest fear, and I really had started to become aware of that fear over the last year or so and realize all the ways that it was kind of holding me back in work and in life and in relationships. By the time I was finished with my 15 or so weeks of somatic breathwork with Lindsey, I felt like that fear had just been completely lifted. I was like, I don't feel like I'm a bad person anymore.
That's amazing. I came into this breathwork practice wanting to just regulate my nervous system and have some sort of tool to help myself feel soothed and to not feel like I needed to rely on a boyfriend or being in this particular city or a particular apartment in order to feel safe and soothed. Like, I wanted to just be able to feel soothed within myself, within my own body and have kind of just this self care tool to add to my self care toolbox.
But instead, I got not only that, but I also got just complete relief from this fear that I'm a bad person that I felt like I had been living with for my whole life. Suddenly by August of this year, I was like, honestly, I feel like I can admit to the things that I thought were the most unlovable about me. I feel like I could admit to mistakes that I've made in the past. I could admit to things that I feel shame about and know that I'm still good, that I'm still okay, that I'm still lovable.
These things are not actually unlovable about me. These things are actually things that I've learned from and grown from, and I'm just a human and just like everybody else, and I'm good. I felt so much relief and so much joy when I was sharing this with Lindsay in our last session. She was like, yeah, it makes sense that you were able to release that fear, that limiting belief through breathwork, like that makes so much sense. I was like, why?
Why did that happen through breathwork? So, I want to share a little bit with you about why that happened. I want to share more about the mechanism of somatic breathwork and also just the general power of taking time to just be with yourself. I think that's actually what I'm going to talk about first. So, we live in a world where we're constantly trying to fill every single space in our lives with stimulus constantly.
We're constantly looking at our phones when we're going to the bathroom, when we're waiting in line for coffee. We constantly feel like we need to be connected with someone, communicating with someone, looking at something, being entertained by something. It's very rare, in today's world, to actually take space, to just sit and be with yourself truly. When was the last time you allowed yourself to just sit on the couch and just stare at the wall?
No TV, no music, no nothing, just like sit on the couch and just be like, well, how am I doing right now, or what's going on inside my brain right now? So many people don't take the space to do that. So many of us don't give ourselves that space in our life. Even in conversations with other people, like when we're talking to another person, we feel sometimes uncomfortable with silence.
When there's a pause in the conversation, we tend to feel the need to fill it with words, to fill it with something else to say, instead of letting the silence be there for a moment. Sometimes that silence is where a lot of important processing and intangible sort of energy can be exchanged between people, right?
We don't give ourselves enough space in the world that we live in today, and that in of itself is why somatic breathwork and other practices that invite you to just be with yourself and take space away from stimulus, away from doing something, just give yourself space to be is so, so powerful. So I actually did the somatic breathwork certification training a few weeks ago.
Obviously, after my experience with Lindsey, I was feeling so inspired to learn how to teach somatic breathwork, because I was like, I really feel like I need to teach this to my clients. I think I'm gonna do a separate episode on how I think somatic breathwork can help with connecting to your body cues, your hunger cues, your fullness cues, and things like that. So if I try to talk about that today, oh, my God, this episode will be like 95,000 minutes long.
So anyway, I went to the certification a few weeks ago to learn how to facilitate this myself for my clients. On the first day that we were there, we’re all like, me and all the other people that are learning to facilitate somatic breathwork are sitting down in the opening circle, and the leader, the teacher, whatever, he's leading us through a somatic breathwork mini practice.
The first thought that popped into my head when we were all sitting there in this opening circle doing a mini somatic breathwork practice, I was like, this feels kind of culty, and I was like, this is uncomfortable. Did I join a cult? What happened? Am I in a cult? My mind just started spinning because frankly, I used to do so many different fitness instructor certifications back when I was a full time fitness instructor, and a lot of them were very culty.
They really were, and kind of had a little bit of trauma more or less from that. I was like, oh gosh, what if somatic breathwork is just another cult? Then eventually, it struck me that it's not a cult, and the only reason it felt culty for us to all be sitting there in that opening circle, just doing nothing but breathing is because it's so rare for human beings to, as I'm saying, take the space to just be.
It's so rare that we take the space to just tune into our bodies, to practice breathing, to just see what's going on inside of us. I recognize that, and also, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the mechanism of somatic breathwork in a moment. It's rare that we give ourselves the opportunity to just sit with and release whatever emotion is coming up and through us. It's not considered a normal thing to do in our society.
It's considered much more normal to suppress whatever emotions you're experiencing and just kind of push through your day. It's considered much more normal, again, to fill every space with stimulus, with words, with conversation, with something. So even if you're not going to listen to the rest of what I have to say about the mechanism of somatic breathwork, what it is and why I feel like it saved me, and how it saved me, or sorry, saved my soul.
Let me be clear about that, it didn't save my life. It saved my soul. Even if you're not going to listen to all of that hoopla, right, just the power of taking space is so important. That's something I hope that you'll take away if you're listening to this. It is so valuable to just take space, to just sit and be with yourself. If you're feeling at all inspired are all called right now to pause this podcast for a moment and close your eyes and let yourself sit in silence and in stillness for a moment, just be, just notice, just see like how am I today?
What's going through my head? How fast is my heart beating? Am I taking deep breaths? Just taking that time that space, 15 seconds of it can do so much for you. Having space gives you the ability to kind of digest your experiences. It gives you the space to actually integrate all the things that are happening to you into your life and learn something from them and heal from them and kind of crystallize them into wisdom.
That sounds a little cheesy. But having space allows you to really integrate all the experiences you're having in your life. On a couple episodes ago when I interviewed Amanda Vasquez, we were talking about this idea of holding space and how it's so important for your therapist, your counselor, whoever you're working with on anything to be able to hold space for you. That is what holding space is.
Holding space, like when you're holding space for someone, you're allowing them to digest their experiences. You're allowing them to integrate their experiences. So you can take space for yourself through a practice like somatic breathwork, and you can also have someone hold space for you in both these cases, whether you're taking space for yourself, or you're having someone hold space for you.
It's this opportunity to just digest, to slow down and digest everything that's happening to you in your life. It's so wildly important. Again, 15 seconds of it, set a timer on your phone for 15 seconds and just be like, I'm going to take space for 15 seconds to just breathe, to just notice my breath, to just be with myself. You'll notice that 15 seconds is a long time. You have time, give it to yourself.
So again, I want to dive a little bit more into the mechanism of somatic breathwork, what it is and how it works. But that said, even if you're not interested in doing this practice and not much of it resonates with you, that's okay, but just keep in mind, how powerful it is to take space, take space to tune in, to breathe, to pause, to just feel whatever is coming through. That's like the primary point I want to share.
The primary reason why I felt I was able to regulate my nervous system and let go of fears through the practice of somatic breathwork was because I had this space to just really be with myself, to not suppress and ignore and pacify myself by scrolling through social media and distracting myself with conversation. Yeah, I let go of distractions, and I let go of using distractions as coping tools and just kind of made myself sit in what was there.
When I sat in what was there really, really sat with it, I was able to release it. It's kind of like what I was saying, wow, I'm really doing a lot of episode callbacks today. It's kind of like what I was saying in my last solo episode. Can you sit with negative emotions long enough for them to release, long enough for them to fully move through you? Somatic breathwork is one way of doing that. It's one way of saying, well, I'm feeling lonely right now.
I'm going to sit with this so that it can move through me and out of me, and it's done, and it's over. The next day I don't feel lonely anymore all of a sudden, or I'm sad. I'm gonna let myself sit in this sadness and let the sadness sort of just move through me. But what if you don't know what you need to feel? What if you just feel this sort of intangible stress kind of building up in your body and you know you're exhausted.
You know you're not feeling as good as you can be, but you're not really sure what you need to feel. You're not really sure what you need to release. This is what somatic breathwork can do for you. So, there are multiple types of breathwork. Somatic breath work, the one that I was trained in, is not the only type of breathwork. Breath work goes back a long time. People have been doing this for a very, very long time, and there are multiple ways to do it.
There are multiple ways to practice breathwork. Some types of breathwork use over breathing to kind of spike the nervous system, and other types of breathwork use relaxing breathing to regulate the nervous system. Somatic breathwork, the kind of that I'm trained in, actually does both. So in the first phase of somatic breathwork, you practice inhaling and exhaling through the mouth only as a way of kind of spiking your oxygen levels.
While you're doing this, it allows you to kind of clear out the stressors and the pressures that have been stored up in your body. So whatever is stored in your body, you may or may not be familiar with this concept, but trauma, any sort of traumatic experience, anything that feels like too much, too fast, that's happened to you in your life that has overwhelmed you emotionally gets kind of stored in your body, and your body sort of continues to live as if that trauma might always be happening, as if that trauma is always happening until you process it and clear it out.
So in this first phase of somatic breathwork where you're practicing inhaling and exhaling through the mouth to spike your oxygen levels, it allows these stressors, these traumas that are stored and living in the body to kind of move through and out of you. That is what allows you to kind of express and discharge emotions that might be living inside of you, that are holding you in a little bit of a contracted state or that are keeping you in more of a defensive and survival state.
You don't really have to know what you're releasing in order for it to release. So you don't have to consciously go into the breathwork session and be like, okay, I want to release. Like I didn't go into the breathwork session saying, okay, I want to release this limiting belief I've been harboring that I'm a bad person, that I always need to try to make up for that and be good.