Ever get triggered when someone says, "Just breathe." No? Oh, it's just me?
Realizing that I tend to hold my breath as I am thinking, waiting on something cool to happen, or anxious about an outcome, I found I was living in tension that was caused from a deep rooted imbalance in my energy. If you know anything about the way I run my life, when I see something in me that needs work, I face it head on. It was time to face the reasons behind this tense response and do something about it.
In this new self-awareness of tension and discomfort in my body and energy, I realized my dark side hadn't had an outlet in a long time. Holding my breath was my way of holding back what I really wanted to express in that moment. My truth was being suffocated by holding everything in. No wonder I was triggered when someone said, "Kareen, just breathe." I felt like if I did take a breath and exhaled all my tension, I probably would have exploded with all sorts of emotional rants that I wanted to just keep it all to myself. I would do what I was trained to do at a young age with my emotions, I would swallow it.
I am sure you can imagine what swallowing anger, frustration, and discontent could do to your body as it ferments and festers inside. Take a guess. See, when people meet me, they have no clue what I am actually holding in because I had a long standing belief that other people needs will always come before mine, and I am here to serve them. My low self-worth training started at young age to put myself last and serve others first. It was a survival skill to feel seen and be loved if I showed up that way.
Mastering the skill of serving others helped me build a 7 figure business of serving other peoples needs, I am a master at it. And as grateful as I am to have these skills, it is not sustainable if it is built on an unstable foundation that could implode if I didn't allow myself to feel and connect to my truth about it all. This is the root of my digestive issues. Swallowing what you wish you could say or should have said, reeks havoc on your body and is an energetic violation that creates mistrust in yourself, and an inability to attract what is truly meant for you. Years of this type of behavior has led to my insides starting to explode on me and growths started to appear because I was not standing in my truth and stating what I needed to in order to be fully seen and heard.
I share this because I know I am not alone in this type of trauma response. Here's what I have learned on my most recent unleashing of the habits I have that no longer serve me - even though I consciously get what needs to change, and I put it into action, there is a residual energetic layering that does not release with words alone.
Stale unwanted energy that is carried around from a stack of microtraumas requires alternative methods to release, repair, and rebuild your energetic structure to sustain the new found way of thinking and being. I needed to explore how to energetically shift and realign my mind/body/spirit connection in order to what I now call, Wholing Up.
I define Wholing Up as an aligned activation of your Mind, Body, and Spirit. If I were to assess myself on where I am most comfortable in my connection, I have a strong Mind/Body connection, I have a strong Spirit/Mind connection, but my Spirit/Body connection was non-existent. I have been doing the mind work through different forms of therapy to find the best way to communicate who I am in the world to others and build boundaries since I was 16. Years and Years of investing in my mental health allowed me to create the cognitive awareness and language on where I was right and wrong about certain situations and the decision on who I wanted to be in this world. However, I had physical reactions that stemmed from my survival skills that made it unsafe for my spirit to stay connected to my body. I know realize it was not safe for my spirit to be connected to my body with the way I mistreated it over the years. I knew in my gut I needed to figure out how to rebuild that connection.
Since I discovered I needed a deeper Spirit/Body connection, I asked one of my client, Jordan Marks, Founder of the Mind/Body Healing Center, who he thinks I should work with to help deepen my connection. He suggested I work with two practitioners to help me release and realign my core energy to reflect who I am today and who I aspire to be. The first practitioner I worked with used a method called "timeline therapy". It allowed me to be in a meditative state and get to the root of where I learned certain negative emotions and my response to them, by returning to those moments, we could reprogram them. It was such a gift to work with her and release some conditioning that was no longer serving me and feel more true in my emotions as things occurred in the present, without carrying the past energy into it. It was such a gift to open myself up in this way and learn a new method of healing.
However a few months ago, I started to feel heavy again. I remembered the second practitioner he mentioned was David Elliott and his breathwork methodology. When he suggested to work with David, he said not everyone is ready to got his deep, but I believe you are. Since I was now on a journey to build a deeper Spirit/Body connection, I reached out and set up a 1:1 with David. In my session with him, I learned his breathwork technique and I instantly felt connected back to my spirit and released some more traumatic layers of energy I was holding onto. What fascinated me most was the ability to connect to my spirit and keep the connection. I was closing my session with David and found out he was going to be in my area for a 10 day training in Rhinebeck, NY which was only an hour an a half from where I live, the following weekend. I was so intrigued by this method, and decided right then and there that I was going to enroll in his training. I knew that if I did this immersive experience my transformation would be accelerated, but most of all, I would learn how to facilitate this technique with others. If you know me at all, you know I love to share what I have learned. I learned how to breathe, and my body has begun to heal.
Breathwork is so powerful. Not just for it's ability to help us get centered and calm our nervous system, it has the ability to help us release what is no longer meant for us, and allows us to move forward more energized. It has been 5 months since my training, and now facilitating breathwork for groups, and it has been a game changer in my life. Now if someone were to say to me, "Just Breathe." I leap with excitement and respond with, "YES LET'S BREATHE!!", because I know how rewarding and uplifting it is to push through emotional unrest, see where it lives in my body, and release it by breathing through it and replacing it with what I want it to be, and open to what is meant for me.
If you would like to join me for a live virtual group breathwork session and experience the impact of this method, click here to join the next session.