Breathing out trauma
I'm a broken record at this point but CCB has slapped me in the face yet again.
Trauma. What a relevant 2024, instagrammable word. It’s very overused. I’m guilty of this. I ordered a takeaway recently and when it arrived they’d forgot to put the sauce in the bag. I loudly announced to the room that I was ‘traumatised’ by this. I quickly thought ‘don’t be d*ckhead.’ Good to have regular check ins with yourself!
I have been a traumatised person. I know what trauma is and I know the nuances of it. It feels like that Frances bacon painting, the monster with the orange background. It lives inside you, like an unwanted guest and you carry it everywhere with you.
I’ve been through things that I believed had left lifelong scars and would affect me forever. I’ve lived for years in the fight or flight response, looking at the world through a fear lens. I thought the way I lived was normal. I had two years of trauma therapy which was nice, but I don’t believe it was very effective. Perhaps wrong timing.
I only started taking breathwork seriously at the start of 2024 and now I’m training as a facilitator. It’s a whirlwind and I can’t put this practise into words. It’s like magic. When I breathe, I breathe out trauma and something new and different happens every time. I can feel it leaving my body. I can physically feel it go, I feel so light. I feel like I’m out and fight or flight (at least for now.) I’ve just finished a Thursday night group CCB and I couldn’t share in the sharing circle afterwards because I was still shaking and could barely articulate myself. It does take me a little while to recover and I feel the physical effects of it so intensely.
But something big has left me. A big shadow that lived inside me, that I didn't even fully realise dwelled there has gone. I have an intuitive feeling it’s gone forever. And it’s a big one. If anyones seen the film Spirited Away, I feel like when the stink spirit enters the bath house and throws up all the junk they’d swallowed. Don’t Studio Ghibli have an incredible way of illustrating emotion? They create beautiful metaphors for trauma, depression, loneliness, love, angst ect.
I know that every time I breathe consciously and connectedly something leaves my body. I’m ejecting these shadows and demons. I feel that I’m returning to my original born state. Breathwork connects you back to the core of who you are, before all the noise gets in the way. Every thought that gets repressed, pushes down into our body and remains in us until we expel it. Every touch, every non-consent, every word, every emotion stays with us. Our mental universe and our physical have the same scars.
I must ensure I’m not re-traumatising myself. My felt sense is screaming at me loud and clear, she doesn’t need to be dropped into today. She’s very much in the room with us. And she’s telling me what to do, in fact, she’s shouting at me about patterns of behaviour, people and situations that could re-traumatise.
My felt sense is a woman, she’s very beautiful inside and out. She has a voice. A strong one. She knows what to do.
It made me think of possible scenarios where a client could be trapped in a situation that is traumatising for them and they are unable to leave. I think breathwork can certainly help them deal with the situation. It can stop them becoming overwhelmed. It can clear their mind, so they are able to think and strategise about how to leave their situation. But until they leave this situation, they won’t be able to properly heal. I still believe breathwork could be a valuable tool to these people, as it could be the reason they are able to make a change in their lives and mental state.
Going through the ethic + boundaries module in my breathwork facilitator training, I realised I need to clean up my own sh*t and I should get a move on. Working with trauma and healing is not just a course or a job, it’s a way of life. Moving forward in this training, my main area of interest is how our bodies hold onto trauma, the link between this and our creative blocks, and how breathwork and bodywork can physically expel this and unblock us.
I really feel my body now, if I sit still and listen I can physically feel the blood running through my veins and feel my organs working. I can feel the connectedness of everything around us.
Our bodies know everything, they hold onto everything. I feel like I’m being reborn everytime I breathe. It is possible to breathe out trauma.
One of the main places trauma lives in our bodies is in the diaphragm and through deep breathing we release the blockages held here. This has a positive impact on the physical functions of our body, because stress causes shallow breathing and chronically bracing the diaphragm.
We can lose weight through our exhaled breath. Every 10 pounds of fat lost comes through the lungs. Most of it comes out in the form of CO2 and water vapour as carbon dioxide is a waste product of metabolism. We can breathe out excess weight and we can breathe out trapped emotion. We can reach a higher level of our consciousness.
I’m results driven and I’ve never believed in therapy being a ‘slow process’. I’m a huge Marissa Peer fan, and her RTT approach is my favourite. I have the same mentality with breathwork. You will see results after one session. Potentially big ones too.
If you want to make an impactful difference to your mental state, and you need to physically feel the results, breathwork is for you. <3