Transparent Tuesdays

Issue 207

You guys,

I didn’t know what to expect from an hour-long 1-on-1 breathwork session but all I was hoping for was a life-changing moment.

I sat on a cushion on the floor, opposite Chelsea, the woman who was going to guide me through the next hour. She asked what brought me in and I told her a book. Two books, actually. 

The first was Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle. Towards the end of the book, people in Glennon’s life kept telling her, "You need to breathe, Glennon. Don't forget to breathe." It made her roll her eyes. She knew how to breathe. But then she Googled breathing in her area and found a class that taught the use of breathing as a healing tool. So she went. 

She laid on the floor for a while and then wrote, “What happens next lasts for one moment and forever. I feel myself begin to float up and out of the room, into a night sky filled with stars… For the first time in my life, I feel the utter absence of fear. I am completely comfortable. I am at peace.”

She felt all that just from… breathing?? 

Then most recently I read another memoir: My Fair Junkie by Amy Dresner. In one of the last chapters Amy was newly sober and on the road to recovery when she decided to see a breathwork guy. She did not think it was going to work, but as she laid on the table breathing she started sobbing out of nowhere. In the Acknowledgements section she even thanked her breathwork guy, Nathaniel, “who's seen me cry more than a decade's worth of therapists and boyfriends combined.”

Woah. That’s a lot of crying. And now that’s two memoirists who wrote about the power of breathing at the end of their books. I had to try it. I Googled breathwork near me and found Chelsea. 

In her profile online, she wrote that three years ago she was mindlessly driving home from work, talking on the phone, and crossed three lanes of traffic when a car struck her from the side and flipped her over. That was the beginning of her wellness journey. She wrote, “I coach people who want to show up as their most authentic selves.”

That’s me!, I thought. I want to show up as my most authentic self!

I told her I had no expectations for the next hour but that wasn’t true. I fully expected to cry and I hoped for some version of a Doyle-Dresner moment. 

I laid down on a long cushion and closed my eyes. Chelsea put on a playlist of songs that all felt starkly different from each other. Sometimes I listened to the lyrics, sometimes I listened to what Chelsea was saying, and often I listened to the voices in my head, which told me this was a waste of time and money and wasn’t going to work.

Thirty minutes into the session Chelsea mentioned something about a visualization and I thought back to three years ago when I was guided through a visualization to meet my future wise self. In that visualization exercise I saw a future me who was happy, calm, and sober. I desperately wanted her to tell me about my future but she did not speak. She only smiled and sat with me and held my hand. 

Now, as I laid on the long cushion breathing, I saw my future wise self for the first time in three years. She turned to me with a big smile on her face. “Hey!” she said, a host welcoming her guest to the party, “You’re getting closer!” 

I was so taken aback that she was speaking to me that I let out a sob right then. Her message was not news to me. I knew I was getting closer to my authentic self, had been moving towards her for years, and yet, hearing her tell me so allowed me to stop and recognize and celebrate how far I’d come. 

I came to breathwork for a life-changing moment. I left with a simple message from the single most important person in my life. 

Keep going. You’re killin’ it. 

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Until next week,

Charlie