Breathwork・Sandra’s story
“breathwork is the embrace of all that we are, our bodies, our heart, our inner child, our energy, our pain, our traumas, our love, our connection to the animate world; the wholeness of existence ”
As my dog choked in my arms, the suffering she experienced and her struggle to breathe threw me into a deep hole of despair. I woke up countless nights gasping for air. After months of suffering and hopelessness, my partner suggested that I go on a retreat to the Netherlands, where breathwork was also offered as part of the program.
I was then diagnosed by a psychotherapist for post-traumatic stress disorder. According to the current state of science and knowledge, however, I am now aware that it was not PTSD; it was a spiritual emergency. I questioned life itself and the meaning of my existence, my reality, and also began to question my social and family conditioning. I felt as if I had lost the ground beneath my feet.
In my first breathwork session - for the first time since the trauma I experienced - my anger was unleashed, the anger of being abandoned. I felt the deep fear of being abandoned again, and the aggression against myself and others, the rage of not being able to prevent what I witnessed.
Then that anger spread to everyone who had already left me: my father who passed away when I was 13, my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my best friend, my cats, and my divorce.
In this powerful session I learned that although I had cried a lot in my life and had felt a lot of grief, I never knew how to process what I had experienced or how to heal these emotional wounds. I felt that these were open wounds, still bleeding and not yet scarred.
After the session I was very tired, and at the same time light for the first time. I felt as if I had looked at my own life through a magnifying glass and allowed myself to feel emotions that I had previously suppressed because they seemed unacceptable to me, like anger for example. I was lucky enough to be supported and encouraged by the facilitator (his name is Sven: thanks Sven) in expressing these feelings.
From this experience, after some time of integration, I learned that although I'm not a particularly introverted person, I had suppressed many of my true, authentic feelings, which inevitably led to my breakdown triggered by the death of my dog. I can remember using the words “the wisdom of my breath” for the first time back then.
I got to know the real, true, human Sandra, and it was okay that I felt that way. Nobody gave me "good advice" or interfered in my self-discovery process, I didn't feel judged, smiled at, or criticized for the first time. Nobody in the room "knew better". I was allowed to be who I was in that moment. These findings were the first and biggest step on my path to healing.
After some time I decided to train myself as a breathwork facilitator.
My physical, emotional, mental and spiritual view of being human has changed fundamentally, starting with my first breathwork session. I have rediscovered the power and courage within myself to live every part of my being and to allow myself to feel authentic. I've also discovered that my feelings are my guide, and I'm getting better at seeing them as these every day. This gives me more and more the power to decide for myself whether I want to react to them or whether I perceive them as a way of perceiving disharmony in myself and changing the way.
I now regularly attend breathwork sessions to stay in touch with my subconscious, and to be able to view old and new wounds and darkness, as well as unbridled joy and love, and everything in between, through the magnifying glass that my inner guiding intelligence, my inner wisdom, "the wisdom of the breath" shows in the moment. Because what I experience is often unexpected. Unexpectedly difficult, unexpectedly beautiful, and always unexpectedly mind-expanding.
Over the years I realized that many of us live in a world, where a lot of emphasis is
“When we authentically embody who we are, we stop looking for lost parts in others. That is a way to create peace, harmony and balance in ourselves and in our communities. That is how we remember our home within ourselves.”