How Breathwork Transmuted a Memory that was Holding Me Back

🎧 👉 Prefer audio? You can also listen to me share about this in podcast episode #059 here.

Over the past 10+ years, I have experienced various healing modalities. Since I am a lifelong student and wisdom seeker, I recently tried something new: facilitated breathwork.

I had previously experienced various breathing exercises in yoga classes and during guided meditation sessions. (One example is box breathing, where you inhale for a count of four, hold the breath for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, and hold the breath again for a count of four before repeating the cycle. Another example is exhaling longer than you inhale, which calms your nervous system and helps to slow you down, center yourself, and ground you.)

However, this breathwork experience was very different than those breathing exercises. I had a dedicated session with a brilliant facilitator, Anna Parker-Naples, who guided me through a 30-minute experience. She instructed me to breathe in actively and breathe out passively through my mouth the entire time so that I could take in as much air as possible and feel as if I was filling up my entire body and lungs.

We had a brief discussion beforehand about an area of my life I wanted to focus on. As Anna guided me through the session, she incorporated music to enhance the experience and said supportive phrases that were focused on overcoming my personal issue.

It was very intense, and I could sense that I was going through a therapeutic process of letting go of a deeper layer of some old beliefs. The process of breathing this fully for that long allowed my body to get into a state that offered great potential for such a breakthrough.

Side note: Don't assume that any coach has it all figured out all the time; don't assume their life is perfect. I choose to share many of my life experiences—including messy moments, mistakes, and lessons—because I appreciate it when my coaches and mentors do the same. I personally prefer to work with people who are ahead of me and have advanced skills, yet are also willing to discuss their ongoing journey instead of claiming to have all the answers.

I coach people to bring better balance to their lives, and I have a lot of ways to do that.

Do I feel my life is constantly in balance or that I've got this all perfectly balanced life? Heck, no!

Is it much more balanced than it used to be? Yes!

Do I have the skills to recalibrate myself faster and easier so that I feel better more often each day? Yes!

I am able to help others because I've been able to improve myself and learn what works.

I'm the first to admit that I get "off balance," and yet, I also have the skills and tools to get myself feeling better and more aligned more quickly than ever before. 

I worked with Anna in this breathwork session about another layer of an issue in my life that is connected with another layer of perfection, another layer of being afraid to disappoint people, which has been an ongoing theme in my life, as is perfection. So these things it's another layer, another layer deeper I was ready to face. So we went there, and I had these images come up during the session. The images were all over the place in different aspects of an era times of my life. For instance, a moment when I was ill as a child, I'd go and sleep with my mom, and my dad would come to sleep in my room. She would take care of me through the nighttime, so I wasn't alone. That was a memory that popped up. I just had a memory of her taking care of me one night and him making room for me to be there with her. I had memories of different moments, and it was interesting just to see them pop up.

Then suddenly, a theme of multiple memories came up right after each other toward the end of the session. They were all very expansive, very fun, high energy, freedom-seeking moments physically in my life. For example, jumping out of an airplane, being on a jet boat in New Zealand, and being on a jet ski back home in Washington state on the Club Meier River. These wonderful, freeing, literally exhilarating moments came together in one memory after another. They all brought a sense of joy and expansiveness to me. It even makes me relax just thinking about it right now. Something about those feelings: it was a message of relaxing, being free, and being expansive.

And then a thought came up for me of a memory of someone years ago telling me, "Charis, everything you do turns to gold," like it was a compliment. While it was a beautiful compliment, it also put a lot of pressure on me to maintain that level of success. I have tried to reframe it and let it go, but it still comes up from time to time. For many years, it felt like an example of the pressure I put on myself and the pressure I felt from the outside world, especially as a high achiever as a child and young adult.

Then it created this image that I remember feeling conflicted when it was told to me. It's always been a very conflicting thought since then because I want to release the pressure. It makes me feel like if I don't touch something and turn it into gold, then I've effed up in some way. That is what I have felt over many years at times. I have worked to let that go, loosen the pressure, and be okay with messing up, being imperfect, and being a human. I've made a lot of progress in those areas. Though I had not fully been able to transmute this phrase yet, I did in this session.

So what came up for me was the memory. And then it switched. Instead of being told everything you touch turns to gold, it switches to a message coming through that you are the "gold." It made me feel less pressure of having to transform, change, and do something and be in some way that affects something outside of me. Instead, it was saying no, you've got it in you. You are it. I'm not saying that in an ego way that I am gold. I believe we are all the gold. We each have it in us. We don't have to do or be any certain way or have an effect on anything that is amazing and turns something into gold. We don't need to do that to be worthy of a wonderful life. We don't need to do anything to be worthy of joy and happiness. We can just be ourselves because we are the gold. The gold is already within us innately, and I believe that.

It was a beautiful way to transmute and transform this concept to something that serves me now versus something that felt like a heavy expectation to try to live up to.

Then it went even further. I had a picture of opening up a safe, seeing gold bars inside, and then seeing them flow and melt out. I've been in various guided meditations where images will occasionally come up, like the scenes and different things. I've finally learned to trust what comes up and immediately trust the first thought about what the image means. So, when it all finished, I quickly shared with her about the gold and the message. But the pictures of the safe and the gold bars were reflecting within me. I need to continue to unlock it, open it up, and let it flow. It's already in me. I need to let it flow and not be rigid in these bars locked up deep inside, inside a vault, literally inside of me. That also aligns with what I believe we have everything we need within us. It's a matter of accessing, trusting, unlocking, unleashing, and then expressing it. So this was a beautiful message, reminding me of something I already believed, but in a new way, and it came up out of the session.

I have a favorite phrase that I use as a laptop screensaver. It's my own creation, born out of a desire to move away from the hard-charging message of "go for it" that many of us grew up with. Instead, I prefer to live in a state of flow, so my version of the phrase is "flow for it." I'd rather live in a state of flow and feel that I'm going for more ease, more flow, more simplicity versus challenging things, chasing things, and going for something, because that, in my prior years, was exhausting and depleting for me. I find the concept of "flow for it" to be a much better way for me to live now, and so it's something that I practice.

So then, the thoughts came up, reminding me that I had my version of the phrase. I have connected it with the fluid version of gold, being in the flow. So all that wrapping together became this beautiful message reminding me that I have everything I need within me and I don't need to be or do anything to have something I want or achieve. It's already there. It was a beautiful reframing of this phrase that has haunted me, to be honest. I was ready to have it come up and change it and turn it into something new, to melt it away, to transform it from the gold bar into this flowing gold. That can become anything. The possibilities are endless, right?

That was a wonderful experience that I had. It was very powerful, very moving. A lot of tears and energy got moved through me. It was phenomenal.

By sharing my experiences, some might have been relatable to you, feeling that kind of pressure to live up to some perception of being able to achieve great things. Ultimately we put it on ourselves, but yes, people around us can contribute, and we can take that on. And it can be a lot to hold, and it can have an effect on us. I've been working over time to release the expectations I had embodied that had created chronic tension over the years in my shoulders and back. That weight of needing to perform and trying to be perfect in things was literally on my shoulders. And I had made huge progress.

But every new experience I share, a simple thing that happens in my day, a podcast I listen to, a book I read, or a new modality I experienced firsthand as I did with the breathwork, helps me release a little more and free myself up a little more to be able to live and experience myself more fully without the old pressures. That is part of our journey to release the stuff that we've taken on and been carrying around for years.

“It's just a bad day, not a bad life.” 

– Unknown author

🎧 👉 Prefer audio? You can also listen to me share about this in podcast episode #059 here.