After the final breathing session on the last day of our Level 1 Breathwork Training, a participant asked me this question: “do you find that you heal yourself as you hold space for others?” Simple and yet so much to say about this.
Abso-fu*king-lutely. When she asked me to expand, which of course I wanted to, I struggled to find the right words. Sometimes I find it hard to put myself back in the beginners mindset. I’ve been teaching Breathwork and Meditation for 12 years now and it can be hard to explain things that have just become a part of who I am. It’s also one of the reasons I love teaching beginners, because it forces me to go back into the beginners mindset.
For those who don’t know, the beginner’s mindset is often called “shoshin” in Zen Buddhism, which means approaching something as if you’re seeing it for the first time, even if you’ve done it before. Instead of assuming you already know, you stay open, curious, and willing to notice new details. It helps you learn faster, stay flexible, and avoid getting stuck in rigid thinking. It’s also a wildly profound perspective to consider as you move through life no matter the subject. I’ve found it to be beneficial to my own healing to always be approaching a breathwork session with a beginner’s mindset. My creative writing flourishes when I connect back to a beginner’s mindset. My relationships deepen when I open myself up to being willing to learn. And learning to be a mother, definitely am a beginner, so that one’s easy.
So here I was teaching teachers how to be a breathwork teacher, showing them that the most important thing to do when you’re teaching is to embody the work. Practice what you preach and make sure you are always breathing. Yet this question - “do you find that you heal yourself as you hold space for others?” - stumped me on how to explain it. So I took a breath and connected into my own beginner’s mindset. My inner beginner reminded me of one of the most important lessons that still holds true today in teaching - that I don’t have to be healed in order to teach other people how to heal, I only have to be healing.
And that is the exact reason I came to this work initially. With a broken heart that was fracturing my mind and spinning me through narratives that were not true, about love, about myself, about family, about my future, I sat in the fetal position in an empty parking lot sobbing, almost praying for a car to just run over me. This moment terrified me. I couldn’t see a way up through my darkness. The only things my body whispered were moments of pain that felt like truth that only years later could I see for what they were. Breathwork is what saved me from myself. It saved my relationships. It gave me the man I’m now married to, and it kept my faith after 4 years of IVF leading me to my now 2 year old baby boy.
As I tried to find the words to respond to my client I found myself only able to list one single overall truth, and that is: the more I teach you breathwork, the more I witness you heal, the more I hear about your lives and witness miracles happen, the more my relationship with my own Spirit grows. You restore my faith in humanity, every single time I witness you heal, you heal me.
The truth is holding space for your healing teaches me something about myself every single session, group, opportunity. There are great, magical, important, expansive learnings, and there are hard, scary, and deeply confronting learnings. All of the learnings I receive from holding space for you, opens something for me, I only have to be willing to see them.
And because I think this is such a fun topic to explore and dive into more of, I want to keep going. Here are more of the many reasons why holding space for others helps you heal something in yourself:
You are my mirror. In healing spaces we like to say, “if you spot it, you got it.” Which is a really nice way of saying if you notice something in someone else, both something that annoys you, that you judge, or something that you love and admire, you also have it. That means that everything I see in every one of you who lay down with me every week, has something in you that I also have. That is both the things I admire and the things I have to work on myself. Looking in the mirror that is you, my clients, is the greatest gift. I’m constantly curious about all that I’m not yet conscious of. I’m only interested in bringing to the surface everything I’m unconscious of so that I can keep growing, healing, feeling more alive in this lifetime. Part of my mission to live this big beautiful life is to live it with everything I’ve got and the only way I can do that is if I’m in a forever promise with myself to grow as a person. Growing as a person helps me grow as a mother. Growing as a mother helps me grow as a healer. Growing as a healer helps me grow as a person. It’s cyclical. What I spot when I see you heal are souls who are curious about themselves, interested in feeling better, wanting to feel more alive, to create goodness, to be the ripple in the world. I’m seeing people ready to claim their own shit. People who feel deeply and experience life in big ways. The way you act as a mirror for my own healing only pushes me to go deeper. When I go deeper I show up for you from a different dimension, and can then invite you into that dimension with me. And so on and so forth.
Hearing about your ah-ha moments gives my brain, body and spirit new ways of learning, thinking and seeing the world. I only have this one lived experience that I have. My eyes, my body, my gender, my life experiences are the ones I know and have worked hard to understand. But what is vitally as important is learning about and trusting one another’s lived experiences. Hearing about what you have gone through, how you’ve found your way, how you’ve lost your way and what shows up for you when you breathe, shows me different ways of being a human on this planet. How could that not help me grow as a healer, and a person? Every single time I hear about one of your lived experiences, everytime I hear about one of your breathwork experiences, everytime I hear what you are working through, and how it’s opening you, or what you’ve learned through the process, my world view expands. It’s as though for just one minute I get to take off the glasses that I’m seeing the world through and momentarily pick up your glasses. And not to put them on, no that wouldn’t be what it’s like holding space for your healing, but I do get to pick them up, examine them, imagine what it’s like to wear them, even just remember that someone else is wearing different glasses. That alone, allows me to be a more empathetic, compassionate and loving healer, teacher, friend and person.
You can only take people as far as you yourself have gone. Watching you grow and expand yourself as a person, allows me to grow and expand in new ways that I might not have seen before meeting you. Because of everything I’ve said above, yes, and because we are not meant to do this work, healing work, self-improvement, or this anything in this life - alone. We are meant to lean on community, to be allies, to be partners in this life. We’ve gotten to a place where we have forgotten this in many ways, and in other ways I’ve seen this be remembered more expansively than I’ve seen it in my lifetime. When my community wants to enter the depths of self-forgiveness, self-love, and expansion, and you’re looking to me to be one of the souls holding the lantern to guide us through the dark, then I sure as shit better be ready to go there myself so I can hold that lantern. I need to know how to light the lantern, and I need to know what cave we’re walking through. I don’t need to know where the cave will lead us, but I need to be brave enough to believe we can walk through it together.
Witnessing spirit move through you reminds me of our infinite power. We are already powerful just as we are, and watching Spirit move through you as you breathe, shows me all of the power that lives inside of you. Watching you access your power, connect to what’s deeper than your feeling state, shows me the total power of who you are as a spiritual person in this human body suit. Not as who you’re going to become or what you have done, but it shows me all the ways you are already powerful. We are already powerful just as we are, and that infinite power already lives inside of you, and you show me that every time I’m given the honor of holding space for you.
My number one reason why being a breathwork teacher and holding space for your healing also helps me heal and grow is this…everytime I see you breath, everytime I see you heal and go deeper into the beliefs that are no longer serving you, the stories that are no longer true, everytime I witness you walk through your own darkness and move something, even in the subtlest of ways, You restore my faith in humanity. You are the bravest souls I know. In a world that is constantly trying to divide us and show us how different we are, every single week I get to see 30-50 individuals lay down and look at some of the hardest things they’ve ever gone through. I see you face your demons and stand back up a little lighter, a little brighter and a little more ready to face the day. I see you dream big and refuse to settle. I see you heal from illness and turn your pain into power. I see you claw and scratch your way through making changes in your communities. I hear about you dropping groceries off to your neighbors who need it. I hear about you finding yourself amongst the chaos and then inviting your friend into her own healing too. I see you being the change that we want to see in the world. You restore my faith in humanity each and everyday.
I think I could go on and on forever here but this feels like a really good landing spot for us. So the last thing I’ll say is this: if you don’t know where to begin but all of this sounds yummy, find a local breathwork group. If you are inspired by this but it’s also a little overwhelming, sign up for a breathwork session. If you know you have the bravery to heal yourself, study breathwork training and step into the healer that you already are. Above all may you never forget that you are the brave soul that is willing to grow, heal, change your life. Not everyone can say that, so keep going dear friend.
& To my community of breathers….
Thank you. Thank you for being my mirror. Thank you for restoring my faith in humanity. Thank you for pushing me to grow. Thank you for telling your friends and family about my work. Thank you for coming back around whether I haven’t seen you in 4 years or I saw you last weekend, it’s an honor to breathe through this life with you.
