This is how you feel

On my experience studying breathwork in New Mexico, learning how to access the emotional "underneath", and my meditation journey.

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Arriving in New Mexico

I tell my friends there is something perfect to me about an American gas station in the desert. Drink a slurpee on the curb and brush shoulders with the most esoteric being you’ve ever met in your life. I didn’t know how much I would love New Mexico, but I suspected it. I was pulled, drawn, called, like I am with everything important to me. At the Albuquerque airport I got a drippy bean and cheese burrito and saw a live band sing covers of Joni Mitchell. A little girl, no more than 3 years old, twirled between the aisles of grubby airport seats while her parents watched tenderly. She is free. May she stay free, I prayed.

I came here to learn how to breathe again. The last ten years of my life have been coloured by this — the forgetting and remembering how to breathe.

Learning How to Feel

My draw to breathwork arrived from my ongoing understanding that many of us operate as broadly numb. We have an entire emotional “underneath” which is inaccessible and responsible for various forms of neuroses, paranoia, chronic fear (also known as anxiety) and depression, which are commonplace among modern humans. The numbness to our “underneath” is, I believe, a result of relentless socialization that essentially teaches disconnection from the feeling-body. It is impossible to discern what one cannot feel, because indeed, we cannot feel it. It is only once we start feeling that we begin learning what it is we carry, in our underneath.

I had no idea that I did not know how to feel.

I would have never identified myself as someone disconnected from my emotions. I cried, I got angry, annoyed, frustrated. I was a therapist. However, the more work I do with myself, the more I realize that many modern “coping mechanisms” are also, in some way, emotional repression tools.

No, we cannot always be in our deep feeling. Yes, we must be able to cope, to get by in one piece. And, the result of being taught out of our emotions is devastating to the nervous system, to the soul. It is dehumanization. Thank God for the ways I fought against it, before I even knew what I was fighting for. It was my wholeness. I was at war inside, for my wholeness.

As I heal, I am realizing that, for example, my “positive self-talk” and “healthy internal monologue” provoked emotional repression. Constantly saying to myself in times of emotional trouble “it’s going to be okay Hannah, this will pass soon”, began registering in my emotional system as it’s not safe to feel this way presently, so find a way to calm down, to make the emotion disappear, to make everything alright.

My psyche has been profoundly wired in this way—to find all kinds of secret passage ways that will help me not feel my feelings. I notice it now constantly, my impulse to find an off-ramp away from emotions. Lately, instead I now just pause. I ask myself if I can experience it—whatever “it” is. I ask myself if I can tolerate being with it, even if only for a few moments.

Compassion has also often been a self-soothing, emotional repression, drug of choice for me. When struggling with childhood trauma especially, I have jumped to all of the ways it makes sense. I have jumped to they were doing the best they could with what they knew at the time. I am now learning that if we don’t spend enough time feeling, truly and deeply feeling, what is associated with how badly, how abusive, how harmful, “their best” may have been—resentment will grow back stubbornly, like sharp weeds between concrete.

If you were to ask me how I got to breathwork I would say it is because I tried.

I tried. I tried. I tried. To get free. To forgive. To let go. To move on. To grow up. To heal. To be an adult. To talk my way out of it. To talk my way through it. To face it. To drop it. To pretend it never happened. To forget.

I tried to be honest, I tried to be loving, I tried to be kind. I tried to be real, I tried to be confrontational, I tried to be brave, I tried to be myself, always, I tried to be myself. I tried asking for help. I tried reading lots of books. I tried doing lots of diets. I found teachers, multiple therapists, lots of practices, rituals, disciplines.

I could not get better, I now know, because I had not yet learned how to feel.

I had not yet learned how to feel, because I did not know how to feel. I had no idea the layers of unprocessed trauma and emotions I carried, because they were not even accessible to me. And eventually, my body started to shut down under the gravity of it. Eventually, the pain of my “underneath” was too much. Eventually the past was something I could no longer carry on my back.

I arrived at breathwork because I was willing to do anything, to try anything, for my peace and freedom. Fuck, for my “okay-ness”. And, I was deeply not okay. For a long time, I was not okay.

Breathwork was and is an important part of my journey beyond survival. Beyond just okay. And towards joy. I could cry writing it. My journey towards joy.