My breathwork journey has been a very somatic one. While I’ve had a few experiences where memories surfaced or insights came through, those have been rare. Most of the time, what I experience is sensation such as tingling, shaking, trembling, tetany, temperature shifts, or waves of energy moving through my body. Frequently, this is paired with some emotional release, but isn’t tied to any specific story and it doesn’t feel like a particular emotion that I can name. It’s more like a general sense of emotional pain, sometimes even despair, moving through and out of me. On and off, I felt disappointed that I wasn’t having visions or clear narratives like I had heard others describe. However, I also wasn’t surprised since my experiences with Ayahuasca had been similar – very “felt” and not visual. No distinct stories, just emotional and somatic movement and release. Additionally, I’ve always been a feeling person –  emotionally sensitive, energetically attuned, and empathetic. Despite all of this, I kept finding myself wondering, Am I doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with me? And those thoughts aren’t new. They’ve been my no-so-quiet companions throughout much of my life so it makes sense that they showed up here, too.

For most of my life, I assumed that when people said they could “picture” something in their mind, they meant it metaphorically. It wasn’t until my sister asked me, “With what degree of clarity can you see images in your mind?” that I realized most people actually see images! And that some see images so vividly that it can almost feel like reality. Personally, my inner visuals are more like impressions or silhouettes and if I try to focus on them, it’s like trying to catch smoke in my hands. I soon learned that I’m likely near aphantasia, which is the inability (or limited ability) to form mental images. This made so much sense! Of course my breathwork experiences aren’t visual. Of course they’re felt. In talking with another breathwork trainee who experiences something similar, we realized something else: we’re both deeply intuitive – highly attuned to energy and sensitive in ways that don’t rely on imagery. And instead of seeing this as something to fix, we began to wonder if this is actually part of our design. Not a limitation, but a different doorway. I started to realize that my experience isn’t wrong, it’s just different. This was something that I was beginning to connect with across all areas of my life. 

Even with that understanding, I still found myself in my head during sessions. My monkey mind kept thinking and analyzing and wondering if I was doing it “right” and I kept waiting for something to happen. Overthinking, overanalyzing, and second guessing my experience were survival mechanisms I had developed early in life and I believe my system was using them to resist the changes I was trying to make through breathwork. I also think that my system may have been titrating my experiences until I was ready. Finally, during one particular session, something had shifted. I knew going into the session that I was ready to push past resistance and as the music was climbing to the peak, I felt like I was approaching the crest of something like the top of a rollercoaster, right before the drop. I could feel myself right at the edge of letting go, right at the edge of moving beyond my thinking mind and into something unknown. Inside, I just kept repeating: Take me. Take me. Take me. I didn’t want to resist anymore. 

Instead of trying to understand what was happening, I remembered to focus on feeling into it and finally understood what that meant. I let my body lead and followed the sensations. It started with small movements in my hands and arms, then my torso and hips joined, then my head. Eventually, my whole body was rocking and swaying with the music. I was still lying on my back, actively breathing, but I was dancing, arms and legs in the air. The movements felt fluid and connected, from head to toe. It felt like the energy inside me was finally moving without resistance. Like everything was working together instead of against itself. From there, the experience shifted again. I curled into a tight fetal position and felt like I was in the womb. I wasn’t reliving a specific memory, but it felt like I was experiencing something primal. There was intense emotional pain, I think it might have been deep sorrow, and there was no story attached to it. Just feeling. I felt cracked open… in the best way. At the time, that was the deepest breathwork session I had ever experienced and it happened well into my breathwork journey. 

Intellectually, I understood that in order to heal something, I didn’t need to name it, trace it back, or make sense of it. I believe that my breathwork experiences were trying to teach me to know that this was true. That healing doesn’t always come through insight, but can come through sensation and movement, and feeling something all the way through, without needing to explain it. I kept noticing how often I was still trying to control my experience by thinking and analyzing and questioning whether I was doing it right. My mind has always been active, often anxious, trying to improve and “get it right.” Breathwork kept inviting me to get out of my head and into my body. With each session, my mind would offer up messages like, Limitlessness is a feeling. Power is something you feel. Transmission happens through feeling, not thinking. These messages were in line with things I’ve been working on – limitations I place on myself, standing in my own power, and building my intuition, but they all had an element of feeling. So I started to listen.

I’ve come to realize that the question “Am I doing this wrong?” was never really about breathwork. It’s a pattern I’ve carried for a long time. A pattern of assuming others have it right and I don’t, of looking outside of myself for the “correct” way, of not fully trusting my own experience. Breathwork helped to illuminate that pattern and in doing so, gave me the opportunity to choose something different. More than anything, this journey has been about learning to trust myself, learning to trust the process, learning to be in my body and truly feel, and learning to listen to what’s true for me, rather than what I think should be happening. It’s been about becoming my own authority.

So if you’ve ever wondered whether you’re doing this work “right”, if your experience doesn’t look like someone else’s, if you find yourself comparing, questioning, or doubting… Let this be your reminder: There is no wrong way to do this work. Your experience is not wrong in ANY way and your way of feeling, sensing, and processing is not lesser or lacking. It’s yours. 

Trust yourself.
Trust your body.
Trust the breath.
Trust the process.