Me, depression, breathwork and, therapy
Breathwork has helped me in a number of ways but I think the two biggest are around opening my heart (you can read more about that here) and helping me manage feelings of anxiety and depression – in short…
Breathwork led me to therapy
When other people share about how breathwork helped them with their feelings of anxiety & / or depression I hear a familiar story about how, over time, these feelings reduced as people learnt to understand themselves better and started to heal.
With me it’s different.
Depression and anxiety have been two unwanted friends that have insisted on hanging around for the past 30+ years. As friends go, they’re not great and we’ve ended up in some pretty dark caves at times – When this happened I rarely sought help, preferring to claw my way back up and out, exhausted, broken and bleeding.
At the core of this “choice” was the fact that I was ashamed of feeling this way. I was embarrassed because I was “failing at life” – everyone else could handle their lives, why couldn’t I?
So I muddled on, pushing all my feelings down and away; packing them into little boxes & storing them in the basement of my soul.
But box by box, the basement started to fill up until one day it was too full and the door wouldn’t shut, some of the boxes started to fall over and their contents spill out… so, I did what many of us do when faced with an over full draw or cupboard: I shoved them all back in, closed the door quickly, and pulled a set of heavy dresser draws in front of the door to stop it bursting open.
Over time I painted over that door, then I hung a rug above the dresser. No-one knew the door was there. I even managed to forget about it for a while too… and then I found breathwork.
I’d been practicing breathwork for a while and slowly starting to peel away some of the surface layers until, one day, I came to face that door again.
Breathwork helped me to gently move those dresser draws away and crack open the door. I started to unpack the boxes one by one. Sometimes they fell on me and the contents (all my feelings) went everywhere but I collected them back up and slowly started sorting through them. I’d be lying if I said it was a consistently painless and easy exploration, but I did feel lighter with each box opened, explored and cleared away.
When the crap hit the fan last year I defaulted back to my tried and tested approach of muscling through it all, but over time it got harder and harder – some days I literally felt that I was falling apart at the seams.
The faster I tried to pull bits of myself back together, the faster I unraveled.
Breathwork helped me to realise that things were getting out of hand and, that unless I changed something, I was pretty sure how things were going to play out… I was going to need a bigger basement.
Breathwork had been slowly introducing me to the idea that I wasn’t a failure at life, that it was ok for me to ask for help.
For the first time in my life I started to think about the idea of truly having some compassion for myself.
When the old patterns and beliefs of “I think I need help but, really, I should be able to deal with this myself by now” and “I’m a complete failure for needing help” started to show up again I was able to replace them with new thoughts like “You are going through a lot right now – if you were carrying this many big things in the supermarket you’d grab a basket to help you, that’s not a failure.”
I’m not going to lie, there was definitely a thought or two that went more like “Ok, I’ll try it but only to prove that I don’t need any help” … small steps.
So, I gathered together all my brave and started to see a Psychologist.
Having already used breathwork to help me as I worked through much of those old boxes in the basement, it was less difficult that I’d imagined it would be to talk about some of those things with my Therapist.
Having done breathwork for a while I’d started to understand myself better and recognised some of my behaviours that stemmed from deep core wounds. Being able to pause, reflect and unpack some of these new things in therapy was easier than I’d imagined it would be.
Having been in therapy for about a year now, I can safely say that I would not be in the place I am now without it.
I genuinely believe that my progress in therapy would not have been as solid if it was not for my regular breathwork practice. I was able to share and talk about various experiences more freely, I was better able to make connections and I was able to understand myself and others more easily.
So there you have it, breathwork lead me to therapy!
Before I go I want to acknowledge that we all have different experiences with feelings of depression and anxiety – what works for one person, might not work for another. If you feel you need the help of a professional please, be brave and reach out for help. I promise you are worth it.
Some people feel they get more benefit from breathwork than they do from talking to a Therapist and that’s ok too – we are all different and we all take a different path.
This was mine.
