Hi Reader,

I love a good bundle. I've bought so many over the years, rarely use them, and forget about them shortly after I buy them. I had to make a rule -- no more bundles (or online courses, for that matter. I know, I sell online courses and I have this rule!). Anyway, in one of many spur of the moment, impulse buys, I ended up with a manifestation bundle a few years ago.

I started a few courses, and then it just didn't stick. But there was a breathwork course that I did finish. I'm not sure I bought into the whole manifesting anything through breath thing, but I thought the science side of it was interesting. And I noticed that I felt a physical change after the sessions.

I felt... lighter. Like I'd put down something heavy I didn't realize I'd been carrying.

Around that time, I was starting to hear more about somatics. The idea that our bodies hold stress and trauma in ways our minds can't always access or release.

At that time, I was firmly in the camp of thinking my way through everything. Meditation had brought me more peace than anything else in my life. Therapy had gotten me through the hardest times. Top-down approaches - working with my thoughts, my beliefs, my mindset - that's what I knew. That's what worked.

Except there was a physical sensation of stress that no amount of reframing could quite relieve.

I'd been thinking my way out of stress and anxiety. But my body was still holding it all.

Every time my nervous system got activated - kids bickering, forgetting something important, running late, basically every moment after 7:30 - I felt it physically. Tight chest. Hot face. That feeling of wanting to crawl out of my own skin.

Within a few weeks of that breathwork course, I could feel what it was doing for me - physically. The tingling in my hands and feet during the holds. The tightness in my chest loosening. A tangible release of something I'd been carrying in my body.

In minutes. Not hours of processing or days of sitting with it. Minutes.

Meditation had given me awareness. Breathwork was giving me release.

Both matter. Both are beautiful practices I'm keeping. But they do different things.

Meditation helps me observe my stress, sit with it, understand it. Breathwork helps me move it through and out of my body. It reaches the places where my body knows I'm stressed before I do - the jaw clenching, the shallow breathing, the waves of nausea that come before I've even registered grief.

Anyway, I've been thinking about that initial class and how grateful that I feel that I stumbled into such an amazing (and accessible) tool, somewhat accidentally.

I'm writing more about this on the blog - my journey into breathwork, why it works differently than meditation, what it's teaching me about working with my body instead of just my mind. TI'll be adding to it in the coming weeks, but here's a start.

Yours in breath,