About Your Living Breath

​ My search for answers began with my body. What I discovered changed much more than the way I breathe.

My Search for Answers Began With My Body

     I suffered from asthma and allergies beginning around four years old and continuing well into adulthood. Asthma and pneumonia resulted in repeated hospitalizations and affected much of my childhood.
 

While friends played sports and seemed to run and jump with ease, I struggled to keep up. Running the required mile in high school gym class felt nearly impossible. Simply put, I couldn't breathe well.
 

As I grew older, other challenges emerged. I experienced significant weight gain, disrupted sleep, physical pain, and symptoms that sent me from doctor to doctor looking for answers.
 

Over the years, different possibilities and diagnoses were raised, including fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, eosinophilic gastroenteritis, autoimmune disorder, chronic environmental allergies, and reactions to what seemed like nearly every food imaginable. Stress was often part of the explanation too.

My symptoms were real, and yet I knew something was missing from the picture.

In 2017, my search took a different direction when I discovered the Buteyko Breathing Method. For the first time, I began learning that something I had always assumed was completely automatic could be influenced by patterns and habits.

I learned about nasal breathing, breathing volume, breathing during sleep and exercise, and how breathing patterns can change and adapt over time.
 

As I began changing the way I breathed, I experienced significant changes in my own life.

• I was able to exercise and walk outside without relying on my inhaler as I once had.

• My sleep became more restful and uninterrupted, and over time I lost 72 pounds.
   

Breathing had seemed so simple, natural, and automatic that I had never considered how much the way I breathed could matter.

But breathing was only part of what I was beginning to discover.
 

My Body Was Still Telling a Different Story

     There were things I had experienced from childhood through adulthood that influenced how I saw myself, how I related to other people, and how I learned to move through the world.

I thought I had dealt with many of them. I had moved on. I had forgiven people. I was functioning well, building a successful career in dentistry where I coached and educated patients, raising my children, taking care of responsibilities, helping others, and doing what needed to be done.

Along the way, I had also learned how to cope, protect myself, and keep going. Many of those patterns served me well. They helped me persevere, accomplish things, care for people, and move forward. They had become so familiar that I didn't even recognize many of them as protection anymore.

But what helps us survive or function in one season can sometimes limit us in another.

My mind believed I was okay. I had learned how to protect myself and keep going. But my body was telling a different story.

What I had experienced had affected more than what I consciously thought or believed. My body had adapted too. Tension, bracing, responses to stress, and even the way I breathed had become so familiar that I didn't recognize many of them as patterns anymore.

I could understand something intellectually, forgive someone, or know that an experience was over, yet my body could still respond as though it had learned something different.

I began to realize that what I had lived through had not simply disappeared because I had learned how to move forward. Some of it had been absorbed into the ways my body had learned to respond.

And this is where breathing became about much more than breathing.

When I Began to See the Bigger Picture

     As I continued working with my breathing, something else began to change.

As I paid attention to my breath and allowed my body to begin breathing differently, more in the way it was designed to breathe, I began experiencing moments when my body became quieter and more settled.

It was in those moments that I began having deeper realizations about things I had carried for years without fully recognizing them. As my body became quieter, I was better able to recognize what the Holy Spirit was revealing about beliefs I had formed, ways I had learned to relate to others, patterns of self protection, and coping mechanisms that had quietly become part of how I operated.

Some of those patterns looked positive from the outside. They had helped me become capable, responsible, productive, and resilient. But I began recognizing that some of the very things that had helped me function and protect myself were also keeping me stuck in other areas of my life.

I also began to understand something about my body that I had never considered before. My nervous system had spent years adapting and responding to what I had experienced, and my breathing patterns had adapted right along with it.

I could tell myself to relax. I could know intellectually that something was over. I could forgive, work on my thoughts, make healthier choices, seek help, and give my body things intended to support my wellbeing. Many of those things helped, sometimes significantly. But too often, I eventually found myself back in the same battle.

As my breathing changed, I began to understand that my body needed the opportunity to experience something different.

It wasn't simply about telling myself, “I am safe.”

My nervous system needed the opportunity to begin learning, “I could be safe.”

For me, developing more functional breathing patterns gave my body more opportunities to settle rather than continually responding from familiar patterns of protection. As my body became quieter, there was more room for awareness, rest, and truth. There was also more room for some of the other things I was already doing to support my wellbeing to begin taking hold differently.

I began seeing connections between what I had experienced, what I believed, how I had learned to protect myself, how I breathed, and what my physical body had been carrying.

This did not mean that every physical symptom had an emotional or spiritual root.

Sometimes something truly is physical. Sometimes there may be an emotional or spiritual component. But what I have learned through my own experience, and what I have observed in working with others, is that it is often not simply one or the other. There can be an overlap.

That realization changed the way I understood the whole person.

Sometimes the body needs physical support. Sometimes thoughts and beliefs need renewing. Sometimes hurts and life experiences have influenced the way we respond. Sometimes breathing patterns and learned responses need to change. And sometimes several of those things are happening at the same time.

For me, learning to breathe differently became much more than learning a breathing technique.

The breath became a bridge between what I knew in my mind, what I was beginning to understand more deeply, and what my body was finally beginning to learn.

As those pieces began coming together, I wasn't simply experiencing changes in symptoms. I was changing. I became freer, more joyful, more present, more secure in who I was, and increasingly aware that my life had purpose.

That transformation profoundly shaped who I am today and became part of the heart behind Your Living Breath.