Last spring, halfway through my 2-year-long break down and build back up funhouse mirror moment, I signed up for an online breathwork class and then spent the whole hour rocking back and forth on my living room floor and heaving through sobs.
Red-faced, snotty, cramped up and still in immense pain from the disaster that was my recent wisdom teeth surgery, I somehow felt GOOD for the first time in months. Clear. Inspired. Lighter. In what I can only describe as an exorcism of sorts, I released the moldy gunk trapped around my poor, tender, beaten heart and exhaled it all out.
So I came back to class twice more, then decided to take it a step further and drive six hours down to Tuscany to spend a week learning how to breathe properly. But even that wasn't enough.
I was hooked.
Greedy, greedier, I always want more.
That's how I ended up spending the last nine months doing an intensive 400 hour trauma-informed training to become a certified breathwork facilitator, and in doing so, how I walked myself back from the edge.
I spent a few months riding the high of oh my god this is how it feels to have a sense of purpose again, and then… that’s when the real fun began.
In September, we came to the section of the course that asked us to face our Jungian shadow. Step into the heart of darkness. Meditate on the most honest interpretation of everything you are, everything you aren't, and who you could truly be without any of the bullshit.
Stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror, as a poet I know once brilliantly put, because: what lies in the shadow? You do.
My shadow is a miserable little bitch. Joyless, spiteful, destructive, nihilistic to the point of parody. It’s forever seventeen years old. It doesn’t want progress. It doesn't want healing. It wants to burn every good thing to the ground.
It has no patience for small victories or cautious hope, would rather lie face-down in the dirt than take a single tiny sip of joy. It wants the nuclear option, every time.
It whispers that nothing matters, that healing is a lie we tell ourselves to keep going, that the darkness is my natural state. It has catalogued every failure, every rejection, every moment I wasn't enough, and it knows which wounds to press into when I'm finally feeling steady.
Sure, the truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you.
I stepped into the cave with pure arrogance and an insufferable air of I can meditate my way to healing, but got spit back out bruised and battered and humbled beyond belief. For a few months over the winter, it didn't let me come up for air at all. I barely had the energy to keep showing up for my course, too exhausted by the constant push and pull between wanting to get better and wanting to see how many different ways I could destroy my progress.
The weekly calls went on, but I stayed stuck in the cave. Then, slowly —slowly— I learned to breathe through it.
Where the light is, I wrote in my notes around that time, is behind every shadow. (Cute!!)
And: The more we can allow our inner children into the light, the less they'll have to shout to make themselves heard through the shadow.
Ah, now we’re getting somewhere, aren’t we? My training did go on to teach us how to alchemize our shadow into healing, and here in Bali, I've been doing a lot of it:
1. Recognize (give the emotion a name)
2. Accept (that this is simply what the situation is)
3. Inquire (as to what it's asking of you)
4. Nurture (the relationship with your shadow not with judgement but with loving kindness)
I came here knowing I was finally ready to step into the light. Fully, this time — no reservations, no delays, no takebacks. Not inching my way in one toenail at a time, but running down there to drag the last of what's left back up with me.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been breathing my way out of the worst of who I am and into a new paradigm of who I could be if I just took a hammer to every single survival mechanism I’ve ever picked up.
It’s not easy, but it feels good. I’m hoping that just like learning to breathe properly, it will get easier in time.
I'm listening to the new HAIM single on repeat, and each time I do I feel a little braver that it just might.
Everybody's got a bed they're sleeping in
And I know that I've made mine
I lost count of the ticking clocks, baby
And I can't feel my lungs
You think you're gonna die
But you're not gonna die
You think you're gonna die
But you're not gonna die
Those lyrics loop in my head like a mantra, like the breath itself — inhale the truth, exhale the fear.
You're not gonna die, even though it feels like you might.
Hammer those cracks, baby, let the light in.
In the end, none of the decisions I made last spring felt connected or fated. There was no grand plan, no narrative arc I could point to and say, "This is the story of how I brought myself back to life."
But through the grace of retrospect, I can point to that week in September, knowing it led me back to my creativity and my light and my joy and everything I hold dear.
I can point to the notes I took after that Monday’s breathwork session:
I know now what my body is asking: are you ready to become someone —something— entirely new?
I wasn't ready then.
But that was then, and this is now.
I've been thinking about returning to my 400 hour training all over again, this time to help mentor the next set of graduates. Not to come back to the cave as someone who can succeed where she once failed (girl leave those behind!! they’re not doing you any favors and they never will!!!!), but to meet myself where I am now.
Someone who learned to dance with her shadow rather than be consumed by it.
Someone who learned the hard way that the only way out is through, yes, but also then back in again, all over and over again.
There's something profoundly tender about looking back at our past selves with this kind of understanding. The you-of-then didn't have access to the wisdom of now. How could she? She was doing the best she could with the tools she had.
We do the best you can until we know better. Then when we know better, we do better.
Which is to say that the dots might only connect looking backward, but we keep living our lives moving forward.
And if you asked me now, all these months later, I’d tell you: the light was never anywhere else but right here — in the breath between the questions we ask, and the moment life answers.