3 lessons I learned about healing from practicing breathwork
This is a guest blog post by Amy Kurtesky, Breathwork Instructor. Amy is the keynote facilitator at the 2022 Rooted Retreat in Phoenix, AZ.
I thought that after I spent three years, year-round, with my head down studying Chinese medicine, another nine years treating patients with everything from back pain to migraines to panic attacks with acupuncture and energy work, and nearly twenty years of having the first hand experience of living with a chronic disease, I had learned much of what I was ever going to learn about self-healing. But in 2016 I learned how wrong I was and how much more I had yet to learn.
That’s because that’s the year when I first discovered, and then later trained in, guided breathwork.
What is guided breathwork?
In some ways it’s as simple as the name implies. A trained facilitator guides you through an intentional breath pattern for a period of time.
But in other ways, just like my own miscalculation around my healing knowledge, there’s a lot more to it.
Guided breathwork is a form of self-healing that uses our own breath as a tool to tap into the deeper layers of our brain, body, and heart (or spirit) and become our own healer. It supports healing by moving stuck energy and emotions through stimulation of the nervous system with the breath. Oftentimes breathwork can release old stories, heal past trauma, and re-connect us to our bodies after periods of dissociation.
It was through the breath and my relationship with breathwork that I expanded both my knowledge as a healing professional - and as a human worthy of self-healing.
Here’s 3 things I learned about healing from practicing breathwork:
We are our own best healers.
So often when we first have that awakening moment when we realize something in our life needs healing, we immediately look outside of ourselves for the answer. Maybe we feel lost without the map to get us home. Maybe because of developmental trauma, systems of oppression, or the challenges of living in today’s world we don’t trust ourselves to know where to start. Maybe we feel broken and unsure how to be fixed. (Gentle reminder: No matter how much healing you still have in front of you, you’re never broken and ‘fixing’ and ‘healing’ aren’t interchangeable.)
Whatever the reason, we reach out and put our faith (and often a lot of finances) into someone else’s hands, hoping that they’ll have the answer we’ve been searching for.
But we don’t always need outside experts or gurus to heal us.* We have everything we need inside us already, just waiting to be tapped into.
Breathwork gives our inner kids the space to feel their feelings fully, in a way that might not have been possible as children. Breathwork helps us move through the anger, sadness, and grief that arises when we realize that none of us are free until all of us are free. Breathwork helps us shine a light within ourselves to find the map that has been living inside our hearts the whole time, nudging us forward with each and every breath.
(*Note that the healing I’m speaking of here is a more subtle, internal type of healing and not the kind of intense physical healing that trained and licensed professionals really are needed for. Please don’t try to heal your appendicitis with breathwork, ok? Thanks.)
Healing takes time.
Healing heartache, our internal self-worth, past trauma, and the like take time. It would be great if they were as easy as setting a broken bone in a cast - set it and forget it, right? But even that’s not an accurate representation since even broken bones take time to heal. The setting and casting part might only take an hour or two, but then the sections of bone need weeks or months to find their way back to each other and knit themselves back together.
And the same is true for internal self healing too. We can have incredibly healing and cathartic experiences - just like what often happens in breathwork, but then we need to let that catalyst do its work, to give ourselves time to knit back together.
This is one of the reasons we always spend several minutes in a gentle restorative rest after the active breathing potion is complete. It helps the healing waves that we called in with the active breath to spread out and wash over us, slowly settling into place.
(And for those of us who maybe run a bit impatient, know that it’s also not only a waiting game - we are healing all the time, even when we don’t realize it.)
Healing can be fun and full of joy.
And most importantly, I’ve learned that healing doesn’t have to hurt. (Actually, it can even be fun!)
As someone who has had her fair share of painful healing experiences over the course of my lifetime, I had a belief that healing was always hard, laborious, and never, ever fun.
But through breathwork, I’ve found that to be one more story I can wave goodbye to. I’ve shed my fair share of cathartic tears in breathwork, but I’ve also bellied out some heart-healing laughs, and felt the most connected to myself, my guides, and my ancestors that I’ve ever felt before. For every tear shed during breathwork, I’ve had an equally joyful experience too.
And participants in my groups can attest to that too. Several years ago I led a healing retreat in the desert of Joshua Tree. Every person there moved through a healing experience - and many of them felt joy while doing so. Now, almost four years later, several of the folks from that retreat still gather together to feel, heal, and be in a joyful community together monthly.
All in all, breathwork is the most internally transformative healing tool I’ve learned in all the years I’ve been a student of the healing arts. I’m so grateful for the lessons it’s taught me and I look forward to the lessons still yet to come.
Amy Kurtesky, MCM, LAc, Breathwork Instructor
Amy is a trained acupuncture practitioner who turned to breathwork as solace from her hectic hustle. Through practicing breathwork, she discovered inner guidance and the courage to step onto a different path. At Rooted, Amy will guide participants through breathwork practice, and provide coaching or tarot readings for those seeking additional support.
