The unexpected places breathwork can take us: a poem
This feels incredibly vulnerable to share this but I think it’s important that I do.
One of the most important parts of training to become an apprentice breathwork facilitator is allowing myself to go to my most tender places in my own breathwork journey. This journal entry gives a little glimpse into what this can look like using a personal example.
Last week, I was lucky enough to attend a conscious connected breathwork session led by the incredible Duncan Bailey of Brighton BodyTalk. The theme of the breathwork session was The Rising Sun and I just intuitively knew I had to be there to explore this theme with the breath.
I went into the breathwork session with few expectations about where the breathe would lead me. And, as usual, where I ended up surprised me in the best way possible. Here’s the thing: the breath illuminates what needs to be illuminated. If we are open to surrendering to the process, that is.
For me, this session helped me to see my daughter's birth in a different way, which was equally emotional and healing. Right after the breathwork session, I put pen to paper to try to verbalise what came to the surface during the breathwork journey. This poem is the result.
The First Breath
On your first breath, as the sun rose on your life,
please know that you were not alone.
Even with a surgical screen and barely a metre separating us,
please know that you were not alone.
As you took your 100th, 200th, 500th breath in your dad’s arms,
and I lay a floor below you,
willing the numbness out of my lower body,
counting the minutes, the breaths, until I would really meet you,
please know that I was taking those breaths with you.
I can’t change how you came into the world.
But I’m not sure I’d want to
if it would change anything about the person you are.
But what if?
What if things had been different?
What if you had been born peacefully and placed directly onto my chest and into my arms?
Knowing full well that the what ifs are pointless:
there was only ever one way you were coming into this world
and that was through the sunroof.
Today I reframe this.
I’m releasing the guilt and the shame.
You came into the world dramatically and in your own special way:
true to your nature,
you to the core,
with an audience around you
and everyone listening out for your first breath.
And you breathed and you breathed and you breathed.
And I breathed a sigh of relief.
And I cried tears of joy.
And you were here.
I know it was beautiful because I saw it again today.
Differently.
From above.
And I realised that we weren’t so far apart as you drew your first breath
and made your grand entrance to this world.
I was there all along.
It’s our story and I’m claiming it.
Until the sun sets on my life
and I draw my final breath,
know that I’m grateful for every breath I get to take with you
in your physical presence or at a distance:
a frustratingly close metre away
or on the other side of the world.
I’ve realised it’s all the same really
because even with our lungs breathing our own breaths
to our own rhythms and on our own timelines,
we’re rotating around the same sun,
breathing the same air.
We’ll always have that
and you’ll never be alone.
