Breakthrough Breath: A Transformative Step on My Grief Journey - Exploring Healing Modalities

Summary

In this episode of the Growth from Grief podcast, host Susan Andersen shares her transformative journey with breathwork as a healing modality in her grief process. She discusses various breath techniques that have helped her navigate the emotional turmoil following the loss of her son, emphasizing the importance of finding the right methods for individual healing journeys. Susan also recounts her recent experience with a breakthrough breath workshop, highlighting its energetic and emotional release aspects, and encourages listeners to explore different techniques that resonate with them.

This is the 4th in a series on Exploring Healing Modalities

Takeaways

• Breathwork can be a powerful tool for healing.
• Breath techniques can help calm the nervous system.
• Yoga provides a safe space for healing.
• Different breath techniques serve different purposes.
• Mindfulness practices enhance present moment awareness.
• Transformative breathwork can lead to emotional release.
• Finding the right technique is crucial for healing.
• It's important to leave a situation if it doesn't feel right.
• What works now may not work later, and vice versa.

Thank you for listening! Visit www.sueandersenyoga.com for Yoga for Grief classes and additional resources.

Transcript

Susan Andersen (00:04.11)
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 41 of the Growth from Grief podcast. I'm your host Sue Andersen and today I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience over the years with the power of breath work and specifically talk about a Breakthrough Breath, a workshop that I took recently over the last, I guess it was maybe, I don't know, four weeks ago or five weeks ago. It was very, very transformative and I want to talk about that with you. 

This is the fourth in my series on exploring healing modalities. Just in case you haven't listened to any of these, you can go back and listen to the first one, which is sort of the introduction of this series where I talk about different healing modalities that I'm trying now, like either now within the last couple of years or now most recently a couple of months ago, different techniques, different processes that I really couldn't do earlier in my grief. There's no way I could have done these. I wasn't ready for them. I was still filled with a lot of emotion and feeling the effects, the traumatic effects of the death of my son, you know, and how that affected me. 

But now, you know, all of these years later, I'm more open, I'm more receptive to a lot of these techniques. And they've been really, really helpful to me as I continue to evolve and connect more and more with my mission, my reason for being here on earth, which is to help people who are grieving.

Susan Andersen (02:28.174)
And I do that through this podcast. through my Yoga for Grief programs and classes, my emails, my blogs. So just any way that I'm able to share my experience with you to help you as you navigate the challenges of grief. And remember that grief is different for everyone and it will be different for every loss.

And loss is unique, right? And loss could be anything. It's not just a loss of a person. It's loss of your pet, your home, your job, a relationship. So we experience a lot of loss in our life. And with that loss, we have a lot of emotion and a lot of grief that can get stuck in our bodies, whirls around in our mind. And it's really important for us to release these emotions over time, to open ourselves up to joy, to possibility, and to open yourself up to what your mission is on this Earth.

So if you're looking for resources, you can check out my website, sueandersenyyoga.com. And I thank you if you are a returning listener. Thank you so much for coming back to this podcast. And if you're new, welcome. And let's go. Let's go and I'll talk about this experience. 

So I have some notes here. So if you see me kind of looking down, I'm looking at my notes, my outline for this podcast. I want us to start at the beginning, at my beginning, for techniques of breathwork. And that is a month after my son died, I joined this group called Alliance of Hope for Suicide Loss Survivors. 

Susan Andersen (04:54.894)
And they have a forum and you can set up an account in the forum.with a fake name and you can join and do an introductory post and that's what I did. I talked about in that introductory post that I just felt like there was a cloud on my chest and I couldn't breathe. Some person that responded really encouraged me to try a breath technique that was inhaling to a count of three and exhaling to a count of four. So this kind of breath, if you've never done it before, you have the exhales longer than the inhales and it really relaxes your nervous system. And it was truly a breakthrough for me in this, with this breath.

And I cite it as the reason for me to move forward with yoga and the different techniques that I learned in yoga that have helped me along the way and some that I really, some that I really, really love and I connect with more than others. 

You know, at that time, the month after Ian died by suicide. It's hard to describe the feelings that I had, the grief, the numbness. Physically, it felt like a cloud in my chest. That's the way that I described it. I couldn't breathe. There was just this cloud there stuck on my chest. Besides just feeling numb and you know, and stuck and in shock, of course, you know, the first couple of months, you're trying to, you know, navigate this new normal of your life after whatever this loss is. And again, for me, it was at this time was the loss of my son. And it was a challenging time. 

Susan Andersen (07:20.108)
And these simple breathwork techniques really helped me a lot, as I mentioned. So physically, taking and concentrating on my breath with that, you know, inhaling to a count of three, exhaling to a count of four, and doing that three or four times really allowed me to relax my nervous system, relax my body, and also get out of my head. So let's just try it for a minute. 

So we're going to inhale to a count of three.

Exhale to count to four.

Susan Andersen (08:03.992)
Now you can continue this breath. You can make the inhales and the exhales longer. Just make sure that that exhale breath is longer than the inhale breath. 

It really helped clear my mind. And I did this breath a lot. It was just my go-to when I started to feel anxious, when I started to feel angry when I was just incredibly sad and sobbing, I ended up going back to this breath to help me calm my body and calm my mind. So this was really the first tool for my healing journey, this breath work.

In yoga, what I learned, about four months after, four or five months after my son died, I took my first yoga class and I went to yoga. I had a studio that was literally five minutes from my house and I took yoga six times a week. It just helped me release all of this pain that I was feeling. 

Now, prior to this time, I did exercise, I went to a gym. I started doing a little bit of yoga. Actually with my son, he was doing yoga as a compliment to other things that he was doing like kickboxing and things like that. And he said, mom, I think you'll really like yoga. And I did it with him a couple of times.

But that was more for exercise, right? Or strength or something like that. It was a compliment to other things that I was doing. After he died, when I went to the yoga studio, I was focusing on healing. It really helped me heal because of a couple of things. 

Susan Andersen (10:19.096)
First of all, in the yoga studio, there's not a lot of like chit chatting and talking. You say hi to people.but you're really there for yourself. And so you can concentrate on what you need to do for yourself. So I was able to spend a lot of time feeling connected to other people, but not really having to tell my story or why I was there, which was really important for me early in my grief journey. So it felt safe. It felt really safe for me to be there. 

And I learned...some different techniques. For example, I learned about a three-part breath. A three-part breath is when you're inhaling into the belly, you feel the belly expand, then you have inhaling into the chest and the chest expands. That last little sip of breath right into the throat area. It's like this.

Inhale, fill the belly, continue inhaling, feel the rib cage expand, and then take that last sip into the throat. 

So you're really filled with breath and then slowly release the throat, the chest, the belly, and feel the belly. You know, maybe put your hand on your belly and let it go. 

Let feel it just all the air come out.

So let me talk a little bit about another breathing technique that I also find very, very helpful. And I don't think I use this in a yoga class that I recall early on in my journey, but I've definitely used this breath when working with others who are grieving and they have a lot of anxiety and stress and they really want to find a way to help them focus. 

And this breath is called a box breath. So you inhale for a count of four, you hold for a count of four, you exhale for a count of four, and then you hold for a count of four.

Susan Andersen (12:45.954)
And this is a great breath to help calm the nervous system, to reduce your stress, reduce anxiety. You know, any breath technique that you're using that helps to calm you is just great to have in your toolbox when you are anxious, you're, I don't know, nervous about something that's coming up.

You know, try one of these breath techniques. And I have a lot of this information on my website. You can find these breath techniques or on my YouTube channel where I talk a lot about these different breath techniques. But, you know, I think the most important thing that I learned in terms of my breath work in my yoga journey is that each time I tried something new, I did feel the results or the benefits of that in a different way than these other techniques that I've used previously.

And again, I've come back to all these things because they're really important to me. One last breath work that I wanted to talk about is really about - It's a mindfulness technique and it's one of my favorites. So Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and I believe the founder of mindfulness has a breath technique called the, or a mindfulness practice that is the Four Pebbles Meditation. And I encourage you to look that up.

I have it my YouTube channel. But it's just a beautiful, beautiful meditation using breath and focusing on your breath. So it helps you to stay in the present moment. That's another benefit of some of these techniques that you get out of your head and you're in the present moment. And that's, again, something that's really important.

Susan Andersen (15:12.032)
So I want to talk about this breathwork that I recently discovered kind of by accident. so I have a colleague, a friend, who was talking about this breathwork that she became a facilitator of. So Elemental Rhythm is it's actually a training program that helps people to break through according to their website, "break through their limitations, overcome challenges and create a life they love to live." And it's a transformative breath work. 

So I really knew nothing about it, but except for my friend telling me about it and how she was training to become a breathwork facilitator in this particular Elemental Rhythm. So I went to this program, I guess, or workshop called the Breakthrough Breath. So Breakthrough Breath, again, I knew nothing about this. 

So I come into a room and there are four of us, four students, and everyone has a nice kind of mattress almost to sit on with a bolster and a blanket and an eye pillow. And it's a style of breathwork that is very, very energetic.

It helps you create space. It uses sound, uses music, like a lot of drumming. And there are four phases to this breath work. So there's four different types of breathing techniques that you do, meaning it might be it's a timing kind of thing. So you're inhaling to a count of three, exhaling to a count of three.

Susan Andersen (17:35.786)
inhaling to a count of two and exhaling to a count of four or something like that. So there's different counts to this breath work and it gets faster and faster. So you start out with a slow breath work for maybe three rounds and then you go to a little bit faster, a little bit faster, a little bit faster. And all around is a lot of music. And this technique was just amazing to me. I mean, amazing.

I could actually feel the energy in my body. I could feel a lot of release of emotion. And I never experienced anything like this. What it reminded me of, because I actually had this eye mask on. So what it reminded me of is people that are chanting, doing some kind of a dance, chanting. 

And everybody's getting faster and faster and faster. So that's what it kind of reminded me of. And it wasn't scary to me at all. I don't mean to say that this was something scary. It was just a new experience. And once we finished this breath work, then there was a kind of a yoga, nidra, meditation that was done to go back to yourself at a younger age and kind of talk to yourself at a younger age. 

So you might have done meditations or yoga nidra where it's encouraging you to go back to your younger self and forgive you know, to forgive something that you might be holding onto from your younger self. So this was very similar. 

And wow, I mean, it was amazing to me. Something came up that I didn't realize I was holding onto that I, you know, was able to release a little bit. And it came to the forefront for me.

Susan Andersen (20:00.286)
So this was very transformative. It was very powerful, but not something that I would even try or probably the person who was the facilitator who I'm going to be interviewing in another episode, the person who was the facilitator who is trained in this technique. She's also a clinician, a mental health clinician. She would not even recommend that somebody that was earlier in their grief, I don't think she would recommend them to attend this kind of thing. 

But there are other techniques that would probably be more appropriate. This felt like something that would be appropriate for me. I had talked to them because my friend again is a facilitator of this technique. And so I had talked with them and understood that this was a little bit about it, but not not in detail.

So I wanted to share this with you because like everything that I have been trying most recently, these different modalities, some things connect and some things don't. And the other thing is some things that you connected with earlier in your grief, maybe you feel like you need something more, something that's going to really kind of stir you up.

So for me, this breath work was just a culmination of all of these other techniques that have helped me over the years, over the last 13 years, and building upon one another and understanding how I could use them in my grief journey. And so don't be afraid to try something, but certainly, try something that's going to fit where you are in your journey. You might not know that also. You might not realize where you are and something you try might not be a good fit. 

If you start with something and it's not a good fit, leave. Just leave the place. Don't even continue. Just leave if it doesn't work for you. I think that's another thing that's important to recognize is that, what might not work now may work later, but if it's not working, you need to leave that situation right away.

Susan Andersen (22:24.776)
And before you try something, maybe talk to somebody else who's done that technique, especially, again, if it's a breathwork technique or something that's going to be very powerful, it might not be the right time for you to do that.

Thank you for listening to this episode. I will be interviewing this woman who was the facilitator of this transformational breath work that I did called breakthrough breath. We'll be talking with her a little bit more about the power of these breathing techniques and maybe other types of things that she recommends as a clinician who also uses other techniques, other modalities to help her clients as they are moving through their grief journey.

I hope that you have a great day. Bye for now.