I sobbed through breathwork. Here's what unlocked.

A year ago, a breath work session changed my life. Twenty minutes in, I was sobbing. By the end, the entire framework for this podcast had dropped into my head at once.

This episode is about how that's even possible.

I sit down with breath work facilitator Nicole Rager to unpack what happens in your body when you breathe deeply enough to break through the mental noise — neuropeptides, the vagus nerve, the 90-second rule, and the spiritual traditions that have been pointing at the same mechanism for thousands of years.

If you've ever wondered why the answers you're looking for never come from thinking harder, this one's for you.

Find Nicole at https://nicolerager.com/

If this episode moved you, leave a rating and share it with one person who needs to hear it.

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Music Credits:

"Breathe" by Denys Horokhovsky

"777 Joy" by Nolan Nova

"Passage" by EVOE

"New World" by Ian Post

"Of The Sea" by Okaya

"Whispers" by Okaya

"Contemplative Question" by The Tennessee Pistols

Transcript

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Most people think the answers they're looking for are in their heads, but they're actually not. About a year ago, a woman named Nicole had me lay down, close my eyes, and just breathe. 20 minutes later, I was sobbing, and the entire framework for this podcast dropped into my head at that moment, just from breathing. In this episode, I'll show you exactly how all that works and why the most powerful tool you have for finding answers is something you've probably been ignoring your whole life. Let's get into the show. There's something you're doing right now. As a matter of fact, you've been doing it your whole life. You did it while you were sleeping last night. You did it while you were eating breakfast this morning, and you've kept doing it over the last few seconds of listening to me. It's something you'll do about 20,000 times today, and you probably only thought about it a handful of times in your life. Breathing. It's the first thing we do when we come into this world, and it'll be the last thing we do when we leave it. It's even more fundamental than eating or drinking. And to put that in perspective, a human can go about three weeks without food. You can make it three days without water. But most of us are goners if we go three minutes without breathing. And here's the thing, despite breathing being our most basic act of our entire lives, most of us just treat it like background noise. If we think about it at all, we think of it as a little biological chore that keeps us alive while the real action is happening somewhere else, in our minds, or in our jobs, or maybe in our plans for tomorrow. We're always on the move, focused on a million different things besides our breath as we spend the better part of our days looking for answers to solve the problems in our lives, or for direction on what we should do next when we can't see the path for ourselves, and for how it all fits together into a life that means something. Of course, our default way of looking is to think harder. When a problem shows up, we tend to turn the volume up on our mind. We analyze every single angle, and we research all the possibilities. We just turn it over and over until we're exhausted, and then we usually don't do anything anyway because now too many ideas are floating around in our minds. But what if the deepest answers we're looking for aren't something we actually need to search for? What if they're hiding in our bodies with emotions we've locked away or trapped in the filter of our conscious thoughts? And what if the key to unlocking them isn't reading a new book or hiring a new therapist or even downloading a new meditation app? What if the key is the one thing you're already doing 20,000 times a day? If you've experienced something in life And based on the environment you were in or the support system you had or the beliefs you had, if you experience something and your body has a natural response to that stimulus of life, but you're not able to fully process it or fully take it in for any reason, then that's the kind of stuff that gets just, like, stuck and lodged in the system. Because it's like there's a normal stimulus and response. The body wants to respond. An emotion has, you know, I've heard, like, 90 seconds. It takes about 90 seconds for a full emotional response to come up, come through, be experienced, and then integrate. That's Nicole Regehr. She's a breathwork facilitator, at least that's her official title. Though by the end of this episode, you'll know that description doesn't quite capture what she actually does. Nicole guides people into places inside themselves they didn't know existed to find the answers in the deepest part of themselves, and she does it using nothing more than the breath they've been carrying around their whole life. Welcome to Better Beliefs. I wanna tell you a quick story before we get into Nicole's world, because without this story, the podcast you're listening to right now wouldn't exist. About a year ago, my wife gave me a session with Nicole as a gift for Father's Day. She'd recently gone through a group session with her and said it was life-changing, and I totally thought she was overselling it, but I was up for anything that had to do with self-discovery, so I booked the session. Nicole spent the first 30 minutes or so just listening to what was going on in my life, and I mean, she was really listening. She asked me questions, but it didn't feel like she was trying to guide me anywhere specific. The best way I can describe it is it felt like each question opened a trapdoor in my mind to a deeper level, and each level we went down just got quieter and quieter. At the time, I was trying to find something to do that would give me a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in my own life. Nicole said the answer would come through my breath. So she had me put headphones on so all I could hear was her voice and some music she put on. I laid down, closed my eyes, and Nicole just started guiding me to breathe deep, inhaling to a count of four and exhaling to a count of four. She kept guiding me, and about 20 minutes into that session, something happened that I don't really have language for. I just started sobbing. Not crying, sobbing, and it felt like it was coming someplace deeper than my thoughts, almost like a place I'd forgotten I even had, and I felt this release, and I still don't know what it was, but I knew in that moment it was gone. And then Nicole told me that something wanted to come through to replace what just left, and this next part sounds crazy, and I get that, but I felt this, like, energy in my throat, and it was strong, almost like lifting me up, and then I started getting waves of instructions from what felt like the deepest parts of my mind. That was the exact moment where the entire framework for this podcast dropped into my head all at once, and it wasn't just an outline, it was the whole thing, the format, the tone, the purpose, even naming it Better Beliefs. I'd never had an idea arrive like that before. Usually, my ideas, they come in pieces, and then I build them over time. This was way different, and the best way that I can describe it is like opening a file that already existed on some hard drive inside of me I didn't even know was there, and all I did to access it was breathe. That's the experience I wanna try to explain in today's episode. Not because I want you to go have the same one that I did, but because I think what happened to me in that session points to something universal about what's available to all of us if we slow down enough to notice it. ​it Feels really, really deep. Like- Whatever that is. If, like, that love will be completely taken away. It, it... And I don't know that it, it... That, that, like, takes work for me to get to consciously, you know, and probably work I've done over the years. But that, that is the feeling deep underneath, that if I don't be really good, which we g- which as I'm saying it now, it feels very much more like a parental belief, doesn't it? Like a survival, if I don't be really good, if I don't do things right, something very bad is gonna happen. And the something very bad that's gonna happen is usually like, okay, they're, they're gonna leave. God will leave. I'll be alone. I will be... Like, something very bad is gonna happen. I don't even know what it is Nicole is talking about her upbringings and the fears she had as a child. When she's talking about love being taken away, she's not talking about her parents. Home was a stable place for her. Her parents loved her, and they took good care of her. She's talking about a belief that was planted on Sundays when her and her family went to church. They were Christians, and something she heard during a sermon ended up shaping her life for the next two decades. The message she heard from the pulpit was loud and clear. She needed to be good enough to earn God's love. There were things she had to do and thoughts she couldn't have if she wanted to make sure she went to heaven, and it felt like an impossible standard to her. This was a nervous system level belief that if she stepped out of line, she'd lose God's love and get God's wrath instead. It was a heavy feeling that everything she did and even her thoughts were constantly being monitored and scored by some invisible force. But it was that same invisible force that helped her shed the weight of that belief I did an Easter fast, like a three-day water fast, and at the end of it... Well, each day there was something that came up for me, and one of them was like the first day was realizing that I didn't believe that. Like, if, if... Okay, God has washed away all my sins. I have nothing to prove anymore. Like, I am, I am accepted, I am loved, I'm a child of God. And there was a part of me that was still... I became aware that I was still trying really hard to do it right, to worship right, to... You know? So that was, like, during the fast one of the things that came up for me. Like, oh, you're still trying to prove yourself to God, and you don't need to, you know? And then couple other things, and then by the end of the fast I was driving over the bridge in Charleston, South Carolina overlooking the water, and I just had this like... It, it was like... Well, first I said, "Well, I don't know if that fast really worked," you know? Like, I didn't really have like a come to Jesus, like a epiphany moment. And then right then it was like I, I became suddenly aware of like, no, there's really nothing to do. She didn't have an internal debate where she questioned if what she was feeling was the truth. It just came through as a knowing that didn't need to defend itself. Three days of slowing down, fasting, and breathing had given her body enough space and clarity to receive the truth. Let's call it inner wisdom for now. And I want you to hold onto that idea because we are going to come back to it. For now, it's important to understand that the truth we're looking for isn't always waiting in our minds. Sometimes it's waiting in our bodies, and it just needs a channel in order to come out. So let's talk about how that works. so many of us don't have the support or the... or, like, some things are so big that we, like, physically can't handle what that response would be, so then we hold our breath, we create tension in the body, um, s- the cells, the fascia, everything kind of tightens, and so then it's like th- those experiences, those energetic responses get sort of lodged in the system, in the cellular memory, in the tissues, so that we don't have to experience that thing 'cause it's not safe at the moment. That's how something we felt years ago, or even decades ago, can block us from hearing our own inner wisdom. We hold our breath. We literally hold our breath when something's too big to process, or even when we're concentrating really hard. And you can probably think of a time when this happened to you. It might've been during a really difficult conversation, or maybe when you got some shocking news. Even when you just replayed that moment in your mind just now, your breath got shallow or it stopped altogether. And here's the kicker. You didn't decide to do it. Your body did it for you. And what Nicole is saying is that moment got stored somewhere in your body. Not necessarily in a memory you'll be able to just pull back up on demand, but in a tightness in your shoulders or your jaw, or sometimes we can get this weird pressure behind our sternum that shows up on certain days for reasons we can't really name This is where we get into something called the 90-second rule. The idea comes from a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor. She gave a TED Talk in 2008 and showed that the chemical component of an emotion, the physiological response, that lasts about 90 seconds from the moment it's triggered. After that, if the emotion's still running, it's running because we're choosing for it to keep going with our thoughts, or it's running just because we never let it finish in the first place. And that's the key point of this whole thing. When something happens to us that's too big to fully process in that 90-second window, our body doesn't just delete the file. It files it away for later. well, he- here's what I think. I'm not, like, a super scientist, but what I understand is, A, I think actual, the chemicals, like the molecules of emotion, like different molecules get stuck, or the vibration of them gets stuck in certain cells. So then they're, like, neuropeptides and stuff. So then when they get protected for so long, they're just h- they're literally molecules of emotion that are hanging out there, that I believe that once stimulated with the breath and with touch and all of that, that then they, it creates the right cellular environment for them to be released and actually processed through the system. She mentioned neuropeptides, which I hadn't heard of before, so I looked them up. The term comes from a scientist at the National Institute of Health named Candace Pert when she made a discovery that changed how we understand the connection between our emotions and our bodies. Neuropeptides, they're these small chemical messengers that carry emotional information through our bodies. Dr. Pert's big finding was that the receptors for these neuropeptides, they're not just in our brain. They're everywhere, in your organs, in your gut, in your muscles, and in all of your connective tissue. She wrote a book about it in 1997 called The Molecules of Emotions, and that made the case for what science had largely ignored up to that point, that emotions, they're not just mental events. They're physical ones, literal molecules that travel through your body and bind to receptors wherever they land. So when Nicole says emotions get lodged in the tissues, she's not being dramatic. She's describing what Dr. Pert's research pointed to 40 years ago. Now, here's where the breath comes in. There's a reason the breath specifically unlocks this stuff, and it has to do with a nerve you probably never heard of. It's called the vagus nerve, and it starts at the base of your skull and then winds down through your throat, your heart, your lungs, your diaphragm, your stomach, your intestines. It's basically the information superhighway between your brain and the rest of your body. And about 80% of the traffic on that superhighway isn't going down from your brain down to your body. It's actually going up from your body to your brain. When you breathe deeply and slowly, you're stimulating this nerve, and that sends a signal to your brain that it's safe to relax, safe to release, and safe to feel And that's when the stored stuff starts to move. A 2017 meta-analysis published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience looked at 15 different studies on slow breathing techniques. What they found is that the participants who practiced controlled breathing showed increased heart rate variability, reduced cortisol, lower anxiety, and changes in brain activity associated with emotional regulation. The takeaway here is what Nicole is doing with people isn't just spiritual. It's measurable, and it's repeatable, and it's accessible to anyone who has lungs. in the breathwork school that I was trained, they talked about the physical principle of entrainment, the law of entrainment, that says when you bring a high vibrational frequency in contact with a low vibrational frequency, the, uh, for a period of time- The most harmonious vibration of the two will be achieved. Mm. So basic- like you don't have a bunch of waves of energy oscillating at different frequencies all, and just like all the time in chaos. They begin to entrain and vibrate so that they're all vibrating the same, and the most harmonious vibration will be achieved. Entrainment is a real physical phenomenon, and it's not just a breathwork concept. It's actually how a pendulum works. And the guy who figured this out was the same guy who invented pendulum clocks. He had a bunch of them hanging on his wall in his workshop, and one day he noticed that even when he started the pendulum swinging at different times, after about 30 minutes, they'd all be swinging in perfect sync. No matter what he did, the pendulums kept finding each other. What he eventually figured out was that the tiniest vibrations passing through the wall from one clock were influencing all the other clocks, and over time, they all locked in on the same rhythm. That's entrainment. And it turns out your body, it does the exact same thing. You've probably felt it without having a name for it. Like when you sit in a room with somebody who's really calm, you find yourself getting more calm. Just like when you sit in a room when somebody who's really anxious, you find your own anxiety start to creep up And when you spend an hour deliberately breathing in a high vibration rhythm, the parts of you that are still holding on to old chaotic frequencies, they begin to entrain the new one. there's an emotional scale, and each emotion, it's energy in motion, it all is a frequency. So you have love, unity, oneness, all of those are super high vibrational energies, and that's sort of like what we were talking about at the beginning where I was like, "I feel more spacious." It's like truth is also a high frequency energy. There's more space. So love, oneness, connection, um, compassion, high energy, high frequency. The opposite end of that spectrum is the lowest, uh, frequency is shame. Like I am bad, you know? The opposite of unconditional love. I am separate. I am alone. Um, fear, anger, those are lower vibrational energies, or, um, even sadness, grief. You can feel them. They feel heavier. They feel denser. So those are typically the ones we don't like to feel. Notice what Nicole just did there. She described emotions not as feelings, but as frequencies. Love is high and shame is low, and that framing changes everything about how we try to move in and out of the states we get stuck in. You can't think your way out of shame, and logic, that can't break you out of fear. Those are left brain strategies for left brain problems, and shame, fear, and every emotion, they're not left brain problems. But you can breathe your way into a frequency where those states stop having a grip on you. The breath is a frequency changer, and it works whether you understand it or not. If I had to guess, it, it, it could have something to do with what I feel right now when you say that. Like, it almost brings me to tears, you know? Because it's like I, I, I feel like we all want to be seen and we all want love, and, or at least I do. You know? Like, I That's what my heart wants. And so when I'm with somebody, it's like there's just a, a- to me it is a sacred experience of like I'm here to receive you and love you and have compassion for you, and that's what, uh, that's, that's like what supports me, and so that's what I love to just be for people. Like sh- you know what it is? It's like showing up in that space that we talked about earlier of like just being unconditional love. There's nothing wrong with you, and I'm here for whatever you got. Nicole is describing how she gets people who barely know her to open up the way she does, and what she says points to something I think might actually be the engine behind all of this. It's not the breathing pattern itself. The technique, it's important, but it's not the whole thing. It's the space she's holding while she does it. All the neuroscience, the vagus nerve stimulation, all the entrainment I talked about earlier in the episode, it works best when you feel safe, and you feel safe when somebody is holding space for you without judgment Now, there's a whole other layer of this story, and this is where we leave the lab coats and the peer-reviewed journals behind, because people have been using breath as a spiritual tool for thousands of years, long before anybody could measure cortisol or map the vagus nerve. In India, they called it prana, and they developed a whole discipline around it called pranayama, which roughly translates into the extension of the life force. In ancient China, they called it qi, and they built the practice of qigong around it. In ancient Greece, they called it pneuma. All these traditions, they're operating in completely different parts of the world in completely different centuries, and they all landed on the same conclusion, that the breath isn't just oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. It's the bridge between the body and something bigger than the body. The breath is the very thing that allows a person to quiet their mind enough to hear the truth of their own nature. When you put that next to modern neuroscience we've already talked about, you'll see they're both pointing at the same mechanism, just with different vocabularies. I think it's a combination of like being witnessed, um, like just making time to do inner reflection and work. And so it's like, so someone doesn't have to be with me to experience, you know, the things that happen in breathwork. But I feel like, um, going inward to give ourselves a space to be exactly who we are, where we are with what we are, there's something magic that happens there where we get out of the linear thinking, the left brain side of the mind. We get to trap into the... tap into the other, and then, like, I don't know, connect in more with our potential and the love that is our very essence. This is where the science starts blurring into the spiritual, and it's worth sitting with for a minute. Your left brain is where language lives. It's also where logic lives. It's where your sense of I as a separate individual lives. Your right brain, on the other hand, that's where you experience the present moment without narrating it. It's where you feel connected to something bigger than yourself, and it's where intuition and creativity live. When you breathe deeply and rhythmically for a long enough period of time, research shows that your brain activity shifts to the side that's most active. The default mode network, which is the part of your brain responsible for all that constant inner critic you live with, it starts to go quiet, and that's when things start to happen that are hard to explain with a linear mind I, when you said receiving, I feel a yes for that. Like, e- especially because when people ask me sometimes, like, like right after, "What did you see?" I'm like, "Uh, I don't know. Like, I don't remember. I don't remember." There are some times where I'm like, "Okay, it would be good for you to keep practicing breathing in your belly. That would be good for boundaries." Like, if I have a very logical thing there. But a lot of times I don't remember what I said. I don't remember 'cause it's just like I feel like I'm fully open to be in response to the breather and to spirit, to whatever guidance comes through, to whatever impulses come through with my hands. Um, yeah. So I'm receiving in surrender, in hope, in like, you know, just, um, letting love guide as best I can and trusting that whatever is meant to land will land Notice that she's not using words you use when you're trying to analyze a problem. She's using words you use when you stop trying to analyze and let something else come through. And when I asked her whether she was receiving that information from somewhere or just generating it internally, she said receiving, which is the kind of answer that's hard to hear if your default mode is purely logical. But it's also the kind of answer almost every person who has had a deep spiritual experience eventually gives, that the best of what comes through them isn't really from them. part of it, I think, is that thing we talked about with entrainment, that after a certain level of raising the vibration by breathing in the way that you are, it's like a threshold. We're like, "Ah, okay, there. This stored energy of grief or sadness gets to move through," and it literally begins to transform. And so it's like as that energy transforms, then you feel it, you know? So it's like, "Oh, there. There's a dense energy pocket I've been carrying," and then it, it begi- and then you probably notice after a little while, it's like, "Oh, there. Okay, it's done," because it's, it's integrated. It's changed frequency. Um, so I think it's partially that. Like, you're, you're, uh, you're creating a threshold for release. When I look back at my own breathwork session with Nicole, the one I opened the episode with, I think that's what was happening to me. I'd been carrying something I didn't know I was carrying, and I don't know for how long, but probably years, maybe even decades. And once the breath had raised my vibration high enough, the stopped emotion came up and out. That sobbing, it wasn't sadness. The sobbing was release. And because there was suddenly space in me where there hadn't been before, something new was able to come in. That's why I think the whole idea for this podcast dropped into my head at that exact moment. Not because I had this idea come from one of the deeper places in my own mind, but because I'd finally created enough room in myself to receive an idea that had probably been trying to land for a long time. The breath, that made the room. The breath is what made this show possible, which is why this episode feels like full circle to me. Speaking of full circle, I want to take you back to the beginning of the episode when Nicole was on the bridge in South Carolina. That was when she finally let the feeling go like she had to earn God's love Everything's okay. Nothing to prove. Still nothing to prove." That was the message that came up recently in her own breathwork practice. The way I like to think of this, it's kinda like a check-in. She released the fear of not being good enough for God years ago, but that doesn't mean the work she's doing on herself is finished. The beliefs we pick up early in our life don't get resolved in one breathwork session or one therapy appointment or one spiritual retreat. They get layers peeled off over time. Now, that's good news for you if you've felt like you should be over something by now and you're not. You're not broken and you're not behind, you're just human. And as a human, the breath is a tool you can come back to as many times as you need. It never wears out, it never runs out, and it never asks you to be anything other than who you are when you pick it up, and it helps you release everything you're not. the thing that surprises me the most is how when you touch the right spot when doing breathwork or, or maybe not even, but that's my experience is doing breathwork, that when it gets unlocked for whatever reason, that it's like it really does release, that the body will release what it's been holding for, you know, however long. I opened this episode by asking, what if the answers we're looking for aren't the ones we can find through research? And what if all the things we never fully felt when they happened to us were blocking our inner wisdom from coming through? And what if the key to unlocking all of them is the one thing we're already doing 20,000 times a day? Nicole's story and the science and the spirituality I've talked about in this episode, they all make me think of the 15th verse of the Tao Te Ching. It's talking about the wisdom of the ancient masters being profound and subtle before it issues a challenge to anybody who wants that kind of wisdom for themselves. It asks, "Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?" The mud is all of your thoughts, which get stirred up even more when you're in problem-solving mode. What this verse is saying is that the clarity of wisdom comes through when you let your thoughts settle, which means we need to slow down. And that's a tall order, especially in our modern lives, where we think if we just think harder, faster, more obsessively, all the answers, they're just going to emerge. But it doesn't work that way. The answer comes to us when we stop, when we let our bodies do their job, when we breathe and trust that what's meant to come up will come up, and that what's meant to settle will settle. The good news is you don't have to go to a weekend retreat to try this. You can try it right now. We'll do it together. Start by taking a long, slow breath in through your nose. Let it fill your belly first and then your chest, and let it out even slower through your mouth Do that four or five times and notice what gets quieter and what wants to be heard. That's it. That's the whole practice. The most fundamental thing your body does turns out to be the most powerful tool you have for revelation and release. It's also the one tool that's always with you. You just have to remember to use it. Thank you so much for investing your time in listening to today's episode, and thank you to Nicole for sharing her story and for the gifts she brings to the people who sit with her. I shared my own story on this, but there are several others of people I know personally who have had equally profound experiences just by letting Nicole guide them through breathing. If you wanna check Nicole out for yourself, you can check it out at nicoleregger.com. I'll drop a link in the description of this episode so you don't have to remember it. I highly recommend booking a session with her. Just remember, though, you're probably gonna cry. But that's okay. That's what it's for. If you haven't yet, please rate this show five stars on whatever audio platform you're listening to it on if you feel like it's worth that. On YouTube, throw a like and subscribe, and then share the show with somebody you think in your own life could benefit from what we talked about here today. That's it for this episode. I'll see you on the next one. Better Beliefs is owned by Sixty Three Fifty Ventures. It's written, edited, and produced by me, Brent Kocal. Yes, I do all the things. Cover art was by Jenny H. Designs, and original music you hear at the beginning of every Better Beliefs episode is by The Lonely Ramblers. All other music credits are in the show notes