How Conscious Breathing Helped Me Rewrite My Nervous System

What if your body already holds the map to the healing you’ve been chasing? We dive into the living dialogue between physiology and perception—how tight muscles, busy thoughts, and broken sleep are not flaws to fix but signals pointing toward completion. Naomi opens up about a breathwork session that sparked a life reorientation, then unpacks the science and soul of holotropic breathing: a structured, drug‑free method for accessing non‑ordinary states, releasing stored stress, and restoring nervous system safety.

Across this conversation we connect the dots between stress responses and the stories we tell ourselves. You’ll learn why the brain hunts for reasons when the body is tense, how emotions live in muscles and breath, and what it looks like when unfinished survival energy finally moves. We break down the essentials of holotropic breathwork—rhythmic breathing, evocative music, and a held container—and why minimal facilitation honours your inner intelligence. Naomi shares the “spider imprint” example to show how tiny shocks become big patterns, then explains how movement, shaking, and sound are healthy signs that the system is closing loops rather than reliving harm.

If your healthy routines are solid but you still feel stuck, this episode points to what might be missing: completion. We explore practical steps to build safety, from lengthening the exhale to finding trained, ethical facilitators and supportive groups that enable co‑regulation. Expect clear guidance, grounded stories, and a reminder that you are not broken—your body is protecting you, and with the right conditions, it can let go. Listen, breathe, and consider a gentler path to change that begins with sensing rather than forcing.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a softer way back to themselves, and leave a review so more people can find their way home.

Find events such as holotrophic breathwork retreats held by Naomi at her business near Edinburgh, Scotland via our events page

Transcript

Welcome And Embodiment Series

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer.

Body–Brain Loop And Stress Signals

Naomi Mills 0:41

And welcome to episode 11. The first, actually, in what I'm calling the embodiment series, and that's because everything that we covered in the first 10 episodes has been the real basics around your central nervous system, why it's so important, how it controls everything in your body, and what you really need to be becoming aware of in order to create the best life and health possible. So now we get to go a little bit deeper, and I'm splitting the next two arcs into actions we take in the body that are going to help both the body and mind, and then our next arc will be more from the mind body, mindset changes, etc. But of course, you cannot connect the two, disconnect the two, because whatever is going on in your body is reflected in your brain, and vice versa.

Spain Retreat And Breathwork Epiphany

Naomi Mills 1:34

So if your nervous system starts to work in a state of stress, or as I call it, fight or flight, you are going to notice more muscle tension, increased heart rate, sleep won't be as good, your brain will be busier, all of these physical signs will be happening in your body, digestion shuts down, and the brain goes, Oh, the body's really stressed right now. What have I got to be stressed about? And your little subconscious mind goes, What about this? What about this? Because the brain is always trying to make sense of the world. And sometimes that's the outer world, but it's also your inner world. So it kind of wants to match the physiology and the feedback it's getting from the body with what it's having inputted. So that might lead to anxiety, worries, things you're wondering, why am I even thinking about that? And sometimes it's because your brain is getting these unconscious signals from your body and it's trying to match them up, it's trying to work for you to make the world make sense.

Naomi Mills 2:37

And when I had my epiphany that we're going to talk about today, and decided to sell up my practice down in the East Midlands and move up to Scotland, that realization of what I needed to do to create a sense of safety and calmness in my own nervous system came through the tool I want to talk about today, and that is through breath work. Using the breath as a way to not just calm us down, but actually to help shift some stuck emotions or to find clarity in what it is we really want. So back in 2019, I was in Spain on a retreat, and there was a breathwork practitioner who came over from the Netherlands and talked us through a very intense form of breathing. Not quite the same form that I practice with my clients, and I'll tell you why soon enough, but it was a very intense form of breathing, and it was during that experience where I was having all sorts of feelings in my body and tingling and what's called tetanaso cramping going on in your hands, I was also processing a lot of stuck emotions and thoughts that I didn't even know I was holding on to.

The Body Keeps The Score Explained

Naomi Mills 4:08

And immediately following that breath work, and I think during, but it's hard to say, it was quite a long time ago now. I knew, I just knew that I was living and working in a place and in a way that wasn't 100% aligned with me and the future that I wanted for myself. It's not to say it wasn't a great life and it wasn't fruitful for me. However, it was keeping me stuck in this kind of stress go mode, not good enough mode. And my inner soul somewhere just longed to be out in the countryside, looking out on hills, having a much more restful pace of life, and I'm having a lot more freedom essentially to work when I wanted to work, not work when I didn't want to work, to be creative, to be more of who I was. So you might have heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Koelk, and I hope I did that justice, because it is one of the most influential books that we've got at the moment of how emotions are held in our bodies and not just living in our minds. And especially when something overwhelming happens that you don't have the capacity to fully process in the moment, your nervous system does what it always wants to do, which is to adapt and to keep you safe so that you can survive. And we talked about it a moment ago. Muscles tighten, breathing patterns change, your heart rate shifts, hormones recalibrate, you get a big release of stress hormones in your body, and the brain will reorganize itself around this.

What Is Holotropic Breathwork

Naomi Mills 5:58

And the body, in other words, learns to hold on to some of this emotion to keep you safe. And this is why you can feel anxious without knowing why, or you might feel emotionally triggered now about something that belongs to the past, and you may have no idea why you feel why you feel, but your physiology, your body remembers. I mentioned that I do not practice the type of breath work that I used in Spain for my own breakthrough.

Naomi Mills 6:35

The type of breath work I like to use is called holotrophic breathwork, and it was developed by a Czech psychiatrist in the US in the 1960s, and he wanted to recreate some of the same healing effects that people have experienced through taking mood-enhancing drugs to release trauma, and he wanted to do that without using any of the medicine. And it's called holotrophic breath work, and it means whole of self. And put very simply, it's like creating a bridge between your conscious and your unconscious mind, so you can have a conversation with yourself, and often that brings up patterns and wiring and beliefs and old stories, or it might simply be expressed through your body movements and feelings at that time.

Movement As Completion Of Stress Cycles

Naomi Mills 7:29

So the reason I love holotrophic breathing is because for me as a facilitator, it doesn't involve a lot of me, and what I mean by that is I want it to come entirely from you and your own inner wisdom and to really honour that. So I'm not giving instructions during the breathing, I'm often not touching you, I'm not instructing breath holds, it's setting you off on a journey, making sure you're prepared for it and educated for it, holding space, playing the music, being there to support as your body is allowed to go through everything it needs to go through.

Naomi Mills 8:08

And in holotrophic breathing, you are really encouraged to move because you need to process through movement. It's exactly like when an animal's caught in the wild and it's stunned and it's frozen, and you think it's dead, and then it starts shaking, and that's very healthy, that's completing the cycle so that the physiology can return back to normal. Very often during the breathwork process, things are going to come up, feelings, emotions that just need to move through the body.

The Spider Imprint Story

Naomi Mills 8:42

When I was doing my training, a great kind of analogy, a story that I was taught by my teacher, Peggy Dylan, was that imagine an 18-month-old baby who sat on the floor playing with their toys and just having a really, really nice time, and suddenly there's this new toy, and it's kind of soft and fluffy, and it's tickly, and it's moving, and it's very exciting, and it makes its way onto her hand and up her arm, and she thinks, Oh, this is like really fun and nice and interesting, and she goes to reach for it, and one of her parents comes in at that moment and goes, Ah, spider! And in that, that neurological input, the nervous system input that child has been experiencing so far has been fun, curiosity, touch, lightness, tickling, and then this massive interrupter of the parent.

Preverbal Memory And Birth Imprints

Naomi Mills 9:38

And then what does the infant do? You see them, they freeze and they jump and then they cry. And actually, when we think about that, it's a nervous system imprint. It's like this big jaggedy line of input goes into the brain of danger, wrong, no. And she carries on with her life, and things go on as they do. Then maybe she's 16 years old and she's at the cinema with her first boyfriend, and he puts his arm around her, and that feels really nice. And then he starts to just gently run his arm up and down her forearm in a tickling sensation, and she feels this sense of like ick or fear, and she doesn't know why.

Naomi Mills 10:16

And so holotrophic breath work was really designed to help us release pre-cognitive or pre-verbal trauma, so things that got hardwired into our nervous systems before we could understand them. Because breath really can be the bridge between the body and the mind. Often we think the mind doesn't remember that we don't have conscious access to some of the stuff that's come before. But your body does, and I still think it's so cool. In some levels, you absolutely remember your birth because you were there and you experienced it. You just can't necessarily recall that to your conscious brain, but it's all in there.

Completing Cycles Without Re‑traumatising

Naomi Mills 11:01

I've seen during breathwork sessions people almost reliving, writhing and moving or pressing as though they are going through some sort of birthing process. And sometimes it's just imprints being processed for whatever reason it needs to be released to allow that person to move forward. And so, in this way, using the breath is not about forcing something out, but it's about allowing the body to finally have the conditions that it needs to complete what's been interrupted. And so in holotrophic breath work, we're not revisiting trauma, and people have processed some very significant traumas in my sessions, but it's all about honouring the body to finish, to complete the cycle that it wasn't able to complete before when the trauma happened.

When Health Plateaus Hide The Unconscious

Naomi Mills 11:58

And that's where the healing is. As I said right back, I think on episode one or two in the beginning, as a clinician, when we talk about the three T's that hold us in stress, the toxins, trauma, and thoughts, we can be working really hard, adjusting somebody's spine, they can be exercising, they can be meditating, they can be fueling themselves beautifully and getting enough sleep, and yet feeling stuck or plateauing or not getting the shift in health and well-being and safety, essentially, that that person really wants. And I have learned over the years, when that happens, there's a fairly high likelihood that there is something unconscious being held on that, when given the right conditions to release, can dramatically shift that person's life.

Safety, Support, And Ethical Facilitation

Naomi Mills 12:56

Because, as I say, that happened for me. I was holding on to safety and certainty in a big business, in a house, in a life that everything in the modern world told me was success, and success equals safety and goodness and all these other things, and it wasn't feeling successful and safe in my body, and I didn't know it really until the breath work, and I certainly couldn't verbalize it until after that breath work either. So when we talk about the body keeping the score, that doesn't mean it's written there and there's nothing that can be done and it's being held and it's it's on your card for the rest of your life. It's really an invitation to tune into your body and give it opportunities to release and process things in a different way.

Gentle Next Steps And Closing

Naomi Mills 13:52

And it's not just breathwork that can do this, there are other tools and methods that we're going to go into in upcoming episodes. There's a lot of work when I talk about my 31-day nervous system reset journal that's about just simple movement, simple breaths, moving to music, moving for yourself. But actually, if you are able to get yourself into a group with a trained and insured professional, then you will notice these big life-changing things coming up. Because again, going back to the nervous system, what feels safe is being held properly, about being connected with other human beings.

Naomi Mills 14:35

It's about creating the right environment for some of the stuff to come up so that you can process it. And in my experience, when you try to do this on your own or in situations that are not held in the most ethical and beautiful ways, you will actually will not necessarily go deep. And if something comes up unexpectedly, you need to make sure that that person is there to hold that space and help you move through it.

Naomi Mills 15:06

So there you go. That was our exploration today into breath work and really thinking about breath as a means to accessing deep-held trauma or even just patterns that keep getting repeated in your life and giving yourself the chance to come into a slightly altered state so that you can rewire and rewrite your nervous system yourself. So, my recommendation for today is not to go out and do anything drastic, but let this percolate. Maybe allow yourself to notice if there's anything that comes up where you feel drawn to experiencing this more, exploring it more, having a look at what's available locally to you, have a read of that book, The Body Keeps the Score, and just start to delve more deeply into just how much your emotions and past experiences are still creating your reality today.

Naomi Mills 16:12

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparked something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.youareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer, and you always have been.