Your First Relationship
An inquiry into breath
Your first act in this life was an inhale.
Before you had language, before you had memory, before anyone taught you anything about who you were supposed to be or what you were supposed to want, you breathed.
No one showed you how. No one gave you instructions or corrected your form. Your body simply knew! You arrived into the world already oriented toward life, already reaching for it, already saying yes.
The breath was your first relationship. The original agreement between you and being alive.
But somewhere along the way, most of us forget that.
When we’re born, we breathe down and deep into the belly. Yet, as we get older, our breath becomes shallow. Held. Braced. Up in the chest. Crunched in the shoulders.
Breathing like the world isn’t quite safe enough for a full exhale. Breathing like we needed to stay small, stay ready.
I see this constantly in the people I work with. An adapted style of breathing. Breathing that may have once served a purpose. A style that helped us survive a season that required that required us to be on guard. The body is always doing its best with what it has.
But survival breathing and living breathing are not the same thing.
Survival breathing keeps you functional. Living breathing brings you back to yourself.
There’s a moment that happens in a breathwork session. A deep sigh or full, expansive inhale. A release of some kind. A completion of an incomplete nervous system response from who even knows when. Maybe we’re releasing something we picked up along the way, or maybe we’re finally letting go of a type of bracing that has lived in our lineage for decades.
Something releases that we didn’t even know we were holding.
In this way, breathwork is somatic healing. It invites us to remember. To reconnect with the wisdom of the body, and trust that there’s a built in system that already knows how to do this. Underneath all the adaptation and armor, there is still a self that knows how to exhale.
The ancient yogis believed that the breath was prana, life force itself. Chi! To breathe consciously was to participate in our own aliveness rather than just move through it on autopilot.
I think about that when I facilitate. The breath is not a tool I’m giving someone. It’s a relationship I’m helping someone return to. One that’s always there, waiting in the wings. A relationship that began before anything else did.
If you feel called to guide others back to that remembrance, to hold that space, to understand what’s happening in the body when someone finally exhales all the way, I’d love to have you inside Questwork™, my breathwork facilitator training. We begin June 21st. You can find all the details here.