An integration reflection - Journal Entry by Ella O
This year, I have kept returning to the wisdom of my breath.
Not just as a practice.
But as a place to find myself more clearly.
A home.
A reminder.
A map back to parts of myself that have continued to hide in the shadows of my breath.
There were days when on the surface all was well and yet when I breathed in a little deeper — I realised my jaw was tight, my breath was shallow and my body was braced.
And still, I functioned.
I led. I held. I supported.
But my system was bringing things stuck deeper in my past to the surface for - integrating.
This is the difference that Conspire Breath-Work has and continues to make.
It didn’t just teach me to breathe more consciously.
It taught me to breathe more honestly.
To let my exhale surrender the past I’d been dragging into present days.
To let the tears rise without fear of what they meant.
To meet parts of myself I’d expertly kept hidden in the folds of high-functioning, underbreathed strength.
Conspire Breath-Work didn’t give me a way to skip over who I was and all that I’d been through.
It offered me a way to come home to the one I’d buried in protections and sneaky survival mechanisms.
It continues to entice me into bolder expressions of me and there:
I found clearer strength uninterrupted by performance.
I found softness laced with compassion and kindness.
I found myself more powerfully, again and again.
My breath didn’t just support me this year.
It showed me the perfection of who I am, because there is perfection in every single part of me.
The parts that I call frustrating, the parts that feel lost and confused, the parts I wish would stop showing up with determined persistence. As well as the parts that inspire, motivate and offer me joy.
That is the beauty of integration - it's the invitation to keep finding deeper ways to be whole in all that we are when it feels easy, and especially when it feels like the hardest thing in the world to do.
And when I stand in my breath’s ability to move me through it all, I’m more me because of it.