There I was, a few minutes before 6am on a crisp September morning, wide awake before my alarm had even had the chance to do its thing.
And I was already ARGUING.
"You could skip it today. Nobody would know if you did a shorter one. You're tired. You've EARNED a lie-in, GIRL."
The duvet was warm and heavy and doing its very best to hold me agreeably captive. The room was still so dark, and my breath was barely engaging with me yet. Sitting shallow and tucked away while my mind held a full board meeting about why today was categorically NOT the day.
Eyes still closed. Negotiations well underway.
Welcome to Conspirepalooza! Fifty days of Conspire Breathwork at 6am, starting 14 September, with anyone brave enough to roll out of bed and conspire with me.
Now. I've been doing this work for over thirteen years. The breathing part? A doddle.
Getting up at 6am to do it, live and online, every single morning? Ha!
Those early weeks came with the same bargaining voice day after day, and every single morning I had to decide whether I meant it or not.
What got me up was you. Knowing there were people turning up to conspire with me. So I'd drag myself out from under the duvet, still muttering but focused on getting breathing.
And every time, somewhere in the middle of the session, something shifted. My belly softened. My back let go of whatever had tugged me away from remembering the good stuff. My chest opened wide, and the breath I couldn't find while I was busy arguing came flooding all the way through me.
I'd come out the other side thinking, ohhhh. THAT'S why.
I held on to that feeling and took it back to bed with me every night.
Somewhere around day thirty, I noticed the board meeting had been cancelled. I can't tell you which morning. No announcement, no fanfare. The alarm went, I took a breath, and I was up. Where the bargaining had snatched my focus, there was wanting. Wanting to go deeper. To get better at it. To enjoy every last minute.
That's the beauty of building a habit. What takes effort at the start gets breathed into your body, morning by morning, until it's simply part of who you are.
Lovely. Story over. Roll credits.
Life had other ideas.
The renovation that wasn't planned when the Conspirepalooza Challenge was put in the diary snuck onto the agenda. The kitchen moved into the front room. The bathroom moved into my BEDROOM. And just as the dust had settled into every corner of the house, the lurgy settled into me.
Tested. Again. To see if I meant it.
Here's what surprised me. The bargaining voice didn't come back. A brand new one turned up, with a brand new question:
How do I make this work in these conditions?
So I made it work. I let my exhales settle into the perfection of what was, exactly as it was, with no need for it to be different. And that opened up space within all the wild overcrowding.
A beautiful set-up is ideal. Clear floor, quiet room, the light just so. Life upside down is real, though, and your breath is what makes upside down bearable.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, with my house in pieces and my body full of lurgy, everything came into sharper focus.
The conditions are always perfect. The question is how we meet them.
Life is the spectrum. Ease at one end, relative chaos at the other, and everything in between. Yet we talk ourselves into accepting the narrowest sliver of it as success. The perfect breathing space. Perfect health. The perfect outcome. Anything outside that slim little band gets filed under I'll start again when things calm down.
Things calming down. Is that a real place? Asking for a friend.
That sliver is so far from the truth, and so far from where the value lies. The magic of the practice is in showing up for yourself and holding yourself through ALL of it. The ease and the relative chaos alike.
This is what an intentional common thread gives you. Your breath has been with you through every season of your life, the gentle ones and the ones that turned everything upside down. When you hold it on purpose, it becomes the thread you can follow back to yourself, whatever the house looks like.
Maybe you're waiting for the conditions to be right. For the house to be finished, the diary to clear, your body to feel better, life to calm down. I get it. I've lived in that waiting room for years. (The magazines are terrible.)
These mornings have shown me something simple. Your breath is already here, in the middle of whatever you're in. It's been waiting for you to meet it.
So, for the last ten days of Conspirepalooza, I'm moving to 7am. My schedule finally allows it, and I've broken the back of the fifty days. The woman who argued with herself over 6am is now choosing her time. The habit lives in my body, and it'll be there at seven just as it was at six.
I'll leave you with a question. Where are you waiting for perfect conditions? And what might happen if you met the ones you have, one breath at a time?
Come and Conspire with me.
With love,
Ella xo