There’s a quiet refinement happening in my work and I’m taking focused time to be with it as look at what I have been creating in my private spaces and understanding through my own journey so that I can refine it and give it the type of expression it deserves to have instead of responding in the moment and scattering my energy. I am and have been taking this time not as a desire to reinvent what it is that I do, but rather to deepen it and harness my experience.
The more I teach, study, share, integrate and practice Conspire Breath-Work, the more I realise I’m sharing so much more than Breath-Work alone. The Conspire approach goes far beyond techniques of how to breathe in and out for a particular benefit. It is a way of understanding and living life through our relationship with the breath..It is an opportunity to learn what happens when instead of being unconsciously pushed along in reaction to or because of life, we create outcomes and progress whatever that means for us by being ‘Breath - Led’ instead of braced, constricted and reactive.
This is where life meets the things we dream about in the abstract and where we choose and make deliberate moves in the most practical and mundane ways too, but all from a sense of freedom in expressing who we are over the oppressive remnants of past conditioning and the restrictive way that has of squashing who we are.
Taking this time has been a beautiful pause to the relentless desire to be doing more and moving on to the next thing that life has come to feel characterised by for me of late. Instead I have been letting it all filter through my awareness and into deeper contemplation. I’ve been sitting with what I find and letting it show me what I need to know. I have been living with the confusion of not getting it the first time round. Poking it, feeling it, breathing it and learning what all of that means to me.
This is a gift.
It is a time for me to know what lives on the other side of staying with it over doing something with ‘it’.
As I am discovering, and am always open to being reminded, there is a lot more than I could have anticipated to stay with. I am staying when the reflection feels tight. I am staying put when things feel hazy and I’m tempted to call it quits. I am even staying with it when I try to convince myself that everything is fine right now, I don’t need to change a thing.
The reason I am persisting is I want to help as many people as I can in the most sustainable and intentional ways possible. This work is needed more than ever in this world of uncertainty, fear and disconnection.
Staying with it, is the foundation of this insight.
Over the years — both in my own life and with my clients — I’ve noticed that the big loud, conspicuous breakthrough is rarely in the defining moment. The profoundest change comes in the moment someone decides not to leave themselves.
It comes in the decision to simply stay with what is there for them.
Even as I write that, I know how simple and obvious this idea may present itself as being, tucked away innocuously in these words, but to live it - that’s an entirely different story.
BUT….
It matters with the greatest significance because, the only way out is through and through requires staying with what we would rather escape.
In my own Conspire Breath-Work journey, this has looked like sitting with contraction instead of trying to expand too soon and push past it.
I have often felt the urge to tidy something up emotionally — to be ‘done’ with it by urging thinking to move me forward only to be reminded that lacking emotional integration leaves very unique and distinctive hallmarks. (Ones that it is best to avoid.)
The more I embraced letting the breath hold all parts of me at once, the more I was able to stay, and allow what needed to be worked through in the absence of making it wrong or different. That meant the parts of me that were capable along with the frighted and fearful parts. Those parts could also make friends with the bits of me that wanted certainty - she could be besties with the girlies that had no idea what was coming next.
What a thrill to not have to manage these aspects of me separately. What a thrill to not have to divert energy off to suppressing any of it.
Conspire Breath-Work has become the language I use for this whole scale integration.
To conspire — from its Latin roots — means to come together and breathe and for me this means to call all parts of who we are and breathe with them, as well as the sacred act of us as individuals coming together in communion to breathe together.
I get to bring all parts of myself to the same breath, and we get to do it together and witness and acknowledge our reflections, and connection in our shared breath and humanity.
Nothing to fix or silence, nothing to champion because it looks strong, favoured or better, simply breathing with it all.
Again and again, I am reminded that we are always capable of more staying with it than we think when we leave it to our minds alone. “Being led by the breath opens a level of support most of us never realised was available.
And in that staying, something powerful happens.
The need to be in reaction softens which make responding available and this expands our capacity. Gently growing capacity helps us to trust ourselves to remain present with what is hard. This is so essential in a culture that has us diarising ourselves out of presence and feeling and presence with feeling.
It’s not about maintaining the most comfortable distraction because when we are no longer divided inside, there is no need to keep giving energy to those survival pieces.
It is part of the grounded expansion Conspire Breath-Work offers. No more chasing or forcing growth. It is more about moving through life and being able to stay long enough with something for an integrated outcome to emerge.
I am refining how I speak about this work because it matters. Language shapes how we meet ourselves. And if there is one thing I know with certainty, it is this:
We are not here to brace our way through life.
We are here to breathe through it.
And the breath is always available.
If this resonates, I’ll be opening a space called Exhale later this month.
Not as a place to learn more information.
As a place to practise.
To experience what it feels like to include all parts of yourself in the same breath.
To discover, gently and directly, that you can stay.
I’ll share more soon.