Breathwork + Guided Meditation
There’s something about the breath that feels almost too simple… and yet, it’s everything.
It’s the first thing we do when we arrive here, and the last thing we do when we leave. And somewhere in between, we forget it’s even there, regulating us, acting as a guide to bring us back home to ourselves.
Breath, to me, hasn’t always felt like magic.
I’m probably not supposed to say that as a Trauma-Informed Breathwork Facilitator, but I prefer honesty and truth over purple-washed facts, gift-wrapped toxic positivity, and stale affirmations.
I breathed shallowly as a child due to many rounds of bronchitis in which breathing deep caused physical pain. As a child I had to walk on eggshells in my family home and at Catholic school for being ✨too much ✨ and the first thing children do when they’re trying to keep themselves small or be invisible to avoid getting in trouble is to hold their breath. As I got older I smoked cigarettes for many years; essentially while I was growing up I had no conscious connection to my breath.
There were, however, many bright spots over the years of conscious breathing
When I was in high school I swam competitively and my strokes were connected to my breathing
After graduating college I decided to start running and learned more about my breath
I practiced Tai Chi in college and its a moving meditation connected to shifting energy with breath
Tattoos are painful and the only way to move through the pain is to control the breath
Massages are my favorite form of prevention and deep tissue strong pressure moves best when breathing deeply
I have always loved to hike, and during hikes, I am always connected to breath
I have been a yogi since I was 20 and have always connected breath to movement
Fast forward to my early sound healing and energy session days, I was always connected to my breath as that is the only way to receive information from your client and then ground it out of your body - by breathing deeply and exhaling out your tailbone or soles of the feet - I call this breathing like a dragon because of the ferocity of the breath. When you hold space for people moving through deeply difficult emotions one of the things that is most helpful is to regulate your own breathing. We literally are tuning forks and respond to our environment - if someone is moving through extreme discoherence, the best thing you can do is offer powerful coherence by breathing and centering yourself.
One fateful night I was invited to collaborate on a Breathwork + Meditation + Sound Healing Session. I was invited to participate in the whole event and close the ceremony with a Crystal Bowl Journey. So I blindly attended my first ever Breathwork Session…
I am a deeply curious person by nature and love learning new things, but to be honest, when I entered this evening, my ego came too, as I had done so much energy and sound work for literally over a decade I thought ‘what could this possibly teach me,’ and boy I was in for a ride 🎡😂
The practitioner lead us through Dirga Pranayama (3 part breath) and then as the music increased in speed, so did our breath - and before I knew it my arms and legs had tetany and were curling in toward my torso. I was seeing a psychedelic kaleidoscope of color that started in my third eye and then burst forth surrounding my entire body and biofield, and then the colors filled up the environment around me, then the whole shala, and beyond.
I was tripping balls.
People started to cry which gave me permission to cry. I howled while some growled and then we all began to laugh - big belly, juicy laughs. Laughs like you haven’t laughed since childhood when you were carefree and didn’t understand war or taxes.
It was fucking delicious.
With tears pouring down all of our faces, an hour went by without us even realizing or understanding ✨time ✨ because we were so deep in our experience the only thing that existed was our experience.
That’s when I decided to study and become a Breathwork Facilitator
Breathwork deeply humbled me. It was a reminder that we can always find new depths to ourselves, learn new things, and access long-forgotten parts of ourselves.
The simplicity of the breath spoke to me as I am a person who appreciates efficiency; I carry my tuning forks around the world and they fit in my backpack.
The breath barely takes up any space at all, and yet it gives us permission to take up all the space we need.
When I look back I see that this isn’t necessarily the ~ modality I chose ~ it’s one that sat quietly and patiently in the background, staring at me and waiting for me to return the glance. It wove itself into my being before I knew it was happening - through swimming, hiking, yoga, meditation, sound healing sessions, and sitting with people in their most raw, cracked open, vulnerable moments.
For a long time, I had the understanding that the breath was a doorway to connect the mind / body, the physical / spiritual. My conscious breath is now an anchor that connects me to my inner strength and the present moment, it’s a bridge between my body and mind, and it’s a simple power move to bring chaos into clarity.
Breathwork + Guided Meditation
I offer Breathwork + Guided Meditation as they are so closely related (second cousins at the most); they support the cumulative understanding of each other. We can use the breath to help us deepen our meditation and through deepening our meditation we become more acquainted with the power of our breath.
Your breath provides a portal to your nervous system, your emotions and your truth. It helps you uncover the exact emotions, triggers, and feelings that you can use as trailheads to help you meditate.
We use breath as an entry point and through listening and allowing, we create space for whatever wants to shift. There is no ‘right way or wrong way’ - there is only the willingness to meet yourself. Breathwork + Guided Meditation can feel soft and subtle, or it can feel like the deepest unclenching you’ve ever experienced. It’s just about finding what is there, witnessing it, and constantly coming back to yourself and the present moment - which where all the magic happens.
I completed a formal Trauma-Aware Breathwork Certification in 2025, which gave an official stamp on an official paper for what I had already been living and practicing for years - I have always found real learning comes from being surrounded by it and living it.
This is your ✨official invitation ✨
Your breath is always there, waiting to meet you exactly where you are. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, disconnected, curious, cracked open, or somewhere in between, this is your invitation to slow down, to feel and remember.
I can’t wait to guide you back to your breath.
Let’s breathe together. Book a session here.
xoxo
An Honest Update Winter 2025
Hi dear friends,
It’s been awhile since my last newsletter.
The truth is that the past few months have been unexpectedly difficult for me… and to be honest … for most of the people i have spoken too about about the start of 2026. Regardless of how they would describe themselves as being ‘tuned-in,’ sensitive, or an empath, or not spiritual at all - random sicknesses, depression, surprise allergies, unexpected hospital visits, even deaths have been plaguing so many that i know (and me too!)
This heaviness, this density, that we have been trudging through… we have noticed the effects of this feeling deep in our bones and hearts and minds; it feels dark and sticky. It’s in our thoughts before bed, sometimes leaking into our dreams; we have all felt the prickle on the back of our neck of our fears and insecurities in the background creeping to the foreground.
💕Ahhh life. What a roller coaster. A river. A spiral.
Life can move us through seasons that ask more of us than we expected; like the strong rapids of a large river, life can speed up suddenly, it can pull us under, it challenges us. It makes us suffer to grow and evolve so that we are reminded to turn inwards to find answers to our questions, our own inner strength and resilience; and guidance through patience, humility, and a deeper kind of listening. Life does this again and again and again. Remember, the person who got in the river is never the same as the person who gets out.
What we can trust and know is that life is a spiral, it goes around and around and around and sometimes similar things happen to us that have happened before - but now we have the ✨currency and the energy✨ of Wisdom Through Experience, which we can work with.
Suffering is necessary because it is the fertile soil that compassion is able to sprout from (no mud, no lotus). The kindest people i know are the ones who have suffered and grown through what they’ve gone through, they’ve catalyzed their pain into goodness for others. They’ve become the alchemist.
I try to alchemize whatever is ✨up and alive✨ in my life as my meditation object, my focus, my drishti. Lately my meditations have been about being okay with not being okay, allowing a calmness with the confusion, not knowing the next step, feeling a bit lost and perhaps not having control. In communion with my shallow breaths and fast heart rate i have been able to listen deeper to what my body is asking for: REST.
Because of my highly sensitive and intuitive nature i sometimes feel like a canary in a coal mine (haha, but for real☺️) - it seems whatever the mood of the collective or temperature of the environment that we’re in - thats what is LOUD in my heart, mind and soul.
So, I have been letting go of control - daily and literally outloud as a practice (ex: something that i wanted to work out doesn’t and i say out loud “and that’s okay.” or “if not this than something better.”) I have been allowing uncertainty and doubt to wash all over me and then sitting with the fear that it brings up viscerally in my body and knowing that how I’m feeling is okay - it’s just the season I’m in. Its the season we’re all in.
It’s totally normal and beautifully human to be confused right now.
🪷 During the difficult winter moments, I found myself returning again and again to a simple prayer I’ve carried for years and I wanted to share it:
May I be supported.
May I be protected.
May I be healed.
May I be guided.
Over time I have realized that this prayer isn’t just something I ask for in my own life, its also my forever intention; to create spaces of support, protection, healing, and guidance through my magical offerings and sacred presence.
Together, with love and understanding, slowly, and through softening, through gathering, through sharing stories, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and surrendering into the current weather of life; all of this presents the opportunity for the universe to gift you wings.
May you be supported
May you be protected
May you be healed
May you be guided
And just like that - the seasons shift - and winter ends, as it does ever year.
Xoxo
Jess
Discovering Ourselves at Rock Bottom
Shamans know Rock Bottom is a deeply transformative place.
As we go through life, occasionally we find ourselves laid out on the floor of Rock Bottom; this is a natural part of living, growing and evolving. Rock Bottom happens eventually or suddenly, quietly or loudly, it affects all of us without bias, and can happen when we lose a job, or partner, or something else we considered ‘stable’ or ‘long lasting.’ We find ourselves here due to emotional upheaval and chaos, mental stress, health issues, spiritual confusion, a loss of a loved one, and many other reasons. Rock Bottom happens, shit happens but most importantly, Shift Happens.
I’ve learned to appreciate Rock Bottom because of the deeply transformative healing that can occur here. Rock bottom is a sacred initiation that cracks us open and allows us to shed old identities to reveal the light of our true selves.
Think about it for a second.
When you are falling you feel like you are failing and therefore you are flailing. There is nothing to hold on to, no one to grasp, there is no life line to hold. You can’t learn anything while you fall - except for how to fall. Sometimes all you can do is exist moment to moment. You are alone, no one can save you, survival is your only focus, your breath is your only friend. Things are breaking around and inside of you - your heart, your illusions, your patterns, your stories, your deeply engrained belief systems, and perhaps your sense of self and who you thought you were.
Perhaps around this time, we reach for a familiar coping skill and find ourselves confused because for some reason it (alcohol, drugs food, etc) doesn’t feel cozy or ‘good’ anymore… this is because as we fall we begin to learn, and a truth a lot of us discover here is that our old coping skill (that used to keep us safe and ‘protected’) is now the one thing responsible for us being kept us separate from the whole. Coping skills are things we learned to help us survive, but as we evolve we end up out-growing coping skills. It can be so scary when the things we used to reach for comfort are no longer comfortable. We are breaking the shell of our illusion.
We are rapidly unlearning the patterns and beliefs that were illusions of safety. Perhaps we begin to see through the illusions of the people around us; are your friends really your friends? A lot of us notice that as we get healthier and set boundaries we lose people around us that benefited from us having no boundaries. Perhaps we begin to see through the lies we told ourselves. Grasping for perfection or self righteousness in ourselves or others are destroyed when those hopes and expectations turn to ash and we realize that just like others, we are flawed. (The good news is that this is okay! More on that later…)
Even though Rock Bottom sucks, it might feel somewhat familiar - we’ve been here before. It’s a scary place because things feel so broken, but in the brokenness there is a deep vulnerability and therefore, the best medicine for us: healing potential.
Maybe we went through something again that we already experienced and we are so frustrated with ourselves, beating ourselves up for making the same mistake again - but maybe we didn’t learn the lesson well enough the first time, so the universe gave us another chance. Or maybe we did learn the lesson, but got too comfortable and forgot, and the universe challenged us with the same problem to see if our self awareness shifted. We can make the same choice with more awareness and more experience. Or maybe the universe is challenging us to be brave and choose something harder this time: perhaps choosing ourselves over another and risking loss and the unknown rather than staying in the familiar.
Here, the only thing we can do is allow ourselves to fall, and break, and be sad, and feel all the emotions that we are feeling. We writhe in uncomfortability, and yell, and curse the universe, How dare you! Why is this happening? What did I do to deserve this? All I want is to be happy! Fuck! Here we find a pregnant place of potential where we face the pain head on: we emote, we express, we cry, we journal, we write, we sit with the hurt, betrayal, and confusion. We sit with the pain and the different versions of ourselves (inner child etc) and we learn a valuable lesson: the way not around the pain, it is through.
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.
―Alain de Botton
Once we find ourselves here at Rock Bottom, once we have sat with our pain, accepted it and therefore accepted ourselves completely, faults and all, we begin to flow with it and through it, and eventually we begin to dance with it.
Here, true healing can begin because there is such weighted stillness, there is deafening silence, there is alone-ness, and there is spaciousness to heal, because there is such emptiness. This is bittersweet and it is hopeful: when something is empty is has the capacity to be filled.
For the first time, we take a big deep breath and face the things that we’ve been avoiding, and we face them alone. No friend, lover, parent or peer can help you here. We are here alone with all our patterns, all our wounds and insecurities. Here is the magical space we can begin to fill up our emptiness with whatever we want. Here we can start to rebuild ourselves, with a solid foundation that we can only get from being at Rock Bottom. Also, if you have noticed my use of the word ‘we’ rather than ‘you,’ it is very purposeful. Even though we are alone in this process, we all go through this at different times, phases and stages of our lives, and therefore, we are united in this void, and I think there is something gorgeous about this grief.
At Rock Bottom, the only one who can pick you up is yourself. You can call on the wisdom of your Older Self, or your trust in the universe (which is also you.) And so we begin again, a fresh start, a leg to stand on, we begin again. We start listening to podcasts, reading books, writing, journaling, creating, seeing joy in the little things - flowers in the cracks of sidewalks, the way the moon looks, the rays of the sun through the clouds, the laughter of a friend. We start to heal in the tiny moments that sew our heart back together. We start to heal by connecting to the innate wisdom that is us, that is our breath, that is our inner knowing that our current situation is not our final destination. We begin to realize that there is a silver cord throughout our life connecting us to synchronicity; and this perhaps this chaotic upheaval that we suffered through was (maybe, violently) redirecting us to a different path. We look back on all our prior Rock Bottoms and see how they guided us to be different, to be better, to be stronger, more resilient, more kind, more loving, more understanding, and most importantly more compassionate toward ourselves and others.
When we are in pain we are more vulnerable, open, and connected to everyone else. When we are in pain we can sit with other’s pain wholly, with empathy, and a deep understanding. We realize that we heal, not to handle the trauma, but to be able to hold the future joy; the joy that is imminent and just around the corner. We only have to allow ourselves to break, and fall, and dissolve; and gently, with patience and tenderness, pick ourselves up and eventually reach back out and engage in life: to chose to begin again, no matter how much it hurts.
I realized a long time ago that every time my heart breaks, it breaks open to hold more love, to hold more vulnerability, more compassion, and therefore to be able to hold more of me.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
In the past, I’ve held on to things for a while, and to quote someone from TikTok, those things that I held onto have claw marks on them from how much I loved them; but I, as we all do, inevitably learn to let go. Life isn’t about avoiding pain, it’s about jumping in and joining the dance. It’s about saying yes to the things that feel good regardless of the possible outcome. It’s about living fully with no regrets.
Lately, when I have suffered through breakups I truly feel into that loss, wholly and sacredly. I sit with myself at Rock Bottom and feel everything and when I feel ready, I begin again. As I get older I’ve come to realize that in relationships, I give my all, and I’m proud of myself for that. No matter the outcome, I’m able to walk away knowing that I gave such big love, and they most likely needed that.
When death finds you, may it find you alive.
~ African Proverb
So be patient with yourself as you win and as you fail. Be compassionate to yourself, your emotions, your mind, and your body. Forgive yourself for not understanding and forgive others for not understanding. Take care of your body, hydrate and don’t underestimate the power of a salt bath or a really good cry. Don’t forget to pause, take a moment to yourself, and connect with your breath. Most of all be gentle with yourself, you are learning, and you are only getting better, flaws and all.
Xoxo
Jess
Note:
This blog is brought to you by the year 2024, it was not my favorite.
I lost several friends, most notably one of my best friends, Tiffany Barsotti. I also left a relationship, sadly but intentionally, with someone who I thought was my forever.
