On Breath & Nervous System Recalibration

How the power of the breath can literally guide you through life-threatening situations

Click on these words or below if you prefer to listen to me talk to you :)

The power of our breath is an untapped resource that’s literally miraculous. In two week’s time, I flipped a situation that lies at the heart of many of our deepest fears: encountering an angry person with a gun in a public space…with the simple yet profound power of BREATH.

I’ll explain how, but I have to first give thanks and honoring to the Soma+IQ (pronounced “Somatic”) Team who led me and 60 beautiful humans through a Trauma-Informed Breathwork Practitioner Training here in Austin this past weekend. (Click these words if you want to learn more)

Because I had these back-to-back experiences, I literally saw the direct impact of this training in my everyday life and I can honestly say I’d probably be curled up in a ball on the sofa right now had I not invested in this training.

Here’s the story and what I discovered about Nervous System Regulation and how to be able to respond rather than react within a highly-charged traumatic situation.

Some background: I’ve long had dreams of being in a public space with an angry person who breaks out in a moment of rage with a gun. The fear and the dreams have literally turned me around from walking into shopping malls at certain moments of my life. I wake up from the dreams in a cold sweat, often trembling or paralyzed in my bed. (If you can relate, please feel free to reach to me directly). This trauma training, I didn’t know…was helping me to clear this pattern that’s been held in my dreamstate.

Two weeks ago, I’m walking through the local Sprouts grocery store here in Texas and suddenly, an enormous contraction squeezes my entire ribcage. My feet freeze as though an invisible wall of ice had just appeared directly in front of me. My breath stops short in my lungs. It’s as though everything in the scene is completely on standstill, I can hear nothing but the sound of my heartbeat drumming rapidly inside my chest. On the other side of the cheese island about six feet in front of me, a man has a wild look in his eyes. His body is the only thing moving in my entire field of vision. One hand is in the pocket of his sweats and I can see the outline of the gun he’s waving around.

I try to turn myself without making eye contact with him; my body now in full panic, my heart frostbitten, my mind is scanning for the closest exit. I have to keep him in my peripheral vision, I think, but I also have to get out of here, fast. As my head turns towards the sliding glass doors, I see a torso in a rigid black bulletproof vest directly in front of me, a hand on an exposed gun, and I register the security guard who’s headed towards the cheese island.

I lose all memory until my feet pass through the door and I finally inhale. I drop the grocery basket and try to extend my stiff arms. My heart starts to thump loudly as I suddenly feel a wave of guilt pass over me for all the people still inside the store, but all I can do is walk dizzily to fall into the front seat of my car.

As you might imagine, the rest of the day was a wash. Many thoughts racing in circles around my mind…thoughts about what I wished I could’ve done differently, thoughts about whether I feel safe here, thoughts about the dream coming true. Premonition once again feels dangerous inside of me.

In case you haven’t taken a breath as you read this, please pause a moment and take a few deep breaths along with me. Let your arms or head shake if you need to. Notice what sensations you get in your nervous system when you read about this-how does your system alert you to danger? Can you observe without taking on my story?…and let us continue, because I promise you a miracle.
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Yesterday was my second full day after the somatic breathwork training I attended…and it was the first day I had the chance to see how truly life-changing this work is. Why I chose to go to Home Depot at the exact moment I did, I don’t know, but perhaps it was so I could have this entirely new experience practicing the skills that are now hard-wired into my system.

I’m standing in the paint department facing a wall of color, feeling expansive and excited about what shade of emerald green I’m going to paint the meditation and breathwork room in my home…when I feel my stomach clench and another wall of ice forming, this time behind me. My hands freeze on the paint chips, but I’m able to notice the frigid sensation traveling at lightning speed up my arms towards my heart before it gets there and I open my mouth and take a giant breath in. As I exhale, I feel my pecs soften and a wave of light pour down from above, creating something like a force field in a sphere on all sides of me.

That’s when I hear the man’s rage-full words blasting out about 20 feet behind me. “I have a gun and I’m not afraid to use it,” he spits out towards people I know are standing behind the paint counter between me and where he is. I keep breathing and feel my feet turning before my mind knows what’s happening. I walk towards the counter, the man now 10 feet away. My gaze softens as I tell myself internally that I’m safe. I’m able to feel that this man is rage-full, but also that he’s discharging, he’s bluffing, and he’s using words to let out what he’s unwilling to feel. I can perceive all of this without being lost in my own reaction because of the Soma+IQ Training experience I’d been through.

I clear my throat and it breaks all the attention on the man. Another man, who’s a clerk in his twenties with long dark hair and an orange Home Depot apron rotates himself to face me. “I’d love some samples,” I hear myself saying as I continue to take long breaths. The angry man is still shouting, now at two female employees that stand facing him. The young clerk in front of me hooks his thumbs in his apron as his fingers clench and his eyes scan back and forth quickly.

“Look at me,” I say quietly. He looks up from the counter and I can see the fear, anger, protection…that fight mechanism in him. It’s like a storm of emotions rolling through his deep brown eyes. “Breathe,” I say, making my breath longer, slower, deeper, fuller.

I can feel the adrenaline pumping through my system as we take several breaths together, and I watch as his eyes turn bright red, fill with tears, every exhale he takes filled with fire as his arms begin to shake. “It’s okay to feel,” I say. The whisper falls out of my mouth and I stand in awe, as this was the exact cue spoken to us several times throughout the weekend.

The wave of rage begins to pass and the angry man on the other side begins to calm. I continue holding the gaze of the clerk in front of me and breathe until he stops shaking. “Do you need to take a walk around the store?” I asked him. He nods and slowly walks past me. I find myself meeting the eyes of the angry man and take a deep breath, watching his shoulders fall in the most nuanced way. My heart feels strong. My breath feels clear. I feel centered.

Five minutes later, the clerk returns to the counter. The rage-full man has disappeared and I’m still standing there, breathing and rocking slowly back and forth, letting the energy discharge through my own system. “Thank you,” the clerk says. “I don’t know what you just did, but it was an enormous blessing…for all of us.” I smile slowly as he hands me my samples and bow my head.

So, how did that happen? How did that script flip? I’m not going to claim that every scenario might go that way, but I can say for certain that my ability to navigate that experience in an entirely new way was due to the meta-skills brought to my awareness in the trauma-informed training.

The answer lies in the fact that we didn’t just receive these skills from an intellectual perspective, but that after we were given the information, we were led through embodiment practices that gave us real-life experiential discovery.

I believe that’s where the hard-wiring takes place.

So I mentioned discharging—that for me was one of the biggest aha’s during the entire weekend…that each of us as human beings-our machinery and mechanics require that we discharge when we go through an emotional or traumatic experience. The energy either gets locked within our cells, tissues and fascia, or we let it discharge. The more we suppress it, the more it gets pressurized within us-like champagne.

When we get to go through breathwork, we experience the discharge of that energy, and when we witness it, we get to see others letting go of the places that hold that trauma. We can develop our own capacity to be with and allow those emotional discharges without it setting off alarm bells within our own nervous system. This practice alone gave me the capacity to be with it in a real life scenario without absolutely freaking out or turning into frozen bone.

I got to practice being in the presence of anger, recalibrating my own nervous system, clearing out my own past trauma of going into freeze and flight when in the face of someone else’s rage, re-patterning my ability to respond rather than react.

The power of the breath is unparalleled when it comes to nervous system regulation. I’ve known that for years now, thanks to the incredible breathwork experiences I’ve had with facilitators like Christabel Zamor and Robert Starbuck. Those experiences have taught me to more fully expand my breath’s capacity to hold me through clearing my own trauma, and the Soma+IQ training then added an entirely new level of innerstanding that united my comprehension with my embodied practice. It expanded my capacity to be present with others in heightened situations while grounding my own breath practices more fully into each and every moment.

If you’re desiring to learn more about facilitating breathwork, learning about the nervous system or meeting an incredible group of humans doing great work in this world, I cannot recommend this training more highly.

If you’d like to work on expanding your own nervous system regulation one-on-one with me, using tools like breathwork and archetypal embodiment, please reach out. This is a great passion of mine and something I’m excited to now be focused on full-time.

If you’re curious about exploring the power of the breath to create your reality, here’s a link to sign up for my upcoming 5-week virtual breathwork series in January:

https://www.templeoftheswan.com/elemental-breath-series

(If you’re a Soma+IQ practitioner and you want to come receive breath yourself, please email me at greyson@greysonelizabeth.com and I’ll send you a code to join me for free).

And here are a few of the resource links written out since I know it’s kind of challenging to see what’s a live link in Substack at this point….

Soma+IQ Breathwork Facilitation Training: (save 10% with this link)
https://www.somaticbreathwork.com/somatiqaffiliate

Robert Starbuck: Breathwork 1:1’s and Savannah, GA:

https://robertstarbuck.com/bio

Christabel Zamor: Breath of Bliss Training:

https://www.breathbliss.com/a/2148004628/dh2cr3si

Christabel’s Incredible Breathwork Recordings are something I use every week:

https://www.breathbliss.com/audios