Your Breath Is the Way Home
“Home is where the heart is.”
When you read this, you feel the truth of it more than you need to explain it.
Perhaps a person who feels like “home” comes to mind, and your body remembers what it feels like to be with that person.
Perhaps you have a memory of being in your own home, with family or friends. The sensory memory of that experience—the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations—is “home.”
I have this feeling when I’m with my immediate family. My son and my husband are my home. We can be at the top of a mountain, in the car on a road trip, or in our own backyard. Wherever we are together, I am home.
Many of my memories of the beach also bring a feeling of safety, presence, and timelessness into my body.
Your body has experienced your life. Your mind tells the story of those experiences—categorizing, prioritizing, and making meaning from them. Your mind builds structures of beliefs and action plans around the experiences of your body.
Embodiment is living in the present with the experience of your aliveness, outside of the stories. And we get there through the breath.
The breath gives us a path back to the home that is within us. It creates an opportunity to stop thinking about ourselves and instead experience ourselves.
The Breath as a Bridge
The breath has always been a bridge connecting mind, body, and spirit.
Human beings have felt and understood the power of the breath since long before we documented and measured everything.
Yoga Nidra is somewhat well known in the modern yoga world, and certainly in my practice, but it is not unique. Sacred sleep practices have existed throughout history and across cultures. Breath practices have been used for performance enhancement in sports, entertainment, and creative expression. Breath is an integral part of meditation and prayer, and has long been used in spiritual practices, including practices intended to access altered states of consciousness.
Modern somatic practices are part of this much larger human relationship with breath.
Breath changes your physiology, and physiology changes your experience.
The breath can influence respiratory chemistry, nervous system activity, arousal, sensation, and attention. When our physiological state changes, our experience changes with it.
Breath practices, or “breathwork,” are not always calming in the moment. Sometimes it’s the opposite.
Intentional breathwork can activate, mobilize, open, reveal, and disrupt familiar patterns.
This is part of the power of somatic breathwork. It gives you an opportunity to breathe your way into a new way of being—a way of being that is a return to your organic nature. A way of living that comes from the certainty that home is within you, even if it is not of you.
The Science of Changing State
The circular breathing pattern used in Somatic Breathwork changes the way we breathe, which changes our physiology. As carbon dioxide levels shift, so does the way the brain and body are receiving and interpreting information. Changes in autonomic activity, arousal, attention, and sensory processing can alter our ordinary experience of ourselves.
One of the areas researchers have explored in breathwork and altered states is hypofrontality—a temporary reduction in activity in parts of the brain involved in executive control, self-monitoring, and our usual patterns of cognitive processing. When some of that familiar top-down control becomes quieter, we may have access to sensations, emotions, images, and associations that don’t ordinarily make it into conscious awareness.
In other words, the breath can change the conditions under which we experience ourselves.
The Threshold
The process of activating, revealing, and disrupting familiar patterns is not for the faint of heart.
If you’ve ever had a sudden insight into one of your own destructive patterns and felt a heat-filled rush of shame, or an internal curling of disgust, then you know that disrupting patterns is not always a good time.
Somatic breathwork can bring us into contact with experiences that are not easily accessed through ordinary thought.
Not necessarily because we are trying to dig something up, but because when our habitual mechanisms of control and compartmentalization become quieter, there can be more space to experience what is already present.
During somatic breathwork, you may experience changes in physical sensation—heat, tingling, movement, pressure, spaciousness. Emotions may arise that have been present just below the surface, waiting to be witnessed.
These emotions might be joy, grief, rage, tenderness, or anything in between.
Some people experience images of loved ones, symbolic colors and shapes, or unexpected insights. Others experience a profound sense of spaciousness or connection.
These expanded states of consciousness can allow us to touch the reality of our own worthiness and brilliance as a felt experience, rather than simply an intellectual exercise.
This can be as intense as it is freeing.
And this is why I consider these experiences to be thresholds, not permanent changes.
Even birth is a threshold—a transition from inside to outside. It is neither instantaneous nor permanent.
Somatic breathwork can illuminate thresholds between:
thinking and feeling
control and surrender
survival patterns and new possibilities
fear and courage
the person you’ve learned to be and the person you are becoming
Seeing a threshold, and even crossing through it, is not the same thing as changing.
It is awareness.
It is possibility.
The Experience Is Not the Transformation
Profound experiences can evolve into a transformed life through integration.
Integration weaves the profound experience into the practicality of living—to the soma, the body, and the present moment.
Integration happens in the days and weeks after the journey.
If you’ve ever had the experience of your world looking and feeling different after something profound—discovering sex, giving birth, losing someone you love, making the hardest choice of your life—you know that the change began with the experience.
But the experience itself was not the change.
The experience opened something.
What happens next is where transformation begins to take root.
There is a period of integration built into our Somatic Breathwork journeys at North Star Somatic Arts, but the deeper integration often happens in the days and weeks afterward.
You can facilitate this deeper embodiment by making space for the states of non-doing that bring you into contact with your alive spirit.
Walking.
Writing.
Making art.
Spending time in nature.
Noticing changes in perception.
Resting.
Simply being.
The integration is woven into your actual life, bringing you more fully present—at home—to your own life as it is experienced in your body.
And perhaps this is where the most meaningful transformation happens.
Not in the extraordinary experience itself, but in the way that experience begins to change the ordinary moments of your life.
Preparing your morning sustenance.
Walking outside.
Talking with someone you love.
Setting a boundary.
Making a choice.
Resting.
Being here.
Being home.
The breath is the way home—not away from your life, but more deeply into it.
Home is the experience of being fully present in your life, at home with yourself and with your place in the world.
And the path there has been with you all along.
Your breath.
