Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
How one breath during my daughter’s birth taught me I could regulate my way out of survival mode — and become the conscious creator of my life
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I discovered hypnobirthing while I was pregnant with my daughter, and during labor I learned the thing my whole work is now built around: my breath could dictate my physical experience of pain and safety.
It was incredibly intense. It was also the most beautiful thing I had ever felt, because I understood, in my body, how strong the breath actually is.
For years before that, I thought I was connected to my body. I was running 100 kilometers a week. I thought fit meant in tune. But I was not breathing. I was using movement. The body was a thing I drove, not a thing I lived in. Labor was the first time I stopped performing and started being.
And then, for almost a year, I put what I had learned back on the shelf.
Survival looks like functioning
This is the thing nobody tells you about survival mode: it may look fine from the outside. You show up. You function. You keep the child alive, the bills paid, the face steady. Nobody around you can tell that your nervous system has been running at threshold so long it forgot there was another setting.
I was a single mother. My daughter was born during COVID. Leaving the relationship I had been in came with consequences. Interestingly, what the body does when there is no way to come down: it stays in the on position. Heart up. Breath shallow. Jaw set. You think you are choosing it. You are not. The body is running on old decisions, on patterns set long before you had any say.
Awareness alone does not resolve that. You cannot think your way out of what is stored in the nervous system. You reach it at the bodily level, or you do not reach it at all.
So I went back to what I had felt during labor. Breathwork. What I found did not just change how I felt. It changed who I was becoming.
Why is the breath the lever
Here is what I wish someone had told me years earlier:
The breath is the only function in the body that is both automatic and consciously controllable. That makes it one of the only direct lines you have to the part of you that decides whether you are safe.
Most of us never use it that way. We just breathe. We let the body run on default. When you start working with the breath deliberately, you interrupt that default. You send the body a different signal. And the body, slowly, then undeniably, responds.
That is when I understood the line that became the foundation of everything I now do:
You are the creator of your life.
I stopped reacting and started choosing. I became, for the first time, the conscious creator of my own life. Not because the hard things vanished. Because I stopped letting them be the ones in charge.
What this looks like in practice
Breathwork operates on layers. There is the deep work: long, intense sessions where the body releases what it has been holding for years. That work is sacred. It is necessary. It is not something you do every day.
Then there is the regulation work: the daily practice of teaching your nervous system how to shift states on command. That is what I built THE BREATHWORK MASTERCLASS around. Three techniques:
Energizing for focus. A workout, a meeting, a moment that needs your full brain. Not hype. Clarity.
Balancing for when you are off but not in crisis. Brings you back to center.
Relaxing for when you want to come down enough to actually sleep. Not lie there replaying the day. Sleep.
The program is not about learning techniques. It is about implementing the power of knowing how to breathe so that you can stay regulated, in self-control, and calm regardless of what is happening around you.
To the mothers
If you are a mother reading this, especially if you are doing it alone, or carrying more than anyone around you can see, here is what I want you to know.
You are a priority too!
Many of us, myself included, run with everyone else in mind but ourselves. Carving out time, making sure you are a member of the whole, is not selfish. It is the precondition for everything you are trying to do for the people you love.
A baby does not sleep through the night. So what are you doing in those hours? Tired. Frustrated. Snapping at people you love because your nervous system is maxed out and nobody ever taught you how to regulate it.
Checking in with the breath, using it deliberately to bring yourself back, is not a luxury. It is a necessity. And it does not require an hour of practice or a quiet room. It requires that you know what you are doing, and that you choose to do it.
You get to decide what happens next
You are not the product of what came before. You are the one who decides what you do with it. Whether the hard things become what defines you, or what you grow past. Whether survival mode becomes your permanent setting, or a state you learn to leave on purpose. Whether the patterns that once kept you safe stay running long after they have stopped serving you, or whether you learn, breath by breath, how to rewrite them.
The breath you have been holding, you are allowed to let it go. Because you are the one who decides what comes next.
You may also enjoy reading Brain Reset: Gentle Breathwork to Calm Your Nervous System and Mind by Carter Miles.
