From Anxiety to Awareness: My Breathwork Journey Through Motherhood

My biggest fear in life was having a baby, and I am now a mother of two amazing kids, 6 and 7. I wanted kids but was so scared. I knew in the moment I needed a resource to help me get through it. I didn’t know about breathwork back then, but I heard of a form of meditation helping during pregnancy. It helped me so much with my nervous system, but I was still stressed, out of breath, and later dealt with postpartum anxiety. I just thought it was all normal, so I went with it, only to find out later that it is common, not normal.

I found out I was pregnant a few weeks before my youngest was turning one. Then a few weeks later, I had a bleed that was pretty common and not super dangerous as long as I took some precautions. My anxiety skyrocketed due to having had a miscarriage before my daughter. I felt like I didn’t have time this time around to lay down and do these 30–60-minute recordings. The anxiety and mouth breathing got worse, and I started to become more reactive to my daughter. I just wanted to lay down and not play or do anything. After my son was born, looking back, my nervous system was wrecked! I had more intense postpartum anxiety and depression. I was only surviving, not living.

I tried a few different things, and nothing was helping. My husband at the time was traveling for weeks at a time and a couple of times a month. It was not a good time in my life. I found a few strategies that were kind of helping, but they were masking the deeper root cause. I first found breathwork a year later. It was more energetic breathwork, similar to meditation but more active, that really helped my nervous system and energy, getting me back to where I was happy and felt like my “normal” self.

This year, I found functional breathwork. Woah! This changed something in me foundationally. All of my breathwork up until then had been “in-the-moment” breathing, taking care of whatever stressful situation was happening or deep trauma healing to move trapped energy from childhood and later years. This was great and so helpful, but it was only focusing on the breath to move energy and help my nervous system during those 30–60-minute periods of time. Yes, I do believe those practices affected my day-to-day breathing patterns since I wasn’t in fight or flight every moment of my life, but functional breathing and learning how we breathe and how this supports us was a game changer.

We breathe over 20,000 times a day, and yes, we don’t want to focus on every breath, but we can start to become aware and support our breath and nervous system to make new patterns of more optimal breathing habits become conscious and then unconscious. When my mentor was chatting about this, a light bulb lit. The next week, he brought up pregnancy and postpartum and all the changes that happen, and no one talks about the changes to the breath. If you don’t know or become aware, they can heighten anxiety and push your nervous system into fight or flight. I felt so seen, and as he was describing what could happen if we don’t support our breath, it was like he was describing my experience.

With this, we now know that unless we change our patterns, the body will work in the most efficient way in the moment and not the most optimal way for long-term health. So, with my heightened stress and compounded responsibilities after my second child, combined with my poor breathing habits, I am now continuing to learn—after 9 months, and I would argue 18 months, or even all of my life—why I was so reactive and could not drop out of fight or flight and stress mode. My mind was never quiet; I felt like I had so much to worry about and take care of all the time. After years of trying to fix, change, and uncover, I learned it is about supporting and understanding, getting curious about the body and breath, and starting to build a relationship to support us in all moments of life.

This is why I teamed up with Leanne to bring the Breath, Body, Baby program to you. While I believe in divine timing and know I was meant for this journey, I also believe it served a purpose to now help others and bring together the last 3–4 years of lived experience, deep learning, and training to support you through the same. To learn more and sign up for our Beta round click here.