When Grief Breathes: How Conscious Breathwork Helps Us Live with Loss

When Grief Breathes

Grief is not just a feeling.
It’s an imprint.
A vibration that settles somewhere between the lungs and the heart — in the pauses we take before we dare to feel again.

Most of us imagine grief as a wave of sadness that eventually fades away.
But the truth is, loss doesn’t vanish with time.
It changes shape.
It hides in the way we breathe, in how tightly we hold our shoulders, in the places our voice hesitates to reach.

How the Body Holds Loss

When something dear to us disappears - a person, a relationship, health, safety, a dream, the body doesn’t simply “move on.”
It protects us.
It holds the pain inside like a fragile glass — hoping it won’t spill.
We freeze.
We go numb.
We breathe less, trying to feel less.

And yet, every shallow inhale is a reminder of what hasn’t been released.
Every held breath is an unfinished story of love.

The nervous system registers loss as a threat, not only to our heart, but to our very survival.
That’s why grief isn’t only emotional. It’s physical.
We may feel pressure in the chest, a lump in the throat, exhaustion that no sleep can fix.
It’s the body saying: I’ve been holding too much for too long.

What Breathwork Offers

Breathwork doesn’t erase grief.
It invites it to move.
Through conscious breathing, we begin to create a bridge between what is frozen and what is still alive within us.

When we breathe with awareness, something softens.
Tears start to flow, not as breakdown, but as release.
The heart begins to beat with a little more space.
Grief stops being a heavy stone we drag through life, and becomes a quiet companion, a sign of how deeply we have loved.

There’s a moment, often subtle, when the exhale carries a sense of permission:
to feel, to remember, to live again.
In that moment, the body starts to trust life once more.

Love and Loss Can Coexist

Healing doesn’t mean “getting over it.”
It means learning to breathe with it, to make space for both the ache and the aliveness.
To allow love and loss to coexist in the same heart, without one erasing the other.

Because grief, when met with breath, becomes less about what we’ve lost and more about what remains, our capacity to love, to connect, to stay open even when it hurts.

An Invitation

If you could breathe today as if your heart could hold both love and longing,
what would change inside you?

What if, instead of pushing the pain away, you allowed your breath to cradle it,
like a tide that knows exactly how to return everything to the shore?

Because sometimes healing doesn’t mean moving forward.
It means moving with, one conscious breath at a time.

The Language of Somatic Breathwork

HOW THE BODY SPEAKS TROUGH BREATH, SENSATION, AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM

As I prepare to enter another year of Somatic Experiencing training, I find myself rereading old notes - pages filled with underlines, arrows, and small sentences that landed in the body more than in the mind.
Each time I return to them, I feel how beautifully this approach weaves with what I’ve been practicing and teaching for years: breathwork.
Different languages, one nervous system.

Because healing, real healing - is not only about releasing what hurts.
It’s about building the capacity to live well.
To feel safe enough to enjoy, to rest, to love, to create.
To be in the world with both roots and breath.

The Language Beneath Words

The body speaks long before the mind forms a sentence.
It speaks through contraction and release, trembling, warmth, breath.
It speaks in sighs, in stillness, in the subtle shifts that happen when we finally feel safe.

Both Somatic Experiencing and breathwork are, in essence, about learning to understand that language.
About learning to listen.
Because every sensation, every pattern of breath, every tension held under the skin - is the body trying to communicate something.

In SE we talk about titration, meeting just as much experience as the system can safely hold - and pendulation, moving gently between activation and rest.
These are not only therapeutic principles; they are the same rhythms that guide a conscious breathing session. We don’t force the body open.
We offer space, rhythm, and trust - and the body does the rest.

Seeing Safety

We often imagine breathwork as something done with eyes closed, turned inward.
But one of the simplest ways to regulate the nervous system begins not inside, but through the eyes, through orientation.
Up to 80% of the sensory data that helps our brain decide whether we are safe comes through vision.
The eyes are the body’s first messengers of safety - we experience that in Forest Therapy, when we immerse outselves in Nature.

That’s why I love starting breathwork sessions by inviting people to simply look around.
To soften the gaze, to notice light and shadow, color and distance.
To let the eyes find the horizon.
When we widen our field of vision, the vagus nerve softens, the breath deepens, the system remembers: I am safe. I can stay.

Touch as Remembering

Even online, touch can be a powerful bridge back to the body.
Placing a hand on the chest, feeling the warmth and weight of your own palm, pressing the soles of your feet into the floor, these are small gestures of regulation.

Touch tells the nervous system: I exist. I have boundaries. I’m here now.
It’s not just a technique; it’s a form of listening.

In person, touch can be co-regulating - the meeting of two systems in safety.
But even self-touch, when guided with awareness, becomes a dialogue with the body’s intelligence.

The Power of Sound

Then there’s sound. The forgotten language of the body.
A sigh, a hum, a vibration that travels through bone and tissue.
When we hum or tone, the vibration gently stimulates the vagus nerve, sending the message of safety from the body upward to the brain.
One of my favorite SE tools is the sound “Wooooooo.”
A long, deep exhalation that vibrates through the diaphragm and the heart.
It’s a sound that doesn’t need to mean anything. It just brings us home.

The Breath as a Bridge

Our breathing patterns change with our emotional states.
Shallow breathing often mirrors protection.
A held breath can mirror fear.
And yet, when the breath deepens, the whole system reorganizes.

Breathwork teaches us that breath is both a reflection and a remedy.
It shows us what is happening, and it helps us move through it.
When we breathe consciously, slowly, and with presence, we invite the diaphragm- and the heart it’s attached to, to move freely again.
The heart literally gains space.
The body begins to trust expansion again.

The Pathways of Regulation

Over time, I began to see how all of my work sourcers - SE, breathwork, forest therapy - meet in six simple doorways through which the body returns to balance:

Seeing : widening the gaze, orienting to the world, letting the eyes rest in openness.
Touch: feeling the body’s edges, temperature, and contact; remembering boundaries and belonging.
Voice: letting sound and vibration soften the inner tension; expressing what the body holds.
Breath: restoring rhythm, flow, and presence; allowing life to move through.
Orientation:engaging the senses to come back to the moment; noticing what’s around you.
Grounding: reconnecting to gravity and Earth; feeling weight, roots, and stability.

Each of these is a conversation between the body and the world.
Together they create a language of safety, one we can all learn to speak.

The Forest as Teacher

From forest therapy I learned that regulation often begins outside of us.
Through smell, texture, sound, and light, the body starts remembering that it belongs to something larger.
Nature regulates us without trying.
The rustling of leaves, the scent of rain, the feeling of soil under bare feet - they all speak directly to the nervous system.
When we breathe with the forest, something ancient inside us exhales too.

Grounding: The Return Home

To ground is not to become still - it’s to remember where life begins.
It’s to feel the earth’s pulse beneath the soles of your feet.
It’s to release what is too much, and to draw in what sustains you.
I often use the image of breathing through the roots - each exhale releasing tension into the ground, each inhale drawing in stability, nourishment, and life.
Grounding is the final note in the symphony of regulation.
It is the body saying: I am connected. I am home.

The Body Already Knows

In Somatic Experiencing we say:“The body always moves toward healing, if given the right conditions.”
Those conditions are simple: presence, curiosity, rhythm, and time.
Beathwork offers them all.
Every sigh, tremor, or tear is not a breakdown - it’s the body reorganizing itself toward life.
We don’t need to fix what’s broken; we need to listen to what’s speaking.
Because the body doesn’t need us to teach it how to heal - it only needs us to stop interrupting its wisdom.

Somatic Breathwork is not a technique. It’s a relationship.
Between breath and body.
Between science and soul.
Between what we can feel and what we can’t yet name.

This practice keeps teaching me that healing is not a performance, but a remembering.
Each conscious breath is an invitation to come back -to the body, to the moment, to the earth beneath your feet.
And if you listen closely enough, you’ll notice that the body has been whispering its truth all along.