What I Help With

Anxiety often gets treated as a thinking problem — a mind that won't stop generating worst-case scenarios. But underneath the racing thoughts is usually a body holding onto stuck energy: an incomplete stress response that never got to finish. That unresolved charge creates a persistent felt sense that something is wrong, even when nothing in front of you actually is. The mind picks up on that signal and goes to work trying to fix it — reaching for outward solutions, replaying conversations, planning for problems that haven't happened. All useful in small doses, but none of it touches the actual source. The dissatisfaction stays, because what's driving it was never really about the thought.

Breathwork works with the body directly instead of trying to out-think the anxiety. As stuck energy is allowed to move and complete what it started, the nervous system gets the signal it's been waiting for — that the threat has passed and it's safe to stand down. That's not calm imposed from the outside; it's calm that settles because the underlying charge is gone. Session by session, the baseline shifts, and the mind has less to chase.

Insomnia is frequently the same stuck energy showing up at night. It keeps the body in a state of high alert, braced for something that isn't actually there — and a nervous system on alert doesn't know how to power down into real rest. You can be exhausted and still wired, a familiar and maddening combination for anyone who's dealt with this for a while.

As that stuck energy releases, the body slowly regains the ability to drop into deep, uninterrupted rest. I know this one personally — I struggled with insomnia for decades, starting as a teenager. It wasn't a switch that flipped overnight. But as I kept releasing energy through breathwork and meditation practice, I found I could sleep a little more, and then a little more, until I was sleeping through the night regularly for the first time in years.

A lot of chronic pain isn't damage — it's holding. Movement impulses and emotional expressions that got stopped somewhere along the way don't just disappear; they stay lodged in the body as stuck energy. Over time, that shows up physically as myofascia tightening around certain areas, constraining movement and pulling on other parts of the body that then tighten to compensate. This is often described as armoring — protective tension that made sense once but has outlived its purpose.

When we let those interrupted movements finish, and give the emotions underneath them room to be expressed, the armor holding that tension can finally soften — and the pain that came with it often dissolves on its own, without needing to be forced or fixed directly. I had daily back pain through my twenties. Not long after I began a meditation and breathwork practice, it stopped, and it hasn't come back.

Medical trauma tends to happen at moments of total vulnerability — pain, procedures, sometimes as a child with no say in what's happening and no way to stop it. The body registers more than the physical event itself; it registers the powerlessness of it, the overwhelm with nowhere to go. That combination is exactly what gets stored as stuck energy. Long after the procedure is over, the body can keep guarding that area, sometimes numbing it out entirely, as if still bracing against another invasion.

Awareness, breath, and touch together can bring feeling back into places the body learned to go numb for protection. When sensation returns, the memory underneath it often surfaces too — and this time, there's room to actually move through it and complete what got frozen in place. What was locked down as protection can finally soften once it's safe to feel again.

Some of my most significant releases have come from exactly this. In my first online breathwork session, breathing and offering touch to my ears, I realized that I had never been able to feel them even as I felt the rest of my body so clearly. As I kept breathing, a memory surfaced: as a young kid, getting ear infections and having a doctor tilt my head and pour scalding hot water into my ear canal. It was overwhelming, and I'd numbed that part of myself ever since. As the breath and touch brought feeling back, I felt the burning, and energy rushing back in. My ears haven't frozen in the cold since.

In another session, working around my jaw, I remembered grinding my teeth so hard at night I was wearing them down. That session surfaced a memory of partially waking up during my wisdom teeth surgery — unable to move, so unable to scream or get away, in the most intense pain I've ever felt, until I lost consciousness again. Textbook trauma: completely overwhelming, with nowhere for the energy to go. Breathwork and meditation finally gave it somewhere to release. If dental anxiety, a fear of the dentist’s chair, or a hard relationship with routine medical care is part of your story, this kind of work can reach that too.

Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily form mental images — no picture appears when you're asked to imagine a beach, a loved one's face, or your breath moving through your body. It's more common than most people realize, and it can make many popular healing and mindfulness modalities quietly frustrating, even alienating: so much guided visualization assumes everyone can see what's being described, and when you can't, it's easy to conclude something is wrong with you, or that you're simply bad at meditating.

I have aphantasia myself, and it's part of why breathwork and somatic practice matter so much to me. None of this work asks you to picture anything. You don't need to see a color, a light, or a memory — you only need to feel what's actually here in your body and let that guide you. If visualization has never worked for you, or you've quietly wondered whether you're doing meditation "wrong," this way of practicing may finally make sense of why.