The night before I held a breathwork ceremony last weekend, a wave of panic washed over me.
WHAT IF EVERYTHING GOES WRONG?
This is a familiar terrified voice.
(Leading equinox breathwork in my trailer last weekend)
You’ve done this many times, another voice said. You’re ready.
BUT WHAT IF YOU’RE ACTUALLY NOT?
I put a hand on my heart that night and asked a question:
What is the truth here?
I began journaling and my answer came in the form of a stomach flip-flop, a sinking feeling, and the wordlessness of my body going RUUUUUUUN.
But as I kept writing, the feeling shoved a decades-old memory forward, and things began to come together:
THE SPEECH.
Could I ever forget?
It was 1997. I was in junior high, and I’d just won the public speaking contest in my seventh grade class.
Winning that contest took me to the grade-wide finals, which I also won, and that meant the next step was giving the speech in front of my entire junior high - hoping to be the one student from my school sent to the district-wide finals.
My speech was on the assassination of JFK and it hinged on me playing a tape of the shooting, showing how the bullets couldn’t possibly have all come from the grassy knoll, then explaining how Oswald was framed and that we couldn’t trust our government. (I liked to keep things light.) I was filled with the passion of a budding question-asker who’d just seen a really good movie (JFK, lol) and was basically reenacting a scene from it for her classmates.
Except even though I’d prepared for weeks, even though I knew that speech forward and backward, and even though I’d managed to give it twice to an audience of seventh graders with no problems, that day in front of the whole junior high didn’t exactly go as planned.
You saw that coming, huh?
At the crucial (early) moment in the speech when I was to play the video and explain how the “magic bullet” didn’t make any sense…the tape wouldn’t play.
I kept pressing buttons, but to no avail. Lacking the improv skills it would have taken to say something like “what you should be seeing on the screen is xyz…” I was instead rendered catatonic. I felt the hundreds of eyes on the back of my head in the way only a twelve-year-old entering puberty can, and the notecards sitting in my hand may as well have been in another language.
I’m pretty sure a teacher jogged over to try and help me as I fiddled with the VCR, but no matter what we did it was not starting, and it was too late anyway…the wheels had come off my wagon.
“I, um….”
I looked at the auditorium of faces staring back at me.
“Thank you,” I said, and scurried off the stage, as if I hadn't just started the speech. If I could have melted straight into a tile on the auditorium floor, I would have. Instead, I went to the bathroom and sobbed my twelve-year-old face off.
Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the district finals.
And who cares at this point, right?
That was twenty-six years ago: I’ve done tons of public speaking since that day, and it’s never gone that badly again (KNOCK ON WOOD.)
So why did this memory surface as I journaled before the ceremony?
Because as I wrote, and allowed my pen to wander to seemingly unrelated things, I realized there were some overlaps between my fears around the ceremony and that day in seventh grade:
What if my internet goes wobbly during the ceremony?———> (What if there’s an issue I can’t control?)
What if that issue totally throws me off?—> (What if I “run off the stage” again?)
Rather than shutting down these fears with self-assurances that things will go great, or deciding to stay up late over-preparing for every scenario, I closed my eyes, and asked another question.
What do you need?
I imagined twelve year-old-me huddling behind that voice of worry: the protective inner shield that formed because she never wanted to experience something like this again.
What did she need to hear as she sobbed in the bathroom alone that day?
I wrote a note back to myself.
You are so brave
It’s okay for things to not go as planned
We’re grown up now - we’ve done so many hard things
You’ll flow with it, you’ll ride the wave
Let your passion lead, and let go of what you can’t control
You're safe now
I felt my body knot untangling. The fear was still there, but I could tell where it was coming from now.
What is really true here?
I am passionate, and I am scared
I can’t control everything, and that’s okay
Fast forward to the next day…
The ceremony went great, and it also went imperfectly: my neighbor’s sweet dog started barking at one point, and (since I now work out of this travel trailer) it sounded like that dog was in the next room. At another point, a group of squirrels started running across the roof doing an (equinox inspired?) dance I’ve never heard before or since.
And ya know what? It was fine.
I kept reorienting to the purpose of why I was doing this ceremony, and I handled the stuff out of my control.
We’re grown up now - we’ve got this.
That twelve-year-old is still within, along with every other age and part I’ve ever been. When I create room for these parts, room for these selves, rather than thinking they should be gone by now, or diminishing experiences because “they happened so long ago”…I can find what is actually true, and I can do what I am meant to do...
Show up fully, imperfectly, with all of this.
If there’s anything you are considering doing, but feeling fear around, I want to invite you to journal or breathe into the same question…
What is the truth here?
Allow your pen to wander freely: as we write (or do an embodiment practice, like breathwork) we are untangling, unearthing, and revealing a deeper truth that doesn’t live at the surface. And if while you do so, you stumble upon an age, a part, or an old fear, practice asking…
What do you most need?
This practice widens your own inner landscape, creating the cartography of witnessing and healing that YOU most need.
Be gentle and ask questions. Journal, breathe, or talk out your answers.
Trust what comes up: however petty, long-ago, or frivolous.
You are your own exact right medicine because you have eyes on your own origin stories, you are teasing out the larger narrative of your life, and you can bring understanding, meaning, and healing to any chapter.
Now, hand on heart, and repeat after me:
You're safe now.
I've got you.
Let your heart lead.
It's time.
Sending love to you and all of your parts,
Melissa
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
PS: This is the space we create together in my new writing and breathwork membership: Living Questions, Breathing Answers. Our next group journaling session is October 9th, and the theme is “Your Younger Selves.”
You can breathe the replay to last week’s ceremony or join us live for the next breath ceremony on October 29th. If you’re ready to expand that inner landscape of self-compassion, and do so in a community of open-hearted sensitive souls, come join us .
If you'd like more questions like this (and breathwork tracks to go along with them) consider ordering the Questions You'll Wish You Asked Yourself journal
PPS: Another great way to dive beneath your conscious thought for truth is movement: Ask a question, then turn on this song, and shake it out for the whole length. Then sit and write - give your medicine a chance to work through you.