[00:00:11] Speaker A: What's worthwhile? It's a question we all need to answer for ourselves. I'm Ramsay Zimmerman. As for me, it's building mind, body and spirit wellness. Let's ponder the big questions together as we seek peace of mind, vitality of body, and joy of spirit.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: You know, I've had a lot of practice being comfortable in my whole being that I'm a seed of awakening, so to speak, in a sleeping world. I've been in the natural healing community my whole adult life, so there's a lot of people who think that they're grounded and rational people. I consider myself a grounded and rational person. I also have had incredible healing crises in my life that led me down a more natural path of healing because traditional medicine wasn't helping. Now, if you break your arm, please don't come do breath work with me. Go to the emergency room. Right.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Hey there, it's Ramsay here. That was Karen Warwick. In addition to being a successful business administrator for chiropractic offices, Karen leads breath work and sound healing sessions through breatheagainwellness.com dot. Karen Warwick is an internationally certified breathwork facilitator who helps individuals, couples, and groups achieve relaxation, trauma release, and nervous system regulation through conscious, connected breath work. Karen is also a master sound healer and women's sacred circle facilitator, helping people heal through sound frequency and authentic connection. I'm new to all of this. Karen is not. While having this discussion, I so appreciated how she walked me through her modalities and gracefully addressed my own hesitation. Whether this will be your first introduction to breath work and sound healing, or if you've already experienced it and want to learn more, I think you'll get a lot out of this discussion. Let's begin.
Hey, Karen, how you doing today?
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Good, Ramsey, thanks for having me today.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the what's worthwhile podcast today.
I reached out to you for a couple of reasons.
We're both based here in the Olympia, Washington area, and I found you online and was fascinated by two things that you specialize in, which is breath work and sound healing.
Because lately I've been learning as much as I can about holistic health and especially nutritional therapy.
And it occurs to me that breathing and hearing are as basic and foundational as eating. And I'm just fascinated with the idea and to learn more from you about the health and wellness benefits of those functions as well.
I mean, you know, I think everyone is familiar with the idea and suggestion, like, okay, take a deep breath calm down. So maybe we should start with, like, in the most general sense, how is our breathing connected to our level of anxiety or trauma or I. Physical upset?
[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question, Ramsay. So, like, again, in the most basic sense, if you stub your toe, which we've all done before, your inherent response, your natural response is to just, you know, suck in a breath, because that's what. What, you know, it was painful, right? And so it's totally connected to trauma or physical hurt or anxiety when you suck in a breath. And most of us, when we do that, hold it. And unless you actually release it after you hold it, it's going to store in your body. It's going to store in your body in either some kind of physical upset or emotional upset or aka trauma. So the breathing is very, very connected to what happens to us physically and emotionally and also energetically.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Wow.
Well, before we dig too deep into, like, the details of breath work and sound healing, would you please tell us more about you? Like, what is your professional background and how did you transition towards breath work and sound healing?
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. So, professionally, I've been in the natural healing community for almost 30 years, and it has been a beautiful experience to be on this journey to help facilitate healing with, you know, people that need it and are seeking out a natural way to do it. Breath work came to me on a personal level at first, and the way that it did that is I was having my own health crises. And I realized that even though I was in the natural healing community and I had all of these great resources and all of these natural healers that wanted to help me with my healing issues and my health issues, I just couldn't get past a lot of the issues that I was having. And when I really took a step back and looked at it, I realized that every time I had a really strong breath work practice, regardless of what the specific breath work was, my health would get better and work, and the breath work would work in conjunction with the other healing that I was doing. And so I had this amazing blow the lid off of it experience about a handful of years ago when I was doing a breath work session in Sedona, Arizona. And at that moment, I had such a healing moment through breath work that was instantaneous, that I was like, I have to bring this to other people. So I did an internationally certified program. I trained for almost a year in breath work. This was not a weekend seminar, and it just started opening all of these doors of how I was going to bring breath work to the world, how I was going to incorporate that with my sound healing and how I was going to move forward. And I'm really, really thankful that I am able to work with the individuals, the couples and the groups that I do now online and in person, and bring that breath work and that sound healing to them. It's just, it's, it settles in my soul. I'm very happy.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Oh.
So what is breath work? I think it's called conscious connected breath work. What, what does that mean? What, what are we talking about?
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, there are so many great breath work modalities, many of them that I personally do myself, depending on the day. But what I practice primarily is conscious connected breath work, and then also some trauma release breath work. And conscious connected breath work is the practice of breathing with intention and self awareness in order to bring attention to your inner experience. And so you're consciously connecting your inhale and your exhale through a period of time. Let's just use, like, 60 minutes as an example. And during that 60 minutes, you are never pausing, never holding, just consciously connecting your breath throughout that whole experience.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: So why and how does that act of continuously breathing in and out cause a change in someone? Like, what is it like physically, mentally, emotionally? I mean, what happens while they're doing that?
[00:08:39] Speaker B: All the above, there's physical components, there's emotional components, there's energetic components. And in a typical, again, using a 60 minutes session as an example, for the first about 30 minutes, we're intentionally starting out slow and building, climbing, charging to a peak. And so we're increasing the speed and the depth of our breath during that time, all the time while it be consciously connected. And during that, we're activating our sympathetic nervous system. And when we activate our sympathetic nervous system, it can put you in fight or flight mode. And again, we're doing this in a very controlled, safe space environment.
And we're intentionally doing that because we want to get to the point where we stubbed our toe and we stored it in our body, right? And whether it's conscious or subconscious, we're activating that as we climb to this peak. And then once we get to that peak, you know, I will guide my clients or the group that I'm working with to shift into a slower breath, still conscious, connected, still connecting your inhale with your exhale and shift into that slower breath like it moves you into your parasympathetic nervous system. And this is where, because of what you did in the first half of your breath work session, your brain waves have gone into a different state. And you've now physiologically changed your body. And in that moment, you're able to receive different messages, new thoughts, new ideas, whether they're conscious or unconscious, to help you heal. So to help you relax, to help you clear whatever trauma.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: So oftentimes, what are you trying to gain or accomplish? Like, what is it that you're hoping that your clients, your patients, your clients are going to get from this? What are they seeking to do?
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah, my clients are seeking to do everything and anything from simple relaxation. Like, if I have clients that come in, maybe they're high powered executives and have a lot of stress in their job, and maybe the hour that they spend with me is the only time they actually lay down and relax.
To clients like myself who are trying to heal either a physical or an emotional trauma, and they're using breath work to clear that physical and emotional trauma.
And I have clients that are intentionally trying to achieve alternate states of consciousness through the breath. And all three of those things are very similar, but very different. But the bottom line is that we're shifting energetic vibration. We're making physiological changes in the body with the breath in order to achieve whatever result the individual wants. Do they want to relax? Do they want to heal? Do they want to experience what breath can do to their brain state?
It's everything and anything in between.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: How does it release trauma? I think you mentioned trauma release breath work.
How does it release trauma?
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so I have done a lot of additional studies in trauma release breath work specifically, and trauma release breath work takes conscious, connected breath work to the next level. You're still doing conscious connected breath work, which is a beautiful modality in itself. But a lot of people are coming in specifically to me because they want to take a more somatic approach to it. They want to figure out how the physical and the emotional is all tying in together and being stored in the body. So we incorporate a lot of movement into trauma release breath work, and again, just to try to shift that energy, shift the emotional and the physical and the energetic and in that somatic way, to clear it from the body.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: What do you mean by somatic?
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Somatic is a physical symptom that's manifesting in the body versus a psychological approach where how it's manifesting in the mind or in the motion. So when we do trauma release breath work, we're very specifically using the breath to, again, activate parasympathetic and unsympathetic nervous system in order to clear whatever's stored in our body.
And, you know, it could be again, using that very simple stubbing our toe, sucking in our breath, holding it. We never completed that breath cycle. We just sucked it in and said, oh, that was really painful. When I hit my toe on the bed. And you store it in your body, did you store it in your toe? Did you store it in your shoulder? Did you store it in your, you know, in your. In your stomach? However you stored it, it doesn't matter. And so we use that concept to complete the breath cycle. A lot of times when I work with clients, let's use, like, maybe they stored some of their trauma in their throat and they're not able to speak well or they cough a lot or they have thyroid problems or whatever, and breath work is not going to solve anybody's medical problem. I am not diagnosing medical. I'm just using this as an example.
And for whatever reason, they've stored that trauma in their throat. So we will work during our conscious, connected breath work and our trauma release breath work session to take the breath through the throat, to speak out loud during that session, to move the body in whatever way we want to move the body in order for that person to complete the breath cycle that the trauma had created in their body, and also to feel, to heal.
And so it all goes back to what's physically, somatically going on in your body, and how can we not break through it, but move through it, move through it in a way that allows us to heal?
[00:14:51] Speaker A: This is all really fascinating to me, and I knew almost nothing about breath work before we started talking with each other.
But what I'm really interested in and what really gets me excited is this whole mind body spirit connection. So listening to you sort of describe breath work this way, and just the idea of storing trauma within your body and how sort of mental or emotional experiences can be translated into the physical and how physical experiences get translated into, you know, an emotion. Those things are all really fascinating to me, and it's, you know, just hearing you describe that in terms of breath work and how to, you know, actively release that, that's all just really tremendous.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Thank you. I love doing the work. It's helped me immensely on my healing journey, and I love bringing it to other people.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Well, let's pivot to sound healing.
And what are we talking about here? Like, we're, what, what does sound healing mean? Are we talking about specific types of sounds and what do they do? Give us. Give us the basic introduction first.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Okay, so the basic introduction for those of us who are classically musically trained is that classical music is tuned to 440 hz, whereas the healing frequency of sound healing is tuned to 432 each. We use crystal balls, we use metal bowls. We can use tuning forks, all different sound healing instruments.
And if we're talking about crystal bowls, each bowl is related to each chakra. And the concept of seven chakras is from early hindu concepts. And the concept of that we have a physical body, and we have what they call a subtle body. And the physical body is like the mass of our body, right? It's very visible. And the subtle body, or the energetic body, includes the mind and the emotions and the energy and the invisible. And so, again, in Hinduism, chakras are focal points of energy, and there's seven of them in the body.
And many people believe that if we balance those chakras, one way of balancing it is through sound.
It helps boost health and well being. So that's the simplified version, I think, of sound healing.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: Okay, so specific frequencies and specific chakras and parts of your body. So is there, like, a map of this, or, like, how. How do you describe it?
[00:17:56] Speaker B: Yeah, so if we start at the bottom, like, the root chakra is. Is your lowest chakra, and that is related to the. To the c note, and then it just moves up from root to sacral to solar plexus to heart and to throat, and then what they call the third eye chakra and your crown chakra. So it goes from cdefgab. And again, those of us who are classically, musically trained would be like, well, wait, where's my full octave? Where's my next c? And there is another circumental in that range, in that octave, and that is the high c. And that hurts is 528. Lot of people call that the miracle healing tone, the miracle love tone. And it just is.
It's how I end all of my sound healing practices, kind of on this tone that a lot of people believe is just absolute, pure healing note. So.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: So I've been aware of chakras for a while now, and I have some experience in that area. But I just discovered, I just realized the other day, I think, where I first saw that, like, image of the chakra map, and it was in the Marvel movie Doctor Strange. And I'm a huge marvel nerd, but in that story, a neurosurgeon gets his hands crushed, and so he goes on this journey to, like, Nepal or somewhere, and he's looking for sort of a mystical healing, and he encounters this. This sage, the ancient one, and she's beginning to describe to him sort of the nature of their powers. And she's flipping through a book, and she shows him this picture of the chakra maps. And his response is, yeah, I've seen that before in a museum gift shop.
And, you know, he's scoffing at it. And I wonder, do you encounter a fair number of people who generally think of themselves as grounded and rational people kind of scoffing at this idea?
And as a follow up, like, what are these practices based on in terms of. You started talking about it, but in terms of tradition, results, training, case studies, like, things like that?
[00:20:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question, Ramsay. Thank you. You know, it's really interesting because professionally, for the last 30 years, my husband and I have been in the chiropractic community. And I like to joke, but this is very serious, that when I tell people what I've done professionally, there's only two responses. There's either the response of, oh, my gosh, my chiropractor saved my life. Let me tell you why. And let me tell you the story. Or they're like, what you're saying. They scoff and say, oh, and the conversation's over. And so I think, you know, I've had a lot of practice, so to speak, being comfortable in my, in my, in my whole being that. That I'm a seed of awakening, so to speak, in a sleeping world. Right? Like, I don't. I don't really live this mainstream lifestyle to begin with. I've been in the natural healing community my whole adult life. So there's a lot of people who think that they're grounded and rational people. I consider myself a grounded and rational person. I also have had incredible healing crises in my life that led me down a more natural path of healing because traditional medicine wasn't helping. Now, if you break your arm, please don't come do breath work with me. Go to the emergency room. Right? Go to the emergency room. And I'm so thankful for acute triaging medicine like that for those of us who need it when we need it.
But, you know, the people that I attract into my practice and that want to talk to me about this are people that understand that, you know, there's this concept of, we have to feel the heal. And some of them are curious. Some of my clients are very scientific, engineering type people, but they've had this one thing in their life, whether it be a healing crisis or whether it be their friend talking about how great breath work was, or whether it be an exposure to sound healing, that just cracked the door a little bit for them to explore, and they still can be grounded and rational, you know, but they still can. But they can move to exploring these types of natural healing modalities. And as far as, like, peer reviewed training, case studies, that kind of thing, you know, peer reviewed scientific proof for chakras, that's, like, a really good question. I appreciate that, Ramsay, but my answer to that is that chakras aren't inherently scientific, at least in a western medicine way of science that we know that has a lot of funding right, from the AMA or the FDA or something like that. So how can we really look for scientific explanations to a spiritual thing, to an energetic thing?
I'm sure they're out there, but at some point, I think people have to make the decision on whether they're going to come from an energetic point of view where they're collaborating. And I'm not just talking about you and I collaborating on this podcast today. I'm talking about how do I collaborate with my body, with my mind, with my spirit? How do they all collaborate together, and how does that affect my health and well being? And I think when you move into that mode of collaboration with your own health, with your own physical, emotional, and energetic, then you move out of this competition based type attitude of, like, well, if the AMA didn't produce a scientific study about it, I don't want to know about it. So I just. I think that people.
I'm very clear that people come to see me and talk to me and learn about things with me and that I learn about new things myself when we're ready. And when you say yes to things and you stop resisting and you start critically thinking in a curious way, it opens so many doors for you. It's just a beautiful thing.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Well, you said so much there. One of the phrases that really just jumped out at me was, this was feel to heal, you know? And I wonder if you could expand a bit what you meant by that. When I hear that feel to heal, it sort of brings to mind an acknowledgement that healing is something that is beyond just a chemical reaction. It has more than just the body involved. It has more depth to that, uh, mind and spirit. But what do you mean by feel to heal?
[00:26:04] Speaker B: My belief on feeling to healing is that, again, we have to work with our physical, our emotional, and our energetic. So I could talk about this for 3 hours, but maybe 30 hours. I could talk about it for the rest of my life, Ramsay. But I'll. I'll try to use a simple example on just something with a with myself. So, you know, I had this shoulder pain going on for years, for as long as I can remember and way back to childhood. So what, what I, and I never had a. This was in my, this was in my left shoulder. And I never, to my conscious memory and recollection, had an injury, a physical injury to that shoulder. So why was it locked up? Why was it not moving? Why did I have so much pain there?
And so physically, I try to heal it, I exercise, I get adjusted, I get massages, I do acupuncture. It's still very, very painful.
And so I was really, really, really focused on the physical aspect of it. But when I opened my thoughts and my healing process to what is emotionally happening here, what is energetically or vibrationally happening here, and again started to work those three things together, body, mind and spirit, physical, emotional, energetic, that's when the real healing began. That's when, again, I had this life changing, spontaneous healing during a breath work session in Sedona, Arizona. And it was all surrounding that part of my body.
And I really believe that that was about a three hour breath work session, was a really in depth processing of how can I process this physical pain on an emotional and an energetic level while I'm consciously changing the physiological makeup of my body through my breath? And then what subconscious things are coming up and what emotional things are coming up. And I literally felt just this complete release in that shoulder area.
And so what emotionally was holding me back from it until that moment. And then you can start talking about generational trauma and the energy surrounding that in areas that we have pain in our bodies. And that's a whole other conversation. But my whole feel to heal is just what are we feeling in our body, physically, emotionally, energetically, in order to heal.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: So I'm an energy guy.
I've been in the energy efficiency space, the renewable energy space, and now I'm sort of part of what I, how I think about what I'm doing these days is, you know, life energy. But you've mentioned energetic. You've used the word energetics a few different times, and I use that word, too, but I don't really know exactly what it means, and I use it very loosely. But I'd love to hear your thoughts about what does that mean to you. What do you mean when you say that?
And are both sound healing and breath work, are they interrelated? Are they both involved with energetics?
[00:29:53] Speaker B: A hundred percent, 100%. To me, energy is what we were talking about with sound healing a minute ago with our chakras how do I clear those energy centers in my body in order to function better energetically?
There may be scientific studies about this. The last time I read, your aura actually goes out. Your energetic field, your aura around your body goes out about 6ft. So even standing next to someone at the grocery store, you might energetically be in their aura.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Well, there's no doubt that we're energetic beings for sure. You know, your heart runs on electricity, and they break out the zapper machine to zap you when your heart stops and nerve signals are carried throughout the body. That's. That's energy, that's electricity.
So, and electromagnetic fields, anything, any energy device has an em field, whether we're talking about a cell phone or, you know, a living body.
I didn't mean to interrupt, but just to sort of, you know, give you a high five across the ether about us being energetic.
And, you know, how, how does, with the sound healing therapy, like, how does that affect our energy and our energy centers? And what can we accomplish by impacting those energy centers?
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Well, I'll just use, like, the heart chakra, the f note, which is a nine inch bowl when we're talking about crystal bowls. And as an example, and the thing, the reason I'm using it as an example, I love the heart chakra. I work with a lot of my clients on it with breath work as well, because one of the things we have to remember with breath work, it's not just up and down, right? Like it is when we're doing conscious, connected breath and trauma released breath. We're breathing in 360 degrees like a balloon. So there's a lot of people that have a lot of hard time to expand their ribs in that heart space, in that heart chakra. So we'll do different things during breath work and different things during sound healing in order to open it up.
And the thing that I love about the heart chakra is it is the chakra that connects the lower three chakras, which are physical, to the upper three chakras, which is like higher aspirations.
And if that bridge is not functioning, then how can you energetically be functioning yourself?
Energy even goes further down that line of, like, you know, words matter. Like, what kind of energy are we bringing to the world with our words and our, when we're using, like, the heart chakra for healing, we're, we're using affirmations like, I'm grateful for all the love in my life, or I feel stronger, joyful, and more alive every day, or, you know, I'm worthy of love and belonging. And again, different people come to me for different reasons, but the energy of all of it goes back to, how does this relate physically to the heart? Is my heart, like you said, energetically charging in a way that it's supposed to be physically? Is my heart emotionally, mentally in the game, in the sense that I feel that I'm worthy and I belong? And energetically, what am I attracting? Am I attracting gratefulness and exuding gratefulness, or am I going to close myself off? So it's all energy, it's all healing. We're just spiritual, energetic beings on this one physical journey.
And so I think when you really tap into how you as a person are more than your physical manifestation or more than your emotional state of the next two minutes, like, then you understand that it's all energy.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: Do people do breath work and sound healing simultaneously? Do they do it one after the other?
Like, do you sit and listen to the sound frequencies as you're doing breath work, or are they, you know, like two separate experiences?
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good question. And there's so many great ways that lots of different facilitators, you know, do their practice. In my practice, we typically do breath work session that's guided by music, by a playlist that I've created for that individual client, and guided by my facilitation of it through the breath work session. And it could be 45 minutes long, it could be 60 minutes long, however long it is. And then at the end, and sometimes at the beginning, too, we'll bring in sound healing. That's not to say that you couldn't do a breath work session with just listening to sound bowls, but with conscious, connected breath and with trauma release breath. We're very specifically trying to activate those two sides of the nervous system and charge up and then relax.
And sound healing can be activating and charging, but in my practice, maybe not as much as we'd like to. So I'll open a session with sound healing, just a couple of, you know, notes, you know, over the client as they're relaxing into the space. But then we oftentimes do, like a very specific, let's clear the seven chakras with the sound bowls after our breath work session, or as an add on to the breath work session.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: And these sessions, do you do them individually or you do them in a group setting or both, or how would those be different?
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Oh, good question. I work with individuals. I work with couples, and I work with groups. I just did a really great group locally for about 75 women.
It was a beautiful event, and I do individual, couple, and group sessions in person and online.
I just had another women's group leader asked me to lead a breath work session for her group in Costa Rica. So I love to travel and do breath work all over the world.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
And they're different in the sense that when I work with one on one clients, I can work with them one time, or I can work with them, I don't know, once a month, whatever frequency they decide that the breath work is going to be as part of their healing, we can get really deep. The longer that I work with a client, the more I know what their goals are, the more that they experience, the more somatic movement we do, you know, so it's a beautiful synergistic relationship of how we can work together in order to achieve their healing goals. And in groups, you have a different type of energy.
I've had really powerful experiences in groups, and, you know, you can go on YouTube and find some crazy breath work videos with people screaming and running across the room and stuff like that. And that's not what my groups are like. So, you know, our groups are more. My groups that I'm facilitating are more of a collective energy. And again, going back into that energy consciousness, and how can we breathe together and bring that energy together in order to have more people gathered collectively to increase that energy and maybe manifest the healing even more in a group. Also, you know, we'll process afterwards. As a group, there's a lot of validation of your individual experience, and this is where, you know, we're celebrating each other's greatness and each other's individuality. But we're also having this collective community experience together. And, you know, at our core, we all want connection. We all want to be seen and heard and validated.
And group breath work is a really powerful tool to do that.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of value in connections and shared experiences.
How do you think talk a little bit more about that, like, in a group setting, how do people sort of encourage each other? Or how does the healing or health of an individual sort of improve when they're experiencing that in a group setting?
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Yeah. So when I'm guiding a group session, we always have a theme of what we're working on today, whether it's healing or whether it's empowerment or whatever the theme is. And just by setting that theme and coming together as a group, we've made this strong social connection.
And we all know that strong social connections enhance our emotional resilience. And when we have a higher capacity, a higher emotional resilience, it allows us to recover and heal physically quicker and easier. So it ties that shared experience, even if it's a one time shared experience, back into that physical, emotional and energetic experience.
And then when people get to hear other people at the end of the session, share what their experience was, again, they're validated. The person sharing feels seen and heard. The person listening is like, oh, I can relate to that. And then we just all have this collective, beautiful healing experience. It all goes back to healing for.
[00:41:27] Speaker A: Me with breath work, all of it sounds wonderful.
What are you excited about coming up? What are you working on right now? What do you have coming up? Do you have a new project?
What's exciting in your world right now?
[00:41:43] Speaker B: Oh, thanks.
My rest of this year, really fun and exciting. I've been asked to write a chapter in a healer's collective book. So that book is going to be published in January. So I'm fast and furiously writing away and working with that team, and that's really fun.
Locally, I'm also starting up my sacred women's circles again.
And with women's circles, we come together monthly in a very safe, grounded sacred space, and we have collective women's sharing and gathering together. And I also incorporate breath work into that.
And so I do monthly sessions and then usually two or three times a year, I do an eight to twelve week weekly program. So, yeah, so those are the two things I'm really excited about. Plus, you know, talking to you and seeing clients and doing groups.
[00:42:44] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. So what happens or what will happen in the women's circles? What are those going to be like?
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we usually have, well, we always not usually have a theme. And that theme changes every month. And we gather together, we usually bring some food to potluck it at the beginning, very simply.
And then we sit down in what's called a sacred women's circle and we share, and there's a lot of places in your life, in all of our lives, that if we share something, if I share something with you, most people who are listening are crafting their response instead of listening to you.
And when we're in sacred women's circle, everybody is listening, whether it be for three minutes or five minutes or whatever the time is. And there is nothing but energetic feedback, there is no verbal feedback. And the women gather together, and many of the women that I work with have lives where they're not seen and they're not heard.
And so again, it goes back to feeling, to heal. And after we share in that sacred circle. We take that theme into breath work, and I facilitate some sort of breath work with them. And then when we close the circle, then it's when we can all chit chat with each other and we do, we ask for permission. We say something like, it really moved me, what you shared today. Can we dialogue about that? Can I share my experience that was similar, but we always ask for permission and just keep it a very grounded, safe, supportive space. And it goes back to, for me, this concept of collaborative community. How do I create community in Olympia? How do I create community locally in order for me to have stronger social connections, in order for me to have more emotional resilience, and in order for my physical, emotional and energetic mind, body spirit to just be healthier, feel better.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: That sounds really wonderful.
[00:45:08] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:45:09] Speaker A: Is it, is there anything else that we sort of haven't touched on that you'd want to share or any particular points you want to just sort of drive home?
[00:45:21] Speaker B: For me, it always goes back to feeling to heal.
Whatever healing modality someone chooses to do is right for them. And breath work might be right for you and it might not be right for you, but just do whatever it is in order to heal and feel and connect that body, mind, spirit, that physical, emotional and energetic, and just move forward with just love and gratitude. I often talk in my breath work sessions about how we're inhaling love and we're exhaling gratitude. And that phrase is usually inhale love and exhale fear. And there's a lot of justification in that. But I like to focus on inhaling love and exhaling gratitude, because when you just walk around with gratitude about every experience in your life, regardless of what it was or what it is, it changes your entire perspective and again, allows you to have that, you know, connection with others coming from a space of love and gratitude instead of from a space of fear. So thank you.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: How can people get in touch with you or follow up or learn more?
[00:46:42] Speaker B: Yeah, so very simple. My website is breathe again wellness.
I'm on Facebook and Instagram, underbreathagunwellness. And again, I work with individuals, couples and groups locally in Lacey, Washington, which is next to Olympia. And I do it online as well. And I am happy to do it all over the states and all over the world.
[00:47:11] Speaker A: Breath againwellness.com.
karen Warwick thank you so much for this conversation like this. This stuff really resonated with me. I learned so much. You were able to articulate so many things. And God, that idea of inhaling love and exhaling gratitude. That just is a really powerful, powerful statement. And sure, we want to get rid of the fear, but what we really want to spread into the world is gratitude. And that's just a beautiful thing. So appreciate you taking the time. Thank you so much and hope we'll talk again soon.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Thanks Ramsey.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: Thank you for asking. What's worthwhile? Visit whatsworthwild.net to learn more about me Ramsay Zimmerman, and please provide your name and email to become a supporter. I'm asking for a prayer at advice, feedback and connections. The what's worthwhile podcast is on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, and Amazon. You can also
[email protected]. thanks.
