The Oxtail Soup

The first time I tried breathwork, I was lying on a couch in a tiny Tribeca apartment with my AirPods in, making the craziest noises of my life and very nearly convulsing. It was 2021, still very much the pandemic, and I was doing my yoga teacher training over Zoom. One of the modules was breathwork. I knew a little pranayama from classes, and of course ujjayi breathing, but this was something else entirely. I’m fairly sure if my roommate had walked out of his room, he would have called an exorcist. (Lol.)

As woo-woo as it sounds, it was life-changing. In those first few sessions I believe I tapped into parts of myself, and past experiences, that I had locked away and thrown out the key to. I believe I visited earlier versions of myself. I even had visits from ancestors. You can only imagine the scene.

I haven’t practiced regularly since. But one thing from that training never left me: the breath is the one thing that can change our state of being. It’s been on my list to go back for years. Then a student of mine (shout out, Julia!) told me about a teacher she loves, and last week I finally went.

There’s real science behind that line, by the way. Breathing is one of the only things your body does automatically that you can also take over on purpose. Your heartbeat, your digestion, your stress response all run on autopilot. So does the breath, until you decide to steer it. That makes it a kind of back door into the nervous system. Your heart rate naturally speeds up a little on the inhale and slows a little on the exhale, which is part of why long, slow exhales calm us down. A 2023 Stanford study found that five minutes a day of breathing focused on long exhales lifted people’s mood more than the same five minutes of mindfulness meditation. Not magic. Just physiology most of us ignore.

The instructor’s name was Ilaria (she teaches Tuesdays at Sage + Sound), and she was fantastic. She started us with more intense breathing: deep, fast inhales and exhales through the mouth, pulling the breath all the way down into the diaphragm and pushing it all the way out. After several rounds of that, you exhale completely and hold, empty. Then a deep inhale, and hold again. The holds grew longer as we went through the three rounds.

There are moments, especially holding empty at the bottom of the exhale, when you truly think you might die. (I’m serious. Not being dramatic.) Then you remember you’re lying down in a safe room, a bougie one that smells like palo santo, on the Upper East Side, and that you paid money to be here. Once you notice the fear, notice the scary thought, and see how silly it is, you’d be surprised how long you can stay at the bottom of the exhale, or the top of the inhale.

That panic, it turns out, is mostly an alarm and not an emergency. The urge to breathe is triggered less by running low on oxygen and more by carbon dioxide building up in your blood. All that fast breathing at the start blows off a lot of carbon dioxide (it’s also why your hands and face can tingle), so the alarm takes longer to go off and the holds stretch further than you’d think possible. The fear is real. The danger, lying on a mat with a guide, isn’t. (Which is also why this style of breathwork belongs on the floor with a teacher, never in a pool or behind the wheel.)

What I loved most was how Ilaria cued visualization. Somewhere in the holds, I went back to a younger version of myself. Maybe nine years old. I was eating Korean oxtail soup (꼬리곰탕) by myself on a bright day in Tacoma while my mom cleaned in the kitchen. The whole apartment came back. The square table with rounded edges, the dark grey glass top sitting on a slick black rim. The balcony right behind me. The smell of that oxtail broth, which to this day can transport me straight back to being a kid.

It was a confusing time. The soup was a comfort. And lying there, I was reminded that even though my single, hardworking mother didn’t always know how (or have the tools) to support me emotionally, cooking me that soup, which takes hours and hours, was her way of showing me love.

Then Illaria asked us to go to that child and take their hand.

Cue the waterworks. Tears streamed down my face as I pictured myself in my 38-year-old body, sitting next to nine-year-old me, holding his hand. Telling him everything is going to be good. Telling him he is safe. That shit might be scary in the moment, but God, the Universe, Source, the Great Creator, whatever you want to call it, has his back. That I got him.

I know. This probably sounds crazy. But what I’ve learned about breathwork is that if you lean into it, your imagination can take you to some wild places. Physically, I was squirming, letting my body move however it wanted while my mind was somewhere far away. The music ebbed and flowed through ambient sound as Illaria guided us. Then I felt that nine-year-old breathe a little easier and relax. And that let my 38-year-old self breathe a little easier and relax, too. My face felt lighter. My jaw unclenched. I could feel the oxygen moving through my whole body.

Then she guided us out. A few people in the room were so relaxed they’d drifted off to sleep. I could feel my body had shifted out of fight or flight (the sympathetic nervous system) and into rest and digest (the parasympathetic). I felt physically lighter.

This is my little reminder to schedule more breathwork into my life. The little and big stresses of just living pile onto my nervous system, and it shows up in how I breathe. When I’m stuck in fight or flight, balancing the relationships, the teaching, the work meetings, the never-ending to-do list, the never-ending planning, my breath gets shallow and caught up in my chest. I usually don’t notice until something makes me stop.

Forty-five minutes was absolutely worth the trek uptown. And the money.

My mom said “I got you” with a pot of soup that took all day. Last week, lying on a floor on the Upper East Side, I got to say it back to the kid at the table. This time, all it took was a breath.

Have you ever tried breathwork? What was your experience like?