The first time I did breathwork, I vomited all over the jungle…

The first time I did breathwork, I vomited all over the jungle…

No, I wasn’t hungover, unwell, or pregnant. Just in desperate need of a purge.

When I first walked into the class I’ll admit, I was skeptical. What was “just breathing” going to do? I was quickly humbled. What came up was more than just my breakfast, it was emotions that had been stifled for years. And once they were out, I felt ten times lighter.

Who knew the breath could be so powerful? Well… actually, I did. I just hadn’t realised it yet.

Like so many women, I’d wrestled with severe period pain every month since the pubescent get-go. I tried every pill under the sun, even something that sounded super chill and safe for a 15-year-old called mefenamic acid… I trustingly poisoned my body for almost a decade before deciding to come off the pill and just raw-dog my cramps, which, by the time I was in my early 20s, were gracing me nearly every day.

Does this sound familiar? What I’m sharing is a tale as old as time, women being dismissed while trying to navigate life, work, relationships, and mental health in debilitating pain, often with very little support or real answers. By the time I was 27, I was told my symptoms were likely Endometriosis. The only way to know for sure was surgery. And even then, there was no guarantee it would help, because there’s no cure. Reassuring, right? Still, having a name for it felt like something solid to hold onto.

Eventually, I was diagnosed with both Endometriosis and Adenomyosis. I went through operations hoping for relief. But unfortunately they did nothing for my pain, or frustration levels.

For years, I was made to feel dramatic or overly sensitive. Teachers at school. Later, people at work, the eye rolls when you need to go home again because the pain is relentless and the medication you started taking at 6am isn’t touching the sides. All I wanted was to go home, lie on a cool floor with a hot water bottle, and let my body settle.

When the pills, the hot water bottles, the scalding baths, and the bloody mefenamic acid didn’t work, the only thing I had left was my breath.

Connecting with my breath could put me in a trance-like state that shifted me from fighting and resisting the pain to accepting it, softening around it, so I could ride it out until it passed. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I was regulating my nervous system.

I just hadn’t realised the power of that, or what else I could do with it.

So when I found structured breathwork years later, my body responding so dramatically in that jungle wasn’t random. It was recognition.

As I went deeper into the practice, I began accessing emotions I hadn’t consciously processed. Frustration. Anger. Helplessness. Fear.

My body had been holding more than inflammation. It had been holding stories.

Through breathwork, I experienced everything from hysterical laughter to full-body sobbing to more transcendental experiences. Not every session was dramatic, some were subtle and gentle. Sometimes there was just peace as whatever needed to go simply passed.

But consistently, I felt lighter. And over time, something else happened. My pain reduced. My cycles felt less hostile. My baseline anxiety softened.

Not because I “breathed away” endometriosis, but because I was no longer living in constant fight-or-flight mode. I learned how to regulate, how to listen, and how to respond instead of brace. My body didn’t feel like my enemy anymore.

As women, we are taught to override our bodies, to just cope. And life can be really f*cking overwhelming and exhausting a lot of the time (especially if you’re tuning into what’s happening around the world). The fatigue is real and valid. And if you’re already navigating pain, stress, or burnout, living in constant overdrive only makes it louder.

It’s more important than ever to be in tune with your body and aware of how it’s affected. Learning and unlearning are equally important, especially when it comes to how we relate to ourselves, to our bodies.

What I’ve learned is that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is pause… and breathe. Not in a vague wellness way, but in a conscious, connected, nervous-system-regulating way.

There is so much scope for healing to be found in somatic work, and breathwork is a powerful tool. A tool that can help you regulate your nervous system, to help you safely process stored emotion. A tool that can help you stop fighting your body and start listening to it. (And so much more, but that’s for another day).

I started my work empowering women to reconnect through photography and visuals. Now, I support that same reconnection through both image and breath. Knowing how to regulate my own nervous system is my kind of empowerment, and I can’t wait to share this skill with the women in our community.

Written by: Elizabeth Jamieson