How One Breath Changed My Life…
“What’s the worst that can happen, Mummy? We’re just going to breathe.”
It was my daughter Anees who said those words, gently teasing me into courage.
We were at the Medicine Festival in Wasing in 2022, surrounded by drumming circles, deep silence and soulful seekers. I was already experienced in psychotherapy, neuroscience, systems thinking and a tenured executive coach - I knew how to hold space. But this time, it was my child inviting me into something unfamiliar. Breathwork.
And she wanted us to do it together.
I hesitated. Not because I didn’t believe in it, as I’d read a lot about it, but I knew the power it held. I’d studied how the breath could unlock unconscious material. How it bypasses logic and opens the gates to buried emotion. Experience I had personally had using plan medicine and when in deep meditative practice. I wasn’t sure she was ready for this.
But there she was, eyes wide with trust, and I could feel the firmness of her intuition. So I said yes.
The session unravelled us.
Within minutes, Anees was in tears. Deep, shuddering sobs from a place beyond words. She shook like an animal. She reached a point an hour in, where she wanted to stop - to leave the session early. And I, in my own unregulated state, didn’t have an answer. I just stayed with her. Lied beside her. Breathed my own trembling breath.
Me, Samreen and my daughter Anees at the festival.
Later that afternoon, back in our tent, with guidance from my own spiritual guide who I’d rung at that moment, I followed the clear advice to stay with her, to take her through visualisations and meditations. This lasted for hours. I wasn’t wearing my “coach” or “therapist” hat - I was simply a mother, holding space for her daughter’s unravelling. It was raw. Intimate. Sacred.
And something began to shift and soften. That day, she got up and said she wanted to go to an evening concert and sit fireside with cacao. And that is what we did.
In the weeks and months that followed, I began to see a transformation in her. Anees, who had lived in the long shadow of her brother’s cancer from the age of 7, who had endured devastating bullying when she joined a new school during lockdown, who was diagnosed with dyslexia later than she should’ve been - began to lighten. To re-emerge. Her nervous system recalibrated. Her agency began to unfold. She became more grounded, more expressive, less fearful and anxious… more free.
It wasn’t overnight. There were still tears, still moments of fragility. But something essential had begun to move in a new way.
That breathwork session, and the ones that followed, did something no amount of talk therapy had done. Not because the other work wasn’t valuable. But because this reached deeper. It accessed something in the body, the cells, the breath between words.
And what surprised me most… was how much it changed me too.
Witnessing her journey cracked something open in me. For over 25 years, I’d worked in the realm of consciousness, of mind, insight, narrative and a cognitive view of systems. But this? This was the subconscious. The body. The field beneath the field.
It was a turning point.
Not long after, I started my own deeper breathwork journey. What began as maternal protection turned into personal initiation. Anees was my invitation. The breath became my bridge.
And everything started to change.
More on the next article…
Me, Samreen and my daughter Anees at the festival.