When the Past Returns: Finding My Way Back to Breathwork

When I was in academia, as a Ph.D. student and instructor, I wrote papers exploring how trauma haunts us: how the past remains present, returning through memory, relationships, and patterns we do not immediately recognize.

I read books, made notes, and found language for things that were difficult to describe. I understood how an unresolved experience could continue shaping a life long after the event itself had ended.

Recognizing this in my own life has been a different kind of education.

This has been a difficult month. On some mornings, I go about my ordinary tasks while carrying a conversation from the day before. I answer an email. Wash a cup. Open the window. Meanwhile, another part of me is still trying to explain something, still waiting to be heard.

There is a particular exhaustion in realizing that a feeling is familiar.

We can move far from the circumstances in which we grew up. Become independent. Build a home where we decide whom to invite inside. These changes matter. They can give us freedom we once could only imagine.

Yet the past can travel with us.

Sometimes it feels as close as blood or inheritance. I notice it in the breath I hold before speaking, in how quickly I prepare to defend myself, in the importance I give to another person’s acknowledgment. A present conversation can touch an old feeling so precisely that the years between them suddenly seem very short.

For a long time, I believed that enough distance would allow these feelings to settle. Lately, I have been wondering what distance alone can resolve.

I do not want to keep moving away without understanding what I carry. I want to notice what happens when something familiar returns, and remain present enough to make a different choice.

This sounds simple when I write it down.

In practice, I sometimes recognize the pattern only afterward. I have already said too much, become overwhelmed, or spent hours searching for the words that will finally make someone understand. Then the room becomes quiet, and I see what I could not see while it was happening.

There are other moments, too.

Moments when I pause before answering. When I speak clearly without explaining every part of myself. When I listen while remembering my own experience. When I hold a boundary and allow a conversation to remain unfinished.

These changes are small, but I feel them.

For me, working through the past increasingly means meeting a familiar situation with choices I did not have or could not recognize before. The feeling may arrive with its old urgency. I am learning to give myself a little time before following it.

I cannot control whether another person understands me. I can notice when the effort to be understood begins to take me away from myself.

I had thought I had done enough breathwork.

Over the years, I have spent many hours with my breath. I have cried, felt anger, and allowed grief I could barely name to come into awareness. There were sessions after which I felt lighter, as though something I had been carrying without noticing had finally been set down.

Those experiences mattered. They still do.

But somewhere along the way, I began to assume I no longer needed the practice very much. Recently, I have enjoyed shorter breathwork followed by deep meditation. I love the quiet afterward: the gradual settling, the space in which I do not have to reach for an answer.

This month, I have found myself returning to deeper breathwork again.

I lie down and begin. Sometimes feelings arrive quickly. Sometimes I notice only the tightness in my chest, or how tired I am. I try to leave room for whatever is there, without deciding beforehand what the session should accomplish.

I was wrong to think I had finished.

Returning, though, does not feel exactly like starting over. I bring what I have learned. I recognize certain feelings sooner. Sometimes I can stay with them a little longer without immediately needing to act.

I am also learning that what happens during a session needs to find its way into daily life. A feeling of release may open something. Then comes the conversation, the uncomfortable pause, the moment when I must decide how to respond.

That is where I begin to understand whether something is changing.

The breath helps me notice what I am carrying. Meditation gives me time to sit with it. In my relationships, I practice making use of that awareness, imperfectly and sometimes very slowly.

I wish I could say this month had brought me to a clear conclusion. It has mostly brought me back to practice.

Back to lying down and breathing. Back to listening before I know what I will hear. Back to the possibility that, when an old feeling returns, I may be able to meet it with a little more freedom.

If you have stepped away from breathwork, perhaps this is a moment to return. I am returning, too, with things I thought I had already worked through, and feelings I am still learning to understand.

You do not need to arrive with a clear intention or a finished story. Begin with where you are. Give yourself time to breathe and listen.

If you would like support in returning to your practice, contact me for a private virtual breathwork session.

Wherever you are, we can make a little room for the breath  and for the parts of yourself waiting to be heard.

Work with Yuna