Getting high on my own supply

What happened when I gave myself permission to trust my breath.

Hello fellow traveller,

Last week I went to the New Forest for a four-day Holotropic Breathwork retreat.

Holotropic means moving towards wholeness. It's psychedelic breathwork — no substances, just breath. The idea is that the breath itself, when you let it, becomes the guide. Your own inner healer. Your own inner wisdom. Already there, already available, waiting to be trusted.

I had no idea how much I needed to hear that.

The first session was three hours long. For two of those hours I worked harder than I've worked at anything in years. Breathing fast, breathing deep, going all in. Sweating. Pushing. Not stopping. The instruction was to go harder and faster, and I took that completely literally and dived in with masculine energy contradicting all of my own philosophies.

And at the end of those two hours, I had nothing. No insight. No release. No connection. Just exhaustion and a quiet, familiar feeling of having done everything right and arrived nowhere. The third hour I just gave up and waited for it to be over.

Session two was different.

The instruction this time was simpler. Let the breath lead. Don't push it. Just make it a little bigger and follow where it goes. Be curious rather than purposeful.

I said to myself: let go.

Within ten minutes, everything shifted. Two hours of forcing had given me nothing. Ten minutes of letting go gave me everything. I had incredibly profound insights, was able to act on them in the session and also ended with some amazing psychedelic visions plus clarity on how I use those in my onward journey.

That is not a breathwork lesson. That is a life lesson.

The load I didn't know I was carrying

I knew what I'd been through. I had no idea what it had cost me.

When I was six years old, I lost my mother. I lost most of my family, my home, my childhood. I was exposed to serious trauma and loss at an age when none of it should have been mine to carry. With it came a loss of control and a loss of trust — trust in the world, in people, in my body, in my breath, in the universe.

I minimised it for most of my life. Not dishonestly. Because you survive by moving forwards. Because the head and the hands are very good at keeping you going. I was resourceful and practical. I could think and take action and I sensed that those things kept me safe.

What the breathwork showed me was this. That loss of trust led to an overreliance on thought and on action — resourcefulness and doing — as the only tools I had. And while those tools kept me safe and built something extraordinary, they also created their own problems. They narrowed my options. They kept me in a loop I didn't fully see.

I hadn't lost the rest of myself. I'd just stopped listening to it.

What the breath was waiting to show me

I've been on this healing journey for fifteen years. Meditation, breathwork, coaching, wild swimming, cold water, mountains, the Camino. All of it has been the same journey — back to trust. Back to the body. Back to life force. Back to wisdom.

What I hadn't realised was that even my breathwork practice had been using the breath as a tool rather than listening to it as a guide. Still thinking. Still doing. Still controlling, just in a subtler way.

The retreat cracked that open.

And the mantra that came through in the second session was this:

I give myself permission to trust my breath.

Not as a technique. Not as something to deploy. As something to follow. An inner healer. An inner guide. Already there. Already available. Waiting for permission.

Joseph, my voice activation coach, sitting in the woods in Sweden has been teaching me something similar. Voice activation isn't about singing. It's about giving the breath the space to carry whatever it needs to carry from the body. Not forcing. Not performing. Expressing. Connecting. Letting the breath lead.

I've now sung in public for the first time ever. Several times. At the retreat there was a 5 Rhythms dancing session on the Sunday morning. I didn't want to go. Within minutes of it starting, I was almost leading the way and apparently inspiring others. Moving, expressing, completely in my body. I couldn't believe I was the same person who used to say he couldn't dance.

All of it is the same door. The breath, the voice, the movement, the water, the mountains. Each one a path back to life force.

The session one trap

Most of us are living in session one.

We work harder. We push further. We optimise and plan and effort our way towards the breakthrough. And we arrive exhausted, wondering why nothing opened up.

It's not a work ethic problem. It's a direction problem.

Working harder got me absolutely nowhere. Working smarter — which in this case meant letting go, getting curious, and trusting what was already there — reconnected me to something profound in ten minutes.

The things that actually matter — clarity, creativity, connection, joy, genuine insight — they don't come from forcing. They come from the opposite. From trusting the inner healer that is already within you. From following rather than driving. From understanding that thought and action, for all their power, can sometimes just be a mist on the path.

I needed session one not to work. I needed to exhaust every inch of control before I could let go of it. Maybe you do too.

What would happen if you stopped pushing harder and started listening to what's already trying to show you the way?

Best,
Hugh

You've lived many versions of yourself in this lifetime. And there are many more still to come.

If something in this resonates and you'd like to explore what's underneath the effort, that's exactly the kind of conversation we'd have together. Let's talk.

P.S. The mandala I made after session two sits on my desk as I write this. In the centre, an all-seeing eye surrounded by yellow life force. Around the outside, black — the universe. And in between: loss, control, and then gradually, slowly, trust, purpose, balance, joy, connection, family. Life force. The journey isn't linear. But it does go somewhere.