Other People's Healing Is Not Your Responsibility

But yours is, so get to breathing. How breathwork radically changed the trajectory of my life.

A month ago, I participated in an all-women’s breathwork ceremony.

It was a hot and humid afternoon in the Caribbean, and my emotional, physical, and mental battery was on empty. I needed to remember who I was and what I came on this planet to do and share. Breathwork was the perfect medicine. With every session, clarity and answers exceed any fear of the unknown. The breath holds immense power in healing. I am all too familiar with it, being a guide myself. It’s where I am most comfortable. Holding space for others is second nature, but being a student, giving up my control is hard. Taking my healing into my own hands is so scary, yet vital. On my mat, surrounded by 15 powerful women, I readied myself for the next 60 minutes of breathing. Dry mouth, sweating, heart racing, and anticipation rising.

Ready to receive. Ready for the lessons.

Inhales and exhales are all it takes: no psychedelics, no plants, nothing outside of you, just you and your breath.

You gain clarity and heal by breathing, clearing, and sweeping out any blockages inhibiting emotion and feeling. Using the breath in a particular method, you release what’s been stuck, the years, even lifetimes, of stored stress, trauma, and pain accumulated over time. That has weighed you down and held you back.

Within minutes of breathing in a conscious, circular rhythm, you begin to clear in the form of expression; laughing uncontrollably, crying hysterically, gut-wrenching screams, fist-pounding anger, body shakes, complete ecstasy, and even orgasmic pleasure. The range is vast, and there is no limit to the rainbow of sensations and emotions that may move through you.

My mentor and teacher, Steven Jaggers, says: we are expression vessels.

We have a human need to express ourselves: primal expression, sexual expression, spiritual expression, mental expression, and verbal expression. Yet, much of the world we live in now belittles, mocks, and shames expression. See it as “too much.” Many even get uncomfortable around others crying or in their fullest state of expression. We have been programmed and conditioned to sit down, shut up, live to work, and turn off our emotions. For many, control is instilled as children within the school system and carried on into adulthood in societal-wide ideas of synonymously linking productivity to worth in the form of the 40-hour work week. Often equating a happy life to monetary success, not by how much we can feel or express within our own life or relationships with others. The effects? Most of us walk through life asleep, quiet, and repressed. We do not realize the detrimental impact of suppressing our emotions on our health and well-being. Desensitized to the world.

Now, more than ever, we see a shift. We want more from life; we want to heal from our past.

A collective waking up to the numbness, darkness, and inability to share our feelings. We want to feel. We want to feel it all. Vulnerability is the new cleavage. Emotional maturity is the new sexy. We’re being seduced by men in therapy and fantasizing about women in sister circles. Collective healing is happening, and quite frankly, it’s really hot.

As the session began, I set my intention, “surrender.” Allowing the breath to provide me with the medicine and messages I was there to receive. I laid back, eyes closed and reluctantly began to breathe. Flat on my back, limbs heavy, feeling my belly rise and fall, with no pause between inhale and exhale, out of the head and into the body.

Inhale, exhale. I observe the breath. Feel its power.

Within minutes my hands started to tingle, and my jaw tensed. 5 minutes in, the tears begin to well up behind my eyelids, a lump in my throat. My mind scrambles to put a story to the feelings, but I don’t let it. Instead, I allow whatever is coming up to move out and through. I begin to cry. The crying lasts a song or two, and I bring myself back to my breathing rhythm. Within minutes, tears well up for a second round, ball in my throat. “More?!”

I continue to cry—and one by one, the screams, yells, laughter, and sadness domino around the room like a ripple. A sacred container of women all individually, yet collectively, feeling. Unescapable deep grief and pain. An explosion of emotions from every angle.

Hysterical, I roll over onto my side and hold myself in the fetal position while I sob uncontrollably. It feels cathartic, medicinal, and slightly foreign. My mind races around stories of my ex, sexual trauma, and anger at myself for not being “over it” yet. Putting myself on some imaginary healing timeline. I hear myself, “I thought we were through this?!” I begin to judge myself for not being “healed” yet. Wondering if I ever will be? I am in such a hurry to nowhere.

I stay curled up on my side. The crying finally slows to a whimper after 30 minutes or so. I feel clearer, lighter, and freer, no longer storing all that sadness inside me. I am exhausted; I just ran an emotional marathon. It is called breathwork for a reason. I want to get up and go home, but I can’t. With no more energy to breathe and still 30 minutes of the session remaining.

I lay there curled up in a ball. Listening.

All around me were sounds—a tornado of emoting. To my left, a dear sister, grieving. Blood-curdling yells, “no, no, no, no,” she pleaded and gasped. I wondered what she was reliving. What part of the subconscious had she accessed? Clearing it out, we have to die before we are reborn. It shook me to my core. I wanted to reach out and grab her hand, run my fingers through her hair, and tell her everything was going to be okay.

But I couldn’t. So I lay there.

To my right side, heavy panting. Cooing like a baby. Gentle hums. Drowned out by more crying, distant hysterics, and yelling from every corner of the space. I wanted nothing more than to get off my mat and hold every woman in my arms. Thinking, “If I hold them long enough, maybe they will heal.”

But I couldn’t do that either. So I lay there. Listening.

As an empath and compassionate person, I care so deeply. I feel everything so fully. Your pain is mine. I go deep into my depths of feeling—the depths of other’s wounds—the pain of friends, family, and students. At times I struggle to separate myself. Praying for others to know how much I feel with them, wondering if it will ease their pain for them. Hoping that others feel cared for, seen, and felt so they know they are not alone. Carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders and placing immense amounts of pressure on myself to be a safe space for others to heal.

Hoping that if I over-care, love a little harder, and hold a little tighter, maybe they will heal faster.

The problem is that I care so much about others that I abandon myself. I rush my own process. I extend my arms to you before I even hold myself. Empathetic people are nodding in understanding, I am sure.

My mind began to race to all of the times I thought my love alone would heal someone else.

It didn’t.

A mind movie of all of the over-extended energy, problem-solving, and fix-it mentality in hopes it would save my beloved one from his addiction.

It didn’t.

I imagined myself rising from my mat and tenderly holding my sister to the left. Envisioning her leaping up, hugging me back, jumping for joy, “I’m healed! I’m healed!”

Of course, I didn’t. She didn’t. I wish it were that simple, but that’s not how the non-linear healing process works.

At this moment, the messages and insights began pouring in.

“Other people’s healing is not your responsibility.”

A voice. So clear and direct. My higher self? The Divine? Does it need to be named? A flood of messages amidst a flurry of screams.

The guidance was scribbled into my journal as follows:

You can not expedite any one else healing journey

You can not expedite your own

Release yourself of the pressure 

Take the weight of the world off your shoulders 

Your process is YOUR process 

There is nothing anyone does, or says, that will speed it up

Go at your own pace 

Can you let others sit in their pain, as an empathetic witness, and love from a distance?

Trauma is the teacher 

Trauma is your teacher

Lessons in the darkness 

Other people’s healing is not your responsibility 

Let go of your control and trust Me

This moment would change the trajectory of my life. Laying smack dab in the epicenter in a room full of wild, feeling women. Realizing and accepting that there was nothing I could do about anyone’s pain. No amount of my empathy would fix their broken hearts. My holding, stroking, and love would never alone heal their past wounds.

I understood and felt, for the first time, that other people’s healing was not my responsibility.

I gently let go of the guilt and shame I had accumulated for not being victorious in changing my ex, bringing him out of addiction, or over-caring for him into his healing.

It’s not my job to heal anyone. It’s not possible to heal anyone.

Healing is an inside job. It’s singular. It’s personal. It’s slow, painful, and mysterious. And it has to be decided by you and only you. When and if you are ever ready.

Before the ceremony, I knew all of this to be true, but for the first time, I felt free of the pressure I had placed on myself to be the healer.

A secret: there is no such thing as a healer outside of yourself.

“The session begins after the session,” Steven says.

Post-session, someone from my past messaged me. Where his words would have once triggered me, instead, I was curious. I wondered if he had changed since the last time we spoke. A round of messages was exchanged, and I realized he hadn’t. Same shit, different day. On a silver platter, I was given an opportunity to check in on my progress. Further, integrate my lessons. I had changed, grown.

My breath taught me to accept my process and to be more gentle with myself in situations like these.

My brain was rewiring, and old patterns were breaking, “Other people’s healing is not your responsibility,” echoed in my mind.

My breath taught me to release control of the uncontrollable.

I smiled, hit *block*, and whispered, “thank you,” into the sky.

Slowly slowly, one day at a time, you begin to heal. Nothing anyone says or does will expedite the process. No amount of love, care, or empathy, will change that. You are your own healer; stop there. You are only responsible for your own healing. No amount of love or control will change anyone into the version of them that you want them to be or know them to be capable of achieving. Just as no one can do the same for you.

One day, they may get there in their own time and in their own way.

Or maybe, they won’t.

The good news is other people’s healing is not your responsibility.

(Thank you to Sydney, a powerful Breathworker for holding the space for my awakening. I love you.)