Why breathwork?

I haven’t been very vocal about this aspect of my violinist career, but this is about to change. I am discovering that many individuals (musicians or in a wide range of other industries) who have high pressure careers, have the belief that stress is just part of the job, and that there is nothing to be done about it.

Waking up exhausted. Lying awake at night unable to turn off my mind. Pushing through even when my body was screaming at me to slow down. I started to lose my hair. My mental health was down the drain. My body was aching. Yet everything appeared perfectly normal on the outside. Does this sound familiar? This has been my reality for over a decade. The culprit? STRESS!

For a long time I was in denial about the level of stress I was experiencing, because it was my baseline. I remember back in college, I was hoping there would be a class to teach us how to deal with stress. At Juilliard, there was one class that taught me about sports psychology and the power the mind can have in the preparation of a stressful event through visualization. It was mostly mindset principles, and it was fascinating and definitely helpful in dealing with a very specific timeframe, the pre-performance part. But what happened as soon as the performance was done? I would ride the high that comes with it, then crash hard. Juilliard also taught me Alexander Technique and how to align my body to efficiently support what is a very physically demanding career. Even with these tools, I was still feeling like the elastic band was getting tighter and tighter and never really fully relaxed. So I started practicing yoga, which is wonderful. Yoga is still part of my routine. It feels amazing and the mind does quiet, but it never reached the deep underlying hum of stress I felt in my day-to-day life. And everything seemed fine enough, so I told myself “I’m tough, I can handle this, I just need more exposure and I’ll get used to it!” (spoiler, I never did…)

I auditioned for the concermaster job in the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony while I was finishing up my Master’s at Juilliard. By the time the audition process wrapped up (over a year), I accepted the job and Ian and I moved to KW. I believe the first 5 years in an orchestra job are the hardest, and I have always put a lot of pressure on myself to give my 110% in everything I do. This was no different. I remember these years being equal parts exciting and gruelling as I was learning the bulk of the orchestral repertoire on very quick turnaround (we had a new program mostly every week). Stepping into a leadership role at 24 years old, as a woman, is not an easy thing to do. Most of my colleagues (all of them older than me, most by 20 plus years) were supportive and welcoming, but some were not. This was essentially a pressure cooker and I dealt with it with as much grace as I could. I have to recognize that through this time in my life, although not always pleasant, I did grow and learn a ton. Still, the elastic band was getting stretched even more. I was now a master of “high-functioning anxiety”, no one except those closest to me could ever guess that something was wrong because I was so good at hiding it.

Then the whole world collapsed. I just had my first baby in 2019 when everything shut down early 2020. I was at home, not facing any performance stress, but plenty of other stressors were present, and that’s the first time I realized that maybe this stress was just there all the time, not just when I played a concert. I chalked it up to being a new mom and growing pains being normal in my new role. For my second baby, everything was still not fully back to normal (especially the in-person events like concerts) so we decided to move back to Quebec to be around my family so I could get a bit more support. Things were still not settling and I was questioning everything by that point, struggling with depression, anxiety, and constantly trying to fix something I couldn’t quite identify clearly. I tried therapy, meditation, implementing more self-care into my routine, but the elastic band was getting alarmingly tight. I didn’t know who I was anymore, the truth being that my identity had been intertwined with violin from the age of 5 and I kind of lost my sense of self even further when I became a mom. At this point I believed that being on stage would actually help me feel like myself again, so we sold our house in Quebec and bought a house sight-unseen back in Ontario where my orchestra is. I was very optimistic that this would make me feel normal again. The day we finished packing up our house in Quebec I got the email not to come to work the following Monday. The orchestra was declaring bankruptcy. Talk about timing, it really was a straight out of a movie kind of situation. That for me was the last stretch of the elastic that finally made it snap. For 2 years after that, I was barely surviving. I completely disassociated from my emotions in that time. I was in survival mode.

I was introduced to Samatha Skelly, founder of Pause Breathwork, in May 2025 through a free masterclass on Jenn Pike’s Synced platform (that’s where I get my wonderful workouts from). In that session, I cried, I wept, I felt things I didn’t even know were there to be felt. I was shaken to my core, in the best way possible. I knew I had just experienced something truly special. Over the summer, I participated in a few free practicum sessions with students from the same program I am now taking. Every session, something different would come up. In these sessions, I experienced release from a wide range of emotions; sadness, anger, frustration, grief. This is when I knew I needed to learn more about this modality and share this gift with the world. Because somehow, as humans, we forgot how to breathe. We go about life holding our breaths, only using it to survive. But our breaths are the most incredible, accessible, free tool we can use to truly thrive.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t found the magic cure to stress, I still experience a lot of it on a daily basis (hello motherhood and performing arts career!), but I have found a way to truly release it from my body instead of repressing it and carrying it around with me. What did I change? Quite a few things, actually. I started strength training about a year ago (seriously, check out Synced, it changed my life!) and started eating more (yes, stress was affecting even my appetite). I now feel strong and healthy in my body. But there was still something I couldn’t quite put my finger on until I experienced breathwork. You see, every emotion that we experience, but don’t let ourselves truly feel, gets stored in the body. This is what I was doing with all the stress I was experiencing. I thought I could handle it by ignoring it, by repressing it. Turns out, that’s a recipe for disaster. The body does keep score. Breathwork is like finally finding your relief valve, it allows your system to evacuate the built-up pressure.

So, why is a facilitator trained in a trauma-informed approach (Pause breathwork) crucial when it comes to breathwork? Why not just find a video tutorial and do it on your own without a guide? After all, breathing is free! The answer is simple; it’s because if we release too much too soon, we can feel overwhelmed and even risk re-traumatizing ourselves, which then leads back to a shutdown of our emotions. The goal is to regulate the nervous system first by creating a safe environment both physically and emotionally, and the facilitator acts as a guide through this. When our body feels safe, it allows us to go deeper and release what has been repressed and stored there from the moment we were born. We call this titration. By breathing consciously and in different patterns, we can also start to increase our capacity to handle stress. In a breathwork session, the breather is always their highest authority and chooses the intensity, depth, and speed of the breath according to their own physical sensations, and their own threshold for safety.

I also want to validate that although your circumstances might not look anything like mine, as humans, we all experience stress and trauma, this is not a contest. It’s all about trusting ourselves and getting out of our own way so the body can take over and heal itself. You really have to experience it to understand it!

If you’re curious, and ready to get back home to your authentic self, head over to my Coaching page to book a free session. Please share this with anyone you know who might need a respite, and a reminder to take the time to catch their breath.