How Breathwork Changed Everything for the Master Compartmentalizer

Take a moment to land here now… softly. slowly. gently.

I’m often asked what breathwork means to me, and what led me to become a breathwork practitioner.

The truth is, my relationship to breathwork was born from a time in my life where I learned how to hold a lot—quietly, and all at once.

Almost a decade ago, I lost my baby sister.
Around that same time, I found myself in an emotionally abusive relationship.

It was a period that asked more of me than I knew how to process.

So I did what many of us do—I adapted.

I stepped into the role of being “the strong one.”
The one who could hold others.
The one who could stay composed.
The one who didn’t fall apart.

And in many ways, that part of me served a purpose. It helped me and my family move through something unthinkable.

But what I didn’t realize at the time was that in learning how to hold everything together…

I was also learning how to put myself aside.

My grief didn’t disappear.
It just became quiet. Contained. Compartmentalized.

It lived in my body in ways I couldn’t yet access.

Years later, at a women’s retreat, I experienced breathwork in a way that shifted something fundamentally.

Not all at once—but enough to feel the opening.

There was a moment where an insight moved through me so clearly:

How attuned I had become to everyone else’s experience…
and how disconnected I was from my own.

That pattern—the one that once helped me survive—was still running.

And for the first time, I could feel it.

During integration, something in me softened.

The grief that had been held so tightly for so long began to move—not as something overwhelming or chaotic, but as something that finally felt safe enough to be experienced.

There was support.
There was space.
There was resourcing in my body that hadn’t been available to me back then.

And in that space, my body did what it had been waiting years to do.

Tears came.
Subtle tremors moved through me.
Sensations I had long held beneath the surface began to release.

It wasn’t a breaking.

It was an unwinding.

The part of me that had learned to be the warrior…
the one who held it all together…

began to unfurl.

And in its place, something else emerged—

Not weakness.
But a deeper kind of strength.

One that didn’t require me to abandon myself.

—

This is why I feel so deeply about this work.

Because I know what it’s like to be the one who holds everything in.
To be highly attuned to others, while quietly disconnected from yourself.
To carry grief, emotion, or tension that doesn’t always have a place to go.

Breathwork didn’t erase my pain.

But it gave it somewhere to move.

And in doing so, it gave me access to parts of myself I didn’t even realize I had been holding back.

—

If you see yourself in this—
in the holding, the compartmentalizing, the “I’m fine” that lives just beneath the surface—

you’re not alone.

And more importantly, your body may be holding more wisdom, more emotion, and more capacity to heal than you’ve been given space to access.

Sometimes, it just needs the right conditions to emerge.

Hi, I’m Chelsea Saunders,

a trauma-informed somatic therapist, Reiki master, and breathwork facilitator based in Los Angeles. I help people resource their nervous systems, and reconnect with their bodies, desires, and relationships through embodied practices like therapy, Reiki, breathwork, and sound.

If this story resonates with you, I’d love to discover what’s possible together. You can explore my services and schedule a clarity call to see how we can work together — online or in person.

Check out more on the blog!