Healing and Emotional Release

I will never forget the day that I realized how healing of any kind is so intrinsically linked with our emotions. 

About 11 or 12 years ago, I was seeing a massage therapist for my hip issues and we had just finished a session when she asked if she could try a short exercise with me.  Always game for something new… I immediately agreed! 

She nattered a bit about the mind-body connection (which, at the time, I didn’t give too much weight), and then handed me a piece of long string.  She asked me to sit on the floor and place the string around my body—however I felt inclined. 

So I did. And when I looked down to look at it, the shape I’d created with the string looked eerily like a chalk outline of a dead body. Not even an inch of space around me. 

She looked at me gently and said, “You are protecting yourself so hard that there’s no room for you to grow… or to let anyone else in.” 

Apparently, most people make a big, wide, lovely circle or at least leave a few inches of space between the string and their body. But mine was flush against me.  

I burst into tears. Not just a few polite tears. I cried all afternoon, all evening and into the night.  

Something let go that day… something big.   

And honestly… I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. 

Looking back now, I think it was a full-body, full-soul kind of overwhelm… a lifetime of tight-holding, armoring, managing, bracing… finally given permission to release.  

That one small exercise was a nudge I didn’t know I needed.  It wasn’t dramatic on the outside. But on the inside, something shifted. 

Space opened.  And with that space… came something new. 

Just a few months after that string-on-the-floor moment, I was introduced to Marnie through a Breath Therapy class. 

At the time, I didn’t know what breath therapy was or why I needed it. I just knew I was curious and maybe a little desperate for something different. 

That class changed my life… 

It changed my relationship with pain. 

It gave me tools to heal from the inside out. 

It showed me that breath is both anchor and release. 

And, just as beautifully… it began a friendship that would, over a decade later, become a business partnership rooted in healing, nervous system support, and functional wellness. 

Weird eh?!?!? 

Sometimes we think we need a big breakthrough to change… but often, it's a moment of unexpected release that opens the door. A tear. A breath. A string on the floor. 

Since then, I’ve come to understand something I didn’t have the language for back then… 

Emotional release isn’t a side effect of healing. It is healing. 

We tend to think of healing as a calm, linear process… something that happens once we’ve figured everything out and have ‘got it together.’ But in truth? It often looks like messiness, softness, stillness, and unexpected tears. It looks like the body finally feeling safe enough to let go of what it’s been holding for far too long. 

Sometimes those releases are loud and obvious.  Sometimes they’re quiet and confusing.  But every single one of them is meaningful. 

They’re the body’s way of saying, “It’s okay now. You don’t have to carry this anymore.” 

And that space that opens up afterward… the quiet, the breath, the possibility… that’s the real medicine. 

Trust that when the body lets go, the healing can truly begin. 

Much Love