I can do sadness, pain, even grief, but what about fear?

I’m going to be fully transparent with you today.

I’ve lived and experienced some pretty fucked up shit.

I say it like that because it truly doesn’t do it justice to try and sugar coat it with pretty words. It is what it is. And I think by now, if you’ve been here with me for any length of time, you know that honesty is kind of the whole point.

When you’ve experienced a life like this... there are really only two paths you can take.

One where you allow the troubles of your past to cage you. Cage you inside the limiting beliefs of what you think is possible, what you believe you deserve, what you think you’re allowed to want. That cage is comfortable in a terrible kind of way. It’s familiar. It makes sense. It has a logic to it that you can almost defend.

Then there is the other path, where you use what you’ve experienced to shape you, carve you, build you up into something that probably couldn’t have been built any other way.

Tony Robbins has spoken about this his whole life, and the version of it that stays with me the most is something he said about his own hunger, literally.

He grew up poor. One Thanksgiving, when he was eleven years old, there was no food in the house. When he says no food, he means they had crackers and peanut butter, but no meal. And then a stranger knocked on the door with two bags of groceries and an uncooked turkey.

He said that single moment changed his whole life. And he’s reflected since that he doesn’t think he would have gone on to provide billions of meals to people around the world if he hadn’t known what it felt like to go without.

“I think I suffered that way so that others wouldn’t,” he said. “I think if I hadn’t grown up hungry... I don’t think I would work this hard.”

As you move along this journey of life, it’s likely you’ll oscillate between both paths.

There are days you’re building, and days you’re caged again. Most of us do both, sometimes in the same afternoon.

But eventually, you have to make a decision.

I came very close to the break. My first and only failed suicide attempt in 2018 left me in a weird kind of limbo.

A strange suspended state of... what next for me?

And then I found a light so bright I couldn’t look away.

My husband.

Though that’s a whole other essay. Probably a whole other year of essays, maybe more. But what I can tell you is that he arrived in my life at a moment when I genuinely wasn’t sure there was a life worth staying for, and something in me recognised him on a level I feel very few people get to experience.

Since then we’ve grown together, in the way that only two people who are truly willing to look at themselves can grow together. And not without friction. Not without the long nights and the hard conversations and the moments of coming face to face with your own patterns in the reflection of someone who loves you too much to pretend they’re not there.

We’ve faced our demons, and continue to do so—the ongoing work of two humans trying to build something honest without dragging the rubble of their pasts through the front door every morning.

We moved from living off $25 of food for the week in a home on the railway tracks across from a halfway house, to living ocean side in a million dollar home for the last six years now.

A devoted marriage, five years this year.

A beautiful, wild, angel of a daughter turning three.

Dreams upon dreams.

And I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it’s easy to list those things like a highlight reel and move straight past the weight of them. But those aren’t just facts. They’re the evidence of a life that was rebuilt, slowly, on purpose, with intention and love and a willingness to keep going when the easier choice was to stop.

Life now is one of those kinds of lives I used to dream about in the loneliness of my life “before”... a little desperately might I add, wondering if maybe, someday, I’d have something so special, so real and so truly mine.

And through some miracle, some hard work, and some very intentional choosing, it became true.

And now, coming to the end of my training as a breathworker, after three years of personal practice and over two years of professional training, I’ve created a level of safety, love and belonging in my own body that is seriously beyond what I thought I could ever experience. Beyond what the version of me standing on a hill with too many drugs and toxins in my system, wondering if this really was going to be my last breath, could have imagined asking for.

Hundreds of hours of showing up on the mat. The bed. Whatever surface was available to set an intention for what I really want in life and stay with whatever arose.

And some seriously dark experiences have risen. All because I felt safe enough, supported enough, ready enough and willing enough. Or in enough pain.

Because that's the other reason we finally go there, isn't it? It's not always readiness. Sometimes it's just that the cost of staying the same has finally gotten higher than the cost of feeling it.

And up until a few weeks ago, there was genuinely no place I wasn’t willing to go.

What’s inside this letter:

The Physics Class Trigger: The one line a teacher said that had me balling my eyes out and running out of class. Why a fact about something five billion years away activated a fear so immediate and physical I couldn’t stay in the room.

What the Fear Actually Is: Not the philosophical version. The body version. What it feels like from the inside, why logic and reassurance don’t touch it, and why I’ve always suspected it’s older than anything I can consciously remember.

The Life I Built Around It: From banning paranormal movies to putting a rule in place from day one of my relationship, the very deliberate, very effective architecture of never fully meeting this one. How you can be willing to go almost anywhere emotionally... and still keep one door carefully managed for years.

When It Came Back: The full bodied intensity that became impossible to ignore after my first online breathwork retreat. Up until midnight, frozen. What it actually looked like when this fear came roaring back at a whole new level, and what my husband did that I’ll never forget.

Tracking It Back to Body Memory: What breathwork has taught me about where a fear like this actually lives. Why it surfaces in waves rather than being always present. And the thread that connects this to something far older than physics class.

Why I Haven’t Fully Brought It to a Session Yet: The honest part. What it looks like to be someone who has breathed through genuinely dark territory and still find yourself circling around one particular thing. What that’s showing me. And why writing this out loud feels like the first real move to my own personal integration.

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Let’s go...

It came out of nowhere. As these things usually do.

I was fifteen. Sitting in physics class. And Bill (he liked us calling him by his first name) was talking about the sun. About its lifespan. About the fact that in approximately five billion years, it will expand into what they call a red giant and essentially swallow the earth whole.

Now. Rationally. Five billion years. Not exactly something that requires urgent action on a Tuesday afternoon.

But my body didn’t get that memo.

Something sucked me into oblivion. I remember my vision narrowing, this wave of gnawing emptiness opening up in my chest like something had reached in and hollowed me out. And then I was crying. Not the kind you can blink back. Big, awful, gasping crying that came from somewhere I didn’t know was open. I got up and sprinted, half stumbled, out of the classroom because I had no other option. My body was already leaving before my brain had caught up with what was happening.

I don’t even remember what came after that. Maybe Bill came out to see what the hell was going on? I genuinely have no idea. I’ve completely blanked it. What I DO remember though is not being able to explain what I was feeling. Not to him, not to myself, not to anyone. There were no words for it that made sense out loud.

I’m not sure I can fully explain it now either. But what I know is that it wasn’t really about the sun. It was about the end of everything.

The total, complete, permanent cessation of all of it. Not transformed somewhere. Not continued in some other form. Just... gone. All the love and the effort and the building and the living, and then one day, on a long enough timeline, just. Gone.

I was catastrophising into an incomprehensibly distant future and my body was responding as though it was happening right now, this Tuesday, in fourth period physics.

That’s fear. That’s the texture of it for me.

Not the kind of fear that sharpens you in fight or flight. Not the adrenaline-edged kind that makes you quick and alert and alive. The other kind. The kind that swallows you. The kind that feels like the ground is dissolving under your feet and there’s nothing to hold onto because the thing you’re afraid of is so enormous and so inevitable that no amount of logic or breathing or reassurance actually touches it.

That was the first time I remember meeting it properly.

And it turns out, it wouldn’t be the last.

I want to be careful here, because fear has this thing where it shape-shifts when you name it. You think you’ve got it identified and then you try to explain it and suddenly you’re not quite sure what you’re explaining anymore.

What I can tell you is that the flavour of this fear is about cessation. About non-existence. About the absolute, total, permanent end of... me. Of the people I love. Of our bodies in the ground. Of humankind maybe. Of everything, really.

Some people would call it existential dread. And sure, that’s a container for it.

But when I’m in it, it doesn’t feel philosophical. It doesn’t feel like an interesting intellectual question to sit with over a glass of wine. It feels visceral. Physical. Like the inside of my chest is a room and something enormous is pressing against all the walls at once.

I can feel it opening its eye in my chest right now as I write this, and it’s fucking uncomfortable to say the least.

And the part that’s hard to convey without sounding dramatic... is that the body memory of this fear is so deep and so old that when it surfaces, it can stay for days, which is ugly.

Because I become a kind of pale, slow, hollow version of myself. A zombie in my own life. Barely functional. Barely present. Sitting across from my daughter with paper and crayons, having to mentally drag myself back into the room over and over again because the pull of the fear is that strong.

And I want to clarify what I mean when I say body memory. Because after everything I've learned in this breathwork training, I understand that fear like this isn't a thought problem. It's not something I can think my way through or talk myself down from. It's stored somewhere far below the level where logic operates. In the cells. In the nervous system. In whatever got imprinted back when the body was first learning what it meant to survive.

Here’s the thing about this particular fear. From the outside, if you knew what it was about, you might think it was completely irrational.

And in a way, you’d be right.

But the body doesn’t do rational.

I banned scary movies at the very start of my relationship. Not negotiated. Banned. I told Nathan early on, this is a non-negotiable. No paranormal films. No jump scares. No “boo” around the corner for a laugh. We can joke about it now, the way I delivered that information with such certainty, like I was reading a policy document.

But it wasn’t really about the movies or the scares around the corner.

It was about protecting my nervous system from being activated in a way I had no capacity to recover from quickly. Because I knew, on some level I knew, that for most people a horror film is a couple of hours of elevated heart rate and then fine. For me, it could spiral into days of the fear. It could unlock the room.

I’ve done this in other ways too. Avoided certain conversations. Steered around certain topics. Distracted myself with my new beautiful, full, abundant life, which, to be clear, I genuinely love. But I’ve also used it as a layer between me and the thing I hadn’t looked at properly.

The avoidance isn’t dramatic. It’s the art of living a very full life in a way that keeps a particular door mostly closed.

And I’ve been good at it.

Until I wasn’t.

A few weeks ago I set some big intentions. The kind that made me put the pen down for a second after I wrote them. The kind where some part of you goes... “Okay. We’re really doing this then. We’re actually going there.”

And that’s the thing about intentions like that. The body hears them. And once it hears them, it starts surfacing whatever is in the way.

Not as a spiritual metaphor. That's literally what happens in this type of breathwork, and actually happens for people organically who have never heard of it. Intention plus body sensations plus conscious breath plus time creates the conditions for what's unresolved to rise.

I've watched it happen in hundreds of sessions, with myself, my peers, my clients. And the deeper the intention, often but not always, the deeper the surfacing.

At first I was just noticing this fear that was arising on the periphery. A familiar low hum. I’d feel it and kind of look away. Let it be there, but didn’t engage with it. Then, over the course of the last week after my first online breathwork retreat, it ramped up to a whole other level.

A full bodied intensity in my normal day to day life that became impossible to ignore. Up until midnight over multiple nights, completely frozen. The fear so rooted in my chest I genuinely thought it was going to swallow me whole. Shaking tears, wet drops flooding my husband’s bare chest as he whispered every reassurance he could find, for hours, into the crook of my ear so as not to wake the toddler. My body hot and sweaty and shaking in the dark.

He just stayed. That’s the thing about Nathan. He just... stays. Without needing it to stop, or fix, or distract.

And I kept thinking, I can do sadness. I’ve sat in grief that felt ancestral, like I was crying for generations of people who never got to. I’ve felt rage so clean it surprised me. I’ve breathed through pain that made me want to tap out, yet didn’t. I’ve gone to places in sessions that I didn’t know existed in me and come back changed.

But this. This fear.

This is the one I am still yet to even consider going to.

Here’s what I know, from the inside of this work. The body holds what the mind can’t process.

When we work with cellular memory in breathwork, we understand that some of what’s held in the body doesn’t come from this week, or this year, or even this lifetime in a conscious sense. Some of it, honestly most of it, goes all the way back to the very beginning. To conception and birth. To the first moments of arriving here, in a body, in a world, with no language for any of it.

Birth is the first transition. The first experience of moving through a threshold not knowing what’s on the other side. The first encounter with something that, in the body, feels indistinguishable from annihilation.

And what I keep turning over is this idea that sits in the theory of this work... that the fear of death is actually the fear of birth repeating. Not the philosophical concept of dying. The cellular memory of what it felt like to move through that first terrifying passage, not knowing you’d survive it. Not knowing there was anything on the other side.

I was a planned caesarean. And the body memories I’ve touched in sessions have a particular flavour to them. I don’t have the tunnel, the struggle through. For me it’s something else entirely.

What I’ve felt, in those moments, is the memory of being ripped from the most complete belonging I’ve ever known. Warmth. Connection. Something I can only describe as pure love, God, whatever that word means to you. A state of total oneness that had no language but that my body apparently remembers very clearly.

And then the violent interruption of all of that. The cold air on my skin. The wet feeling that was new. The harsh lights. The strange faces. That frown I can almost feel forming on my newborn forehead, the closest thing a minutes-old baby has to the thought... what the actual fuck is this?

From everything, to this. From pure belonging to the dramatic shock of a world that doesn’t feel anything like where you just came from.

And I wonder if that’s where this fear actually lives?

Not in a physics classroom. Not in anything that’s happened in this lifetime consciously. But in that oldest grief, the cellular memory of having once known something so complete, so connected, and then having it interrupted so suddenly and so absolutely.

My fear of cessation might really just be my body still mourning that first loss.

Still braced for it to happen again.

Which is why the managing has never actually worked.

I want to be honest about this part too.

I haven’t fully brought this to a session yet.

And in some ways, it’s not something I really have to do. Breathwork Mastery (RBM) is future-focused, with only what is in the way of those intentions coming up to be strengthened, released, resolved and/or rewired.

So I don’t actually need to go hunting for it.

Yet even with this knowledge, after the week I’d had, I’ll be honest… I was hesitant to set up my next breathe, for fear (ironic I know) that if it was so present in my body now, that I was on some level—safe enough, supported enough, willing enough, ready enough OR in enough pain, to actually go there.

But when I came to the exchange session I had planned, after a week of feeling so fried from the terror, what I found at the heart of my intentions wasn’t related to this at all.

What was true for me in that moment was something softer. Intentions around working with my cycle, around flow and momentum and integrity as my family moves into the next chapter. There was warmth in my chest as I spoke them out loud. A smile I didn’t have to manufacture or perform or “fake it till you make it”.

Hope bloomed in my body after a week of bottoming out. And wow, I really fucking needed that.

And do you know what came of the actually session? Something I didn’t expect but wasn’t surprised to receive. A beautiful, gentle, deeply affirming and restful experience. The kind of session that doesn’t crack anything open, it just... settles everything back down.

I came out feeling so relaxed it felt like a different body entirely. And I remember walking out to find my husband playing fairy wings and flying around the playroom with our daughter, and he just looked up at me and sighed, the way he does when he can see the weight has lifted, and said, “I’m so happy for you. I missed you.”

And that was it. That was the whole thing.

The breath found what I actually needed, not what I thought I was supposed to be working on. It does that. It always does that.

But this fear... I’m still making friends with the idea of letting the breath go all the way there. Still building the safety for it. Still in a kind of negotiation with the part of me that has kept this door managed for a very long time.

There’s no failure in that. The body does things in its own time. The breath can only work with what the nervous system is ready to offer.

And I think part of why I’m writing this today is exactly what the title says. Saying it out loud helps take the pressure off. Naming it, here, in this space where I know I’m being met, makes it slightly less enormous. Not solved. Not integrated. But less like a secret I’m keeping from myself.

The work continues. The mat is there. The breath is always there.

And maybe next week, or the week after, I’ll tell you what happened when I finally let myself go there.

For now, this is where I am. And that feels like enough.

Haven x