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When Is It Acceptable to Cry? What Emotional Suppression Is Really Costing You

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:23:43 GMT

What the Body Holds When the Mind Won't Allow It

What Society Considers Acceptable Grief

At a funeral. Tears of joy at your child's birth. At a wedding. End of a sad movie. Or your underdog team finally winning a championship.

That's the list. That's what our culture gave us.

But here's the real question - what happens to the tears we never shed?

For most of my life - as a man - that list felt even shorter.

The Emotions We Were Never Given Permission to Feel

My mother's passing taught me something about grief. I feel nobody loves me more than my mom. That unconditional love provided me so much comfort throughout my life. I think about her every single day. I miss her every single day. But it doesn't weigh heavy on me the way you might expect - and I think it's because I was allowed to grieve. I cried my eyes out. Society gave me permission. And somehow, that permission made it possible to carry her with me without being crushed by her absence.

Not everything gets that permission.

When my son was diagnosed with autism, I put on a tough face and went to work. I did everything I could to get him help, to understand, to navigate a world that wasn't built for him or for us. There was no time to feel the sadness of knowing your child will not have the same childhood, the same opportunities, the same life that most will have.

You don't cry. You cope. You push. You perform.

And then you wonder why some mornings you wake up and something is just off. Not sad exactly. Not angry exactly. Just - wrong. Grumpy with no logical explanation. The opposite of your usual self. Mean in a way you don't recognize and can't explain. You look at your life and it's objectively good. Beautiful even.

And still. Something underneath.

When Life Looks Beautiful But Something Feels Off

I live on a small beautiful tropical island. I do work I am genuinely passionate about. I have a wonderful wife who shares my values and has a ridiculous sense of humor like me - or at least gets it. I wake up most mornings looking forward to the day ahead.

Freediving gave me so much of this. The joy. The community. The identity. The healing that happened slowly and then all at once.

But there was still something underneath that freediving reached but didn't fully move.

What Conscious Connected Breathwork Unlocked

About two years ago I was introduced to Conscious Connected Breathwork .

One session showed me the potential. Although I did not cry my eyes out like some people did in that room that evening, something shifted in a way that I knew this was the right direction.

Earlier this year I attended a breathwork facilitator training. We had sessions almost every day. At first nothing dramatic happened for me - I watched classmates around me have big cathartic moments while something in me was stirring but hadn't found its way out yet.

My entire body was vibrating.

After four or five sessions it came.

A cry that had been waiting to come out for many decades.

And in other sessions - uncontrollable laughter that lasted fifteen minutes. Joy and grief living in the same body, taking turns.

Not every session had a dramatic moment. But every single one left me with more clarity than I went in with. Because the breathwork was reaching what the mind had carefully, quietly protected for years. The things we suppress don't disappear. They wait. Without language. In the body. And it doesn't just quietly sit there dormant - it wreaks havoc, often in subtle ways. So subtle we just think it's our true self.

That wasn't the end. I kept going. Session after session. Each one peeling back another layer. Some dramatic. Some quiet. All of them necessary.

After those sessions I felt lighter. A heaviness lifted that I had stopped noticing I was carrying.

It may take a lifetime to get it all out. And that's okay - because I know I am on the right path now.

The Breathwork Retreat

Why am I telling you this?

Because I believe one of the most insidious things any of us can carry is the weight of everything we were never given permission to put down.

In September I am holding a Conscious Connected Breathwork retreat. Facilitated alongside someone I deeply trust. For people who are ready to create the conditions for something to move.

No promises about what will happen. These things are different for everyone. But if you have ever sat with a heaviness that has no name, a cry that won't come, or a life that looks right from the outside while something inside feels quietly off -

This might be for you.

Check out the details of the retreat here .

Conscious Connected Breathwork: A Complete, Honest Guide to What It Is and How It Works

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:52:32 GMT

This is a subtitle for your new post

Conscious connected breathwork is a guided breathing practice in which you breathe in a continuous, circular rhythm — no pause between the inhale and the exhale — sustained for the length of the session. That single change in how you breathe shifts your body's chemistry, your nervous system, and your brain itself: as the thinking, self-monitoring prefrontal cortex quiets, the emotional centres open up, and that's the door to everything else the practice is known for.

It's sometimes called circular breathwork , because the inhale rolls straight into the exhale and back again with no gap — the breath moves in a loop rather than a series of stops and starts.

It's worth knowing up front that "conscious connected breathwork" is also an umbrella term. The continuous-breathing pattern sits at the center of several related practices: rebirthing breathwork , developed by Leonard Orr in the 1970s; holotropic breathwork , developed by Stanislav and Christina Grof (more on that history below); and modern branded formats like 9D breathwork, which layer sound design and guided journeys over the same underlying mechanism. They differ in music, framing, and facilitation style, but the engine is the same: connected breathing, sustained.

How it actually works

Most breathing techniques you've heard of tell you to slow down — longer exhales, box breathing, four-in-four-out. This is the opposite. The pattern here is slightly faster and rhythmic, and you hold it for the whole session rather than a few minutes.

Sustaining that pattern lowers the level of carbon dioxide (CO<sub>2</sub>) in your blood, which temporarily shifts the balance of gases in your system and nudges your blood chemistry toward a mild alkalosis. That might sound like a side effect, but it's the actual mechanism. That chemical shift is what signals your autonomic nervous system — the part of you that runs stress, rest, heart rate, and threat detection without your conscious input — to change state.

Here's the part that matters, and the part most breathwork marketing skips over. When the nervous system shifts like this, the thinking mind gets quieter. The mental chatter that normally filters and manages everything you feel starts to loosen its grip. And when that filter loosens, material that's been sitting underneath it — emotions, physical tension, old memories, the low-grade hyper vigilance a lot of people carry without noticing — has room to surface. That's the mechanism behind emotional release. It isn't mystical. Your body finally has the space to move something it's been holding, and it takes it.

This is why I'm careful about how the practice gets described. CCB isn't a relaxation technique that happens to be intense. Its whole point is to dig into the subconscious material driving stress, anxiety, and that "wired but tired" state — and to do it through physiology, not belief.

What CCB is NOT

Because "breathwork" has become a catch-all word, it's easy to lump very different practices together. CCB is a specific thing, and it helps to say what it isn't.

It's not box breathing or slow breathing. Techniques like box breathing, physiological sighs, or 4-7-8 breathing are down-regulation tools — you slow the breath to calm the nervous system in the moment. They're genuinely useful; I teach them to my freediving students to lower the stress response and conserve oxygen, and they work well for that. But they work by settling you down . CCB works by ramping the system up into an altered state so that deeper material can surface. Different pattern, different mechanism, different purpose.

It's not the Wim Hof Method. Wim Hof combines cycles of heavy breathing with breath retention (holding the breath out) and cold exposure. It's built around rounds and pauses. CCB has no retention and no pauses — the breath stays continuous the entire time. The felt experience and the goal are different.

It's not meditation. Meditation generally asks you to observe and let thoughts pass. CCB is active and physical; you're driving a state change through the breath itself. They can complement each other, but they're not the same tool.

If you take one thing from this section: CCB is intense and deep, not slow. People sometimes arrive expecting a gentle relaxation class and are surprised by how much happens. That intensity is the feature, not a bug — but it's also why facilitation and screening matter, which I'll come back to.

What happens in a session

The honest answer is that it varies a lot from person to person and session to session. But some things come up often enough to name.

Physically, tingling in the hands, feet, or around the mouth is very common — that's the shift in blood chemistry, and it's harmless. Some people experience tetany , a temporary tightening or cramping in the hands (they can curl up) or the jaw. It looks dramatic and feels strange, but it passes as the breathing settles, and it's a normal part of the process rather than a sign anything's wrong. Temperature shifts, feeling hot or cold in waves, are also common.

Emotionally, this is where the range is widest. Waves of emotion, unexpected tears, laughter, a feeling of release, sometimes memories or images surfacing. Some people feel a profound sense of calm and spaciousness afterward that's genuinely hard to put into words. Others have a quieter session and mostly notice they feel lighter. Both are fine. There's no "right" experience, and forcing one defeats the purpose.

Sessions are structured and guided from start to finish. Even when things get intense, you're not navigating it alone — the setup is designed so that the container feels safe enough for you to let go, which is the whole point.

What the science says

For a long time breathwork sat in the "probably relaxing, largely unstudied" pile. That's changing. A cluster of rigorous studies over the last couple of years has started to map what's actually happening in the body and brain during CCB — measurable drops in cortisol, shifts in blood chemistry, and brain-imaging patterns that overlap, phenomenologically, with what people report on psychedelics.

I've written a full breakdown of that research in a separate piece - The Science Has Caught Up: What New Research Says About Conscious Connected Breathwork — so I won't repeat it all here. The short version: the effects are real, measurable, and increasingly hard to dismiss, and the conversation in the research world has moved from "does this help people relax" to "what are the mechanisms and how large are the effects."

A fair caveat, because I'd rather you trust me than oversell you: this is still early-stage research. CCB is not a cure for anxiety, trauma, or ADHD, and none of the studies claim it is. Where the practice is honestly compared head-to-head against established tools like meditation, it tends to hold its own rather than blow them away. That's still a strong result for something this accessible — but "as good as, through a different door" is the accurate framing, not "better than everything."

Why the body holds stress in the first place

If the idea that emotions get "stored in the body" sounds a bit woo, stay with me, because there's a real physiology underneath it — and you'll probably recognize yourself in it.

Your nervous system is constantly scanning for safety and threat — a process the researcher Stephen Porges called neuroception . When something stressful or overwhelming happens, your body generates a physical charge to deal with it: adrenaline, muscle activation, an impulse to act. In an animal, that charge gets fully discharged — a gazelle that escapes a predator will literally shake the activation off and then carry on grazing as if nothing happened. The stress cycle completes.

Humans usually can't do that, and most of the time for good reason. Something happens at work, you feel a surge of anger, and the body's impulse is to shout, confront, move. But you can't — you're in an office, so you swallow it and answer the next email. Something makes you deeply sad and the body wants to cry, but you learned young that crying isn't okay: a parent told you to toughen up, or you absorbed the message from school, from friends, from a culture that treats tears as weakness. So you hold it in. You feel the wave of grief or rage rise and you clamp down on it, because in that moment clamping down is the socially correct thing to do.

Here's the problem. Suppressing the response in the moment is fine — it's a normal, functional social skill. But the physical charge doesn't vanish just because you didn't express it. The cycle never completed. The body wanted to shake, cry, shout, or move, and it didn't get to — so that activation gets stored, unfinished. Do that a few thousand times over a lifetime, which is roughly what modern life asks of us, and you accumulate a backlog of stress the body never got to discharge. It lives on as muscle tension, as a braced jaw or tight chest, as shallow breathing, as a baseline of alertness that never quite switches off. Peter Levine's work on somatic experiencing and Bessel van der Kolk's *The Body Keeps the Score* both describe exactly this: unprocessed stress doesn't stay purely psychological, it settles into the body.

Talk therapy works on the story. But a lot of this material was never stored as a story — it was stored as an interrupted physical response, below language. That's why you can understand your stress perfectly well and still feel it sitting in your chest. CCB works from the body up: by shifting the nervous system directly, it can reach that held, unfinished activation and let the body finally complete what it couldn't at the time — which is often why the tears or the shaking come in a session, sometimes without any clear story attached. The body isn't being dramatic. It's finishing something it started years ago.

Is it safe? Who should be cautious

Because CCB is genuinely powerful, it's not automatically right for everyone, and I take screening seriously rather than treating it as a formality.

The connected breathing and the shift in blood chemistry mean there are some conditions where CCB isn't appropriate, or where it should only be done with medical clearance and experienced facilitation — for example certain cardiovascular conditions, pregnancy, epilepsy, a history of certain psychiatric conditions, and a few others, — which is why screening is built into every booking, so anything needing medical clearance or extra care gets flagged before we begin.

This isn't me covering myself. The intensity that makes CCB effective is the same intensity that makes proper facilitation and honest screening non-negotiable. If someone's waving you into a deep breathwork session without asking a single question about your health or history, that's a reason to be cautious, not reassured.

What happens afterward — and why integration matters

Straight after a session, people often describe feeling lighter, clearer, and more settled — sometimes a kind of quiet that's rare in ordinary life. That's lovely, but it isn't actually where the value lives. The value lives in integration , and this is the part the wellness world tends to skip.

A session can surface something real — an emotion, a memory, a pattern you've been running, a piece of tension you finally felt let go. But surfacing it isn't the same as making sense of it. Integration is the work of taking what came up and actually weaving it into how you live: noticing it, reflecting on it, letting it change a behavior or a belief, sometimes talking it through with a facilitator or therapist. Without that, a powerful session risks becoming just an intense experience you had once — a good afternoon that fades by Thursday.

Think of the session as the part that loosens things and brings them to the surface. Integration is what turns that into lasting change instead of a temporary high. It's why I build reflection and follow-up into how I work, and why the practice tends to compound over time: each session, properly integrated, builds a more conscious relationship with your breath, your stress response, and the link between your body and your emotions. Done once, it's an experience. Done as a practice with integration, it's how the nervous system actually recalibrates.

Trying it for yourself

Breathwork is roughly where yoga was in the 1990s — clearly doing something, increasingly backed by research, and not yet mainstream enough that everyone's tried it. If you've been curious but waiting for it to feel less fringe, that moment is arriving.

If you want to experience CCB properly guided and safely screened, that's exactly what I do at Nomad Breath Labs — online one-to-one sessions , group sessions , and multi-day retreats . Start wherever feels right; the mechanism is the same, and the point is simply to feel it rather than read about it.

The Science Has Caught Up on Conscious Connected Breathwork

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:50:38 GMT

What Research Says....

For years, breathwork practitioners have said things that sounded, to the scientific

establishment, a bit too mystical. Words like “ego dissolution,” “deep emotional

release,” and “shifted states of consciousness” didn’t exactly fit neatly into a clinical trial.

So the practice got lumped into the broad category of “relaxation techniques” and left

largely unstudied.

That is changing — fast.

A cluster of rigorous new studies published in 2024 and 2025 has fundamentally

repositioned Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB). Researchers are no longer calling

it simply a relaxation tool. They are calling it a “Non-Pharmacological Psychedelic” and

a “Neuroendocrine Reset.” The science is catching up to what practitioners have long

reported in the room.

Here is a snapshot of what the research has now confirmed:

• Brain-state change comparable to psilocybin. A neuroimaging study

found that CCB reliably induces the same “ego dissolution” seen with

medium-to-high doses of magic mushrooms — a state long associated with

breakthroughs in trauma therapy and anxiety treatment.

• Measurable hormonal reset in a single session. Blood analysis before and

after CCB showed a significant drop in cortisol (the primary stress hormone) and

a rise in prolactin, which supports immune function and recovery.

• Anxiety relief with a “large” clinical effect size. A randomized controlled

trial found CCB reduced anxiety scores by over 10 points on a validated clinical

scale, with an effect size (Cohen’s d = 1.44) that exceeds most pharmaceutical

interventions.

• Brainwave shifts linked to focus and ADHD relief. EEG research showed

that CCB reduces “worry” beta waves while increasing gamma waves — the

frequency associated with peak focus and high-level information processing.

Here is what each of these studies actually found, and why it matters.

1. CCB Induces the Same Brain State as Psilocybin — Without the

Drug

To understand why this finding is significant, it helps to know where CCB came from —

and the surprising role that a banned drug played in its creation.

In the 1950s and 60s, Czech psychiatrist Dr. Stanislav Grof was conducting some of the

most promising research in the history of mental health. He was using LSD-assisted

therapy to treat conditions like depression, anxiety, addiction, and end-of-life fear in

terminally ill patients, with results that were, by the standards of the time,

extraordinary. Patients reported profound shifts in their relationship to trauma, to

identity, and to death. Grof became convinced that the capacity for deep psychological

transformation wasn’t coming from the drug itself — but from the non-ordinary states of

consciousness it was facilitating.

Then, in 1968, LSD was made illegal. The research stopped. Grof’s clinical work was

shut down overnight.

Rather than abandon the inquiry, Grof asked a different question: was there another

way to reliably access those same therapeutic states without a controlled substance?

Working with his wife Christina, he began experimenting with breath.

The result, developed over years of clinical work, was Holotropic Breathwork — a form of Conscious

Connected Breathwork using accelerated breathing, evocative music, and bodywork to

induce non-ordinary states. Grof found that the breath could take people to the same

territory that LSD had opened — not always identical, but in the same neighborhood.

The work continued, legally, without the substance.

That history matters now because of what brain imaging has confirmed.

A landmark study from Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), published in PLOS

ONE in August 2025, used quantitative MRI to map in real time what happens inside

the brain during high-ventilation CCB.

Participants consistently entered a state researchers called “Oceanic Boundlessness” — a

felt sense of unity, bliss, and expanded awareness. This is not a subjective description.

The MRI data showed it had a clear anatomical signature.

The key finding was reduced blood flow in the posterior insula and parietal operculum

— the regions of the brain most associated with the sense of being a bounded, separate

self. In other words, the part of the brain that maintains your everyday sense of “I” was

quieting down. This is what researchers call ego dissolution.

The researchers noted that this pattern closely mirrors what is seen with

medium-to-high doses of psilocybin — validating, neurologically, what Grof had

observed clinically half a century earlier.

Why ego dissolution is therapeutically valuable

Ego dissolution sounds alarming if you’ve never experienced it. In practice, it is more

often described as relief. Here is why it matters therapeutically.

The everyday ego — your sense of being a fixed, bounded self — is also the structure that

maintains your psychological defenses. This is useful for getting through the day. It

becomes a problem when those defenses are what’s keeping you locked inside a trauma

response, a negative self-story, or an anxiety pattern that no longer serves you. The ego

guards the walls, and sometimes the walls are the problem.

When ego dissolution occurs — whether through psychedelics or breathwork — those

defensive walls temporarily soften. The rigid narrative of “who I am” and “what

happened to me” becomes more fluid. This is the window in which deep-seated

emotional patterns can be witnessed, processed, and released in ways that are often

impossible in ordinary waking consciousness. It is why patients in psychedelic-assisted

therapy frequently describe a single session as more transformative than years of

conventional talk therapy.

CCB appears to open the same window. Not for everyone, not in every session — but

reliably enough that it is now showing up in brain scans.

• What it means practically: The therapeutic state that researchers have been

trying to recreate with carefully controlled psychedelic trials can, for many

people, be reached without any substance, in a facilitated breathwork session.

Source: Brighton and Sussex Medical School — Breathwork and the Brain

2. A Single Session Measurably Resets Your Stress Hormones

A study published in MDPI in late 2025 drew blood from participants before and after a

single CCB session and analyzed the results. The physiological changes were significant

enough to prompt the researchers to describe the practice as a potential

“stress-modulatory” switch for the nervous system.

The key findings:

• Cortisol decreased significantly. Cortisol is the body’s primary stress

hormone, and chronically elevated levels are linked to anxiety, immune

suppression, sleep disruption, and accelerated aging. A measurable drop after a

single session is clinically meaningful.

• Prolactin increased. This is perhaps the more surprising finding. Prolactin is

typically associated with lactation, but it also plays an important role in immune

modulation and stress recovery. An increase suggests the body is actively shifting

into a restorative state.

• Respiratory alkalosis occurred. The connected breathing rhythm drives a

temporary shift in blood pH. The researchers believe this mild alkalosis acts as a

biochemical trigger — the mechanism by which CCB signals the nervous system

to shift states.

This study, the first of its kind to analyze blood gas parameters during CCB, found that

the hormonal and biochemical changes are not just subjective — they are measurable in

the blood.

3. A Randomized Controlled Trial Found a “Large Effect Size” for

Anxiety

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard in clinical research — the

kind of study that convinces skeptics. A 2024–2025 RCT published on PubMed tested

CCB specifically for anxiety, with results that were statistically remarkable.

Participants were assessed using the Zung Anxiety Scale (ZAS) at baseline and after the

intervention. The numbers:

• CCB group: anxiety scores dropped by an average of 10.56 points (from 43.87 to

33.31)

• Control group: scores barely moved, dropping only 1.89 points

• Effect size (Cohen’s d): 1.44 — classified as a “large effect”

To put the effect size in context: most antidepressant and anxiolytic medications

produce effect sizes in the range of 0.3 to 0.5. Standard talk therapy for anxiety typically

lands between 0.6 and 0.8. A Cohen’s d of 1.44 is, by conventional research standards, a

very large result.

This does not mean breathwork replaces therapy or medication for everyone. But it does

mean it deserves serious consideration as a primary or adjunct intervention — not a

wellness bonus, but a clinically meaningful tool.

4. EEG Research Points to Enhanced Focus — Particularly Relevant

for ADHD

A 2025 study out of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam analyzed the cortical brain activity of

experienced CCB practitioners using EEG (electroencephalography) before, during, and

after sessions. The findings offer a neurological explanation for one of the most

commonly reported post-session experiences: an unusual clarity and calm focus that can

last for hours.

The EEG data showed two notable shifts:

• Beta waves decreased. Specifically Beta 1 and Beta 2 frequencies — the

brainwave patterns most associated with ordinary waking cognition, rumination,

and worry — showed reduced power. Less mental noise.

• Gamma waves increased. Gamma activity is associated with high-level

information processing, perceptual binding, and peak cognitive states. It is the

brainwave signature of focused, integrative thinking.

For people with ADHD, this pattern is particularly significant. ADHD is frequently

characterized by overactivation of certain beta frequencies alongside underactivation of

the kind of focused, integrative processing that gamma supports. The EEG profile seen

after CCB sessions mirrors the shift that ADHD treatments are designed to facilitate.

This helps explain the anecdotal reports that are common in breathwork communities —

people describing hours of unusual mental clarity after a session, often describing it as

one of the few times their mind feels genuinely quiet.

What This Means

These four studies, taken together, represent something of a shift in how the research

community is positioning Conscious Connected Breathwork. The conversation is

moving from “does breathwork help people relax” to “what are the mechanisms, and

how large are the effects.”

The mechanisms being identified — ego dissolution via posterior insula suppression,

neuroendocrine rebalancing, pH-mediated nervous system shifts, gamma wave

enhancement — are not vague wellness claims. They are measurable, reproducible

physiological events.

This is still early-stage research. CCB is not a cure for anxiety, trauma, or ADHD, and

none of these studies suggest otherwise. But the evidence is growing that the breath,

used intentionally and with proper facilitation, acts on the nervous system in ways that

matter — and that the effects are large enough to take seriously.

If you’ve been curious about breathwork but waiting for the science to catch up, it’s

catching up.

Sources

1. Brighton and Sussex Medical School — Breathwork and the Brain: New Study Reveals

How Controlled Breathing Alters Consciousness

2. MDPI / PMC — Take a Breather: Physiological Correlates of a Conscious Connected

Breathing Session in a Trained Group of Breast Cancer Patients

3. PubMed — Efficacy of Online Conscious Connected Breathwork in Reducing

Symptoms of Anxiety: A Randomized Waitlist Control Trial

4. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Effects of Conscious Connected Breathing on

Cortical Brain Activity, Mood and State of Consciousness in Healthy Adults