When logic stops working, and your body won’t let you look away.

I thought I understood emotions.
In a… structured way.
Something you could name, and move past.

Breathwork.
Energy work.
Inner child conversations.

They felt far away from me.
Like something other people needed.

I preferred things I could explain.
If I couldn’t understand it,
I didn’t trust it.

So I built a life that worked.

Disciplined.
Functional.
Efficient.

From the outside, it held.

From the inside,
it felt like I was slightly behind myself.

Watching.
Keeping up.
Managing.

Then I almost drowned.

And something in me stopped fitting the same way.

I didn’t suddenly believe in anything.

But I was… open.
Or maybe just desperate enough
to try.

The first time I tried breathwork,
I sat cross-legged on the floor,
back against the wall.

I became aware of my breathing in a way I hadn’t before.

Shallow.
Controlled.
Careful.

At one point I wondered,
have I always been holding it like this?

So I tried to adjust it. Fix it.

Which, apparently,
wasn’t the point.

Journaling felt similar.

A blank page.
No right way in.
Just me and my thoughts.

My coach gave me a prompt:
Emotion. Body. Situation. Thoughts.

I remember pausing mid-conversation,
opening my notes app,
trying to catch the moment before it slipped.

Like I didn’t trust myself to feel it fully
without recording it.

It felt… unfamiliar.

Like I was both inside the moment
and slightly outside it.

In sessions, I couldn’t move past things the way I used to.
I had to stay.
A little longer than I wanted to.

And my body noticed.

That heaviness in my chest again.
The one I usually ignore.

This time, it stayed.

So this is what they meant.
By “feeling your feelings.”

I tried again.

My chest felt tight, like something was pressing from the inside.
My throat kept swallowing nothing.
My hands didn’t know where to go.

It just sat there.
Heavy.
Unmoving.

I remember checking the clock.
Two minutes.
Then five.

Still there.

There was no moment where I thought,
oh, this works.

It was quieter than that.
I just started noticing things
I hadn’t been noticing before.

Tension,
before it became stress.

Stress,
before I pushed past it.

Emotions that didn’t disappear
just because I stayed busy.

A lot of what I called “woo-woo”
wasn’t abstract.

It was just things
I had trained myself not to see.

I’m still skeptical.

Some of it still makes me pause.

But I don’t dismiss it the same way anymore.

Because sometimes the things I didn’t understand
weren’t wrong.

Just… unfamiliar.

Now when I hear something labeled woo-woo,
I don’t roll my eyes.

I pause.

Which, for me,
feels like a beginning.