*This is my personal experience and not medical advice.
I fully believe that breathwork transformed my endometriosis. Before discovering breathwork, I lived with anxiety, depression, and severe endometriosis.
Yes, I have also tried other modalities, but I attribute much of the changes within me to breathwork. Especially the anxiety and depression, which were so prevalent in my life, and are now almost non-existent.
Benefits of Breathwork for Anxiety, Depression, and Endometriosis:
- Release stored emotional trauma safely
- Reduce physical pain and tension, including endometriosis discomfort
- Heal and regulate emotions for mental clarity and emotional stability
- Move stagnant energy, supporting both emotional and energetic healing
- Improve your connection with your body and present-moment awareness
- Empower self-expression and emotional freedom
What Is Breathwork and How It Can Help Anxiety, Depression, and Endometriosis?
The benefits of breathwork let you move through emotions that traditional therapy can’t access. Breathwork takes many forms, but the kind I did was called ‘hylotropic breathwork’. It is a practice where you put yourself into a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn, through quick, deep breaths — almost like controlled hyperventilation. Whilst in that state, you naturally revisit times, feelings, experiences, or memories where you felt acutely stressed, and maybe you couldn’t express it at the time, so your body stored that pain or anxiety or joy in your body. This allows for emotional healing, emotional release, and energetic healing.
For example, maybe there was a time when you were heartbroken but had to keep it together, perhaps you had a minor car crash but still had to get to work, so you shoved down that anxiety and stress, or potentially, you were raised for years never being allowed to express anger. This is where those feelings, those unheard emotions, have the safe space to come up and out of your body, healing trauma.
Alternatively, you may feel positive emotions, maybe ones you were also not allowed to express for some reason, you might giggle like a toddler, want to run away and play, or want to stand proud with applause. Ultimately, breathwork is a safe place where you can experience emotions you may have felt were unsafe to feel in your life, for whatever reason.
A wild thing about breathwork is that it seems to collapse time.
There is no time and space, there is only the experience you are feeling, whatever it is.
I believe in past lives, so some of my experiences took me there, but don’t be afraid if you don’t; your body will only give you what you can handle.
That is also why there is a facilitator with you; they can tell if you’re in too deep or are feeling unsafe, and can bring you back to your breath. The important thing here though, is to surrender, to accept it, to go with it and trust with your full self.
What Happens During a Breathwork Session: Emotional and Physical Benefits
Breathwork is different for everyone, but for me, I have experienced a variety of things. Once you breathe for a while, you enter this trance-like state, you’re aware of your surroundings, you can feel the mattress on the floor, the temperature of the room, the eye mask on your face (if you choose to wear one), but you are not attached to it. What is more real is this inner world you go into.
I have seen images, scenes, like a dream where I am there, and I can tell you the colour of the dirt. It is as real as life.
One time I remember running in the woods, I was running away from something, and I could smell the pine trees. I live in Australia, I didn’t even know that I knew what pine smelt like, but I remember thinking at the time, ‘wow, the smell of this woodland is so strong’.
The important thing is to allow yourself to be gobbled up by the experience. I was there struggling to run on a mattress in place, part of my brain knew that I was in a room running on the spot, but what was more important at the time was that I stayed with the feeling of fear. I was clutching onto trees as I ran. I was barefoot, it was an ancient time, it felt Danish, I felt like I was being hunted.
When in breathwork, you try not to analyse it, to think about it, it is simply about experiencing it. Sometimes you will decipher what an experience is about, and other times it doesn’t matter; it is simply about having it.
I have also just experienced the feelings without the dream or vision. I am wrapped up in them, rather, like a nightmare, like every cell of my body felt fear, of what? I don’t know, but I let it come in, come up, come out, and trembled and shook and became small on the mat, so whatever it was I feared didn’t see me.
I have also giggled and laughed and said ‘no’ like 1000 times, as if I were a disobedient child. I have no idea what I was saying no to, I have no idea why I felt like a three-year-old, but I felt playful and grumpy, and all I knew was ‘no’.
Maybe it was all the times I wanted to say ‘no’ as a child but didn’t, all the times where I sat politely, and didn’t talk, and did the right thing. My body wanted to rebel, to play, to stomp my feet – so I did. It was kind of fun actually; it was light and free and so young.
When we remember our childhood, we still remember with our perspective of now. When you do breathwork, it isn’t remembering; it is experiencing. I wasn’t remembering being three, I was three.
What a Breathwork Session Looks Like: Environment and Experiences
It depends on the practitioner, but there is a mattress or mat where you will work, the reason for this is because it is important to stay in a physically safe place. There is also music played loudly, which sort of guides you on your journey. You would think it would be distracting, but it just becomes like the road you follow. It is hard to explain the music, but it helps you stay in your body and out of your head.
The facilitator’s role is to ‘hold space’ — they stay fully present with you, attuned to your experience, ensuring both physical and emotional safety.
Feeling joy as I waved to people and giggled.
When I was trying to run in the woods, my facilitator stood next to me to make sure I didn’t fall. When I was struggling to push this thing from my hips, she used sheets and pressed down on me, providing resistance. When I was suffocating and thought I couldn’t breathe, she assured me to stay with the feeling and that I could breathe, but to stay with it, because my body would breathe when it needed to.
Breathwork for Endometriosis: How It Helped Me Heal My Pain
I have always felt that although my endometriosis is physical, there has been an energetic aspect to it. I felt like it didn’t matter what I did, acupuncture, herbal medicine, diets, contraception, surgeries – it never healed my endometriosis. I think somewhere deep down, I knew that it was because, on some level, the healing needed to be energetic.
Of course, this is my personal experience, but I truly believe that women feel lots of guilt and shame around our sexuality, about our femininity. I don’t know many women who haven’t been suppressed on some level by the masculine world we live in. Even those who are fully empowered and embrace themselves, they still seem to be just reacting to the world rather than simply being in it.
It’s like we are all teenagers who can’t win. If we conform to the idea of what mummy and daddy want, we are suppressed, but if we go out and get tattoos and piercings, we are also conforming to the very stereotypical teenage experience.
Being a woman feels a bit like that. No matter what we do, the world is still masculine.
I think part of why women experience hormonal issues is because of the suppression we feel in this masculine world.
I don’t know of a single woman who hasn’t been sexually harassed by a man. I know times are changing, and it is ‘not all men’, but we can be honest, for me to have never known a single other woman who has not experienced this, means it is still a huge issue. At some point in their lives, maybe not now, but at some point, many men have made a woman feel unsafe.
This doesn’t mean men are bad, but the world we live in is undeniably built for them. From the structured work week to the consumerist productivity model, and even the isolated family units we now adopt, feminine power has been quashed.
I believe my endometriosis was linked to this suppression. The guilt, the shame, the unsafety all held in my womb. Breathwork allowed a lot of that to come out.
I feel like a lot of my pain came from the stored trauma in my reproductive organs, and when I felt those feelings, I had been ignoring for so long, I released them, I let them go, and my endometriosis pain reduced so much after that.
I found that breathwork for endometriosis supported my physical and energetic healing simultaneously.
Breathwork for Depression: My Personal Healing Experience
How breathwork healed my depression is nothing short of a miracle. Now, just to be clear, I still experience hormonal depression, I still struggle with PMDD, but thinking about it, I bet I could probably heal that too with some focused breathwork – I should get onto that. Anyway, as for regular depression though, I can safely say that I no longer write it down on my medical paperwork.
Explaining how breathwork healed this is a bit more abstract than with my endometriosis.
With the endometriosis things, it felt more like a purge; I released a lot of stored trauma, and without that trauma, the pain reduced. With depression, it is not just based on past experiences and old emotions, but also on how you live your life daily.
Part of it was that breathwork allowed me a space to express many of the feelings that were trapped inside my body, therefore allowing me to move through them and release them. But depression is more than that. I feel like depression is the removal from oneself, the numbness, the depths of despair, because your feelings are too strong.
What breathwork did for me was not only allow those emotions to come up and out during the session, but also all the time. I started moving emotions through my body constantly, rather than storing them.
When I felt sad about something, I made time to feel into it. Maybe not that particular moment, but as soon as possible after the fact. I gave myself the evening to cry, to complain, to hurt, to feel.
When I felt angry, I would turn the music up in the car and scream, or I would shake my body with rage on the bed, punching and kicking and hating with all my power.
When I felt excited, I would clap my hands, jump up and down with joy, I would stomp and squeal, crushing my husband’s hand in mine with glee.
The more I began to let the emotions move through me, actually physically express them, the less I stored them.
Depression is a bit like a stagnant pond of emotion. The more often you open the faucet and let some water out, the more new fresh water spills in and clears the pond. Eventually, you have this stream of water flowing freely, it is fresh and alive and activated, rather than green and murky and old.
There is a reason people say emotion is just ‘energy in motion’ because, without the motion, trapped energy turns bad.
Breathwork for Anxiety: How It Transformed My Mental Health
Breathwork for anxiety changed how I relate to my fear and stress.
Like depression, anxiety also needs to be moved through your body. It is just fear.
Whilst depression is the accumulation of old emotions going stagnant and old, anxiety is the fear of the fresh water turning into a tsunami; something you can’t deal with.
But I have news for you: anything that comes to you, you can deal with. It might not always be with the grace you would like, but it is always possible.
Just as I let my emotions pass through me to clean the pond of depression, I let fear move through me too. I didn’t hold on to it and run down the rabbit hole of potential issues, forecasting things that didn’t exist yet. I moved into a state of trust.
If, during breathwork, you can trust someone to keep you on a mattress whilst you essentially trip out on nothing but air and they save you from strangling yourself, you can trust life.
Anxiety is just fear. And fear is there to protect you.
So, I began to thank the fear. Rather than hate it, rather than resent it, I began to appreciate it. I also let it move through me.
Recently, before a public speaking event, before I crossed the road, I jumped up and down, arms flailing, like a child having a tantrum. All these nerves, all this anxiety were pent up in me to the point I thought I would explode. Rather than cross the road and suppress this feeling, as most would, I let it out.
I realised that if I went in with this electric emotion in me, it would be stored in my body, sit in my stomach, make my hands tremble with my notes. If I acknowledged it, if I moved my body like it was being chased by a lion, this anxiety would be seen, heard, and then know that it was safe. I did run from the lion, and I stopped, which must mean… I am okay now.
Sure, I was still scared to present, but there was no pit in my stomach, nor did my notes tremble violently.
When I was nervous about going to a friend’s party one time, I decided to go anyway. I don’t know why I was filled with such stress; they were kind and supportive friends, but I was crippled with fear.
Every step came with a pep talk.
I got dressed, feeling stupid in my outfit. ‘I hope I am not cold,’ my brain worried, ‘I have brought you a jacket,’ I replied.
I got in the car feeling nervous about driving. ‘I am scared I’m too scattered to drive,’ I felt, ‘I have done this drive heaps, but I will put on the GPS and we will go extra slow.’ I said back to myself.
I sat outside their house. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ I pleaded, ‘These people love you, and even if you cry, they will hug you and make you feel safe and warm,’ I assured.
When I said these words to myself, I never discounted my fears, never negated them, never told myself I was being stupid or overreacting; I simply moved through the feeling, accepted it as valid, and not only told, but felt that I was going to be okay.
Just like when you are on the mat in some alternate universe, you can always come back to your home in your body, on that mat. The problem is, our bodies are often not safe, so we don’t live in them.
Anxiety is living outside of your body in a state of fear. Healing my anxiety was making my body a safe place to be, in the present moment.
How Breathwork Changed My Life: Healing Anxiety, Depression, and Endometriosis
So there it is, all the ways in which breathwork changed my life. Breathwork healed my depression, breathwork healed my anxiety, and breathwork healed my endometriosis.
The benefits of breathwork for anxiety, depression and endometriosis have completely transformed my life.
This doesn’t mean I don’t still have some endometriosis pains, or that I never get anxious or depressed. But I move through these feelings quickly, like a river rather than a pond, in a state of flow rather than the panic of a tsunami.
It can be hard to surrender to a stranger, hard to let these emotions in, hard to experience things you have been suppressing. But please remember, your body will only give you what you are capable of experiencing. Of that I am certain. And if you can bring that breathwork into your daily life, you will be able to heal so much more than just what you write on your medical forms.
If you ever feel called to try breathwork, I hope this helps you understand what’s possible — and reminds you how powerful your body truly is.
For more information on how to heal endometriosis naturally, have a read of my article Womb Massage for Trauma & Endometriosis and Fertility Massage and Astonishing Yoni Steaming Experience