On Thursdays I hold a free lunchtime breathwork session - twenty-some minutes of basic breathwork. (It’s at noon at Beyond Yoga - Port of Spain, Trinidad, if you’re in the area and feel like a breathe.)

The other week, I popped my head in to check the room before heading out. One woman was still in the practice room. We ended up in one of those conversations that you don’t plan (couldn’t) and can’t manufacture.

She’s a performance coach. Has been for a long time. She works with elite swimmers, triathletes, high-performance athletes. The woman does not have a website. ( I may have asked that three or four times at various levels of incredulity) No website! No website? No social media. No Facebook. She told me, matter-of-factly, that she “coaches who she wants to coach.” “People find me”, she said, comfortable in a deep squat, heels on the floor. “I do have WhatsApp.”

Coach is in her 60s.

I don’t need to be a witness to other people’s lives. And I don’t need them to witness mine - Coach

I…as they would say in Gasparillo, took flora…which is to say, I sat. Parked my butt on the floor and listened to a lifelong athlete who’s been teaching and coaching for decades.

She wasn’t advising me. She was just…telling me…Afterward…I thanked her for a spectacular conversation…I’ve been sat with it. It landed. I’ve been carrying (only recently consciously) awkwardly and without being able to fully describe…far less name, a kind of despair about the people I can’t reach.

It’s grief, is what it was.

A friend in the hospital. Clients who start and disappear back into the busyness. People who call me after a thing. The thing, being some calamity or incident or breakdown as a result of deep chronic dysregulation. I’ve been writing and trying to describe it and work through it.

I’ve been feeling it like a weight.

Underneath the weight, when I looked, was an assumption that my job was to reach people. (When I say I looked, I first realised that the weight was a thing and then I turned toward it and started investigating.) I reasoned that if I just found the right words, the right post, the right entry point, the right moment, they would receive what I was offering.

I was taught that Julian of Norwich quote “none have crossed till all have crossed and some we have to carry” …my retort used to be, “and some will try to drown us”…but somewhere deep down, I believed the sentiment and sometimes translated the “some” into “all, we have to carry”.

It’s not for me to provide something that looks like service but is entitlement dressed up as care.

To be human is to have free will. We each get to choose. And the work, my Work (sic) is to be genuinely present, to be truly myself, to be clear and clean in what I offer. Annnnnd, people don’t need to do what I think is best for them.

Coach gave me a new way to look at my work. Her legend has taken crafting and diligence and rigour. She has years and years and years of practice under her belt. I’ve got a couple decades in high-pressure operational environments, undergrad and graduate work. Five years of trauma-informed practice. Nearly three years of somatic experiencing. I’m putting in reps.

…and I get to do this.

It is a privilege to get to do this. Not a burden. Not a mission I’m failing. A privilege. I get to show up and offer something real. I get to be present for the moments when something shifts. I get to keep learning - from clients, from elders who sit in deep squats and casually detail mastery, from the work itself.

I’ve built something that works. I know it works. It works for me…sometimes in fires I thought I couldn’t possibly emerge from. It works in sessions, in conversations, and in breath sequences when someone’s whole being changes.

Our mother died before she was 43 and my sister was gone at 15 and my Godmother went to a meeting and died. I have spent years understanding what slow and excoriating and sudden loss planted and reaffirmed in me… the urgency, the need to reach people before it’s too late, the ache when someone I love moves toward harm I can see coming. I understand it. I can hold it without being run by it.

Sitting with Coach on Thursday - her squats are stronger than mine yalllll! Talking with a woman certain in the dynamic stability of someting something she’s built on her terms, was profoundly reassuring. It also reminded me that I’m just at the start of this enterprise.

I get to do this. I get to do my Work and show up - in sessions and programmes and boardrooms and LinkedIn posts and conversations that go longer than planned.

I get to cross too.

It’s good.

If you’re reading this and something resonated, my door’s open.

Pop in to a free breathwork session any Thursday lunchtime at The Hub on Wrightson Road in Port of Spain. No registration. Just come and breathe. If you’re ready to go deeper, I have three spots open this month for a nine-week programme. Structured, built around your specific patterns. Send me a WhatsApp (thanks Coach!) +1 868 752 4454

Let’s breathe like our lives depend on it.

Among other conversations recently - vintage calypsos from Trinidad and Tobago - have a listen to Rafael deLeon, the Roaring Lion

First published on Mindset Breath on Substack.