Ep 46 - Breathwork for Busy Brains: Another Novel Path to Mindfulness

Welcome to the Thinkydoers podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work, where thinking is working, but we don't stop there. We're compelled to move the work from insight to idea, through the messy middle, to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich. I'm a strategy coach, a huge goal-setting and attainment nerd, and board-certified health and wellness coach working at the overlap of work life well-being I'm. Also a Thinkydoer.

I'm here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction, and more flow in our work. My mission is to help changemakers like you transform our workplaces and world. So let's get started. Welcome to today's Thinkydoers podcast. If you are someone whose brain rarely stops spinning, today's episode is gonna be a real treat. You might relate to this.

I am a person who lives mostly as a brain that sometimes forgets It has a body and body-based practices like meditation and breathwork have not always been accessible to me. But today's guest, Chauna Bryant, changed my perspective entirely. Chauna is a breathwork professional and founder of the Breath Liberation Society. If you've ever felt like mindfulness practices weren't designed for your busy brain, this conversation might change everything. So let's dive in.

I am so excited to have Chauna Bryant here with me today. Chauna and I met through Jamar Diggs' incredible Low-Lift Club. It's a community membership training space for business owners who wanna use YouTube. People who are business operators, not content creators.

It's also one of the best memberships I've ever joined. So, Chauna, tell people who are you and what do you do. My name is Chauna Bryant. I am from Los Angeles and I'm currently living in Maryland. I am a breathworker, I'm a pilates instructor and A Gyrotonic movement instructor. I do a lot of things, body, energy, and breath. In 2021, I founded a community and online learning school called Breath Liberation Society.

We are globally accredited, We are the first Black-owned program to be globally accredited through the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance We're in our sixth cohort and we are moving into a hybrid model. We run our training mainly virtually, but now as of July 2025, I'm moving into a more hybrid model. I'm going to be in a couple different cities and it's an exciting time. I'm a dog mom, I have two brindle rescue pitties. So that's who I am. Hi!

For folks who are not familiar with the concept of breathwork, can you tell us what that is? Sure. Breathwork is an umbrella term, but it most closely describes a breathing pattern, an intentional breath that takes the brain out of the equation and welcomes the body up to the microphone. It's an active meditation. Some ones that are more popular would be box breathing, the alternate nasal breathing.

The two styles of breath that are more popular for longer form breathwork, so for 40 or 30 minutes, are the conscious connected breath and that involves breathing in to the mouth into the body. A big breath in with an easy exhale, big breath in with an easy exhale. And you just do that and it's so simple but it's so powerful. The second style that I teach is called, the three-part breath, it breathes into the mouth, into the belly, into the mouth, into the chest with an exhale.

And then you do that repetitively. And as I said, the breath just gives the body and the brain really something to do. I have nieces and nephews. If you give them an iPad, you buy yourself, like, 20 minutes. You can shower, right? That's what the breath does. It's something that for those of us, especially with busy brains, the breath gives the brain something to do. It's like just out-of-the-ordinary enough, breathing through the mouth.

It's just like weird enough where you're like, "What am I doing?" To where it really gives the body some time to process. It gives the body some time to start unpacking some things, like, "Okay, there's that emotion that I shoved on a shelf and ignored, because it was inappropriate to cry in public, oh, there's that emotion that stressed me out." It's really just a pause, and it's a welcoming for our bodies to start to work through the things that maybe we haven't taken the time to work through.

Is there anything that you would like to share about origins of of breathwork practice. Yeah. So origins of breathwork practice are something that is quite tricky

because when we talk about the origins of breathwork, we talk about colonialism, we talk about colonization, and the disappearing of so many different lineages across the world. And places where breathwork is most mentioned and most referenced and most documented, it comes down to more of a pranayama breath out of Southeast Asia. So I a hundred percent give credit to the pranayama breath and that lineage.

With that said, I am very confident that most of our ancestors found ways to access the breath. You'll see little sprinkles of it in different places. There are warriors in Africa, some of the oldest tribes in Africa that use the breath to power them through to battle. In South America, there are cultures that have practices around the first breath of a body or the last breath of a body. If you just pay attention a little, there's breath in almost everything.

One of the reasons I was so excited to have you on is, like, I try not to make this podcast like a focus group of one, but I also just do this for fun. And so I'm just gonna be honest, I am a person who is a brain that forgets it has a body, and somatic practices and body-based anything is really not always accessible to me. I felt invited into your practice, even though I am the least likely person ever to voluntarily opt in to something somatic. So congrats. Well done. You're welcome.

And I would say I'm probably the second least likely person to opt into something somatics. I'm probably the like least chill meditation teacher you'll ever meet. I think a lot of times when we think about meditation or a lot of embodiment practices, which immediately takes it out of reach of a lot of people, myself included, it becomes this thing where it's, okay, we're gonna sit so still on a rock with a gentle breeze, and like a random tree in the background, and a blue sky.

And you're gonna hold your fingers and just take like deep breaths in and out, which I know makes me wanna crawl up a wall. And meditation as somebody who like idles at anxious, the idea of this like still practice was very out of reach for me. The breath is something that bridged that for me, it's active. You're doing something. It reaches its hand out, as opposed to you having to just fully submit and surrender into a thing.

I've seen how accessible your work in practice is to people who aren't traditional sit-down, be-still, be-quiet kind of mindfulness folks. But I didn't realize that your transformation was as big as it is. So, tell me where did you start and then how did you get to where you are? Where did I start? I think I was always the kid that the report card was like, "Chauna talks too much." I'm a chatty person. I am like the introvert whisper, awkward doesn't phase me.

I was a childhood performer. I sang a lot as a kid, and trained vocally for a long time. I started, as a gymnast and a singer, so body and voice. And I had quit all of that by the time I got to high school. And when I was in college, I knew I wasn't gonna be like an office job person and I graduated in the early 2000 and went, into an economy that wasn't super hiring at the time.

I worked in retail, I bartended, I started taking science classes because I thought I wanted to be a physical therapist. I remember calling places, asking if they would hire me because I wanted to get some like experience so I could write that on my physical therapist application. And this woman that I talked to was like, "The industry is changing. You should either go become a massage therapist or a Pilates instructor.

And when you do that, call me back." I was like, "Cool, what's Pilates?" So I started learning Pilates, and it stuck. I was working retail, and teaching Pilates and bartending, and just trying get things going. Being a fitness instructor and paying your bills with it is actually quite a feat. I was just grinding it out until I had enough Pilates clients I finally quit bartending. I really wanted to create my own Pilates reformer that blended cardio and Pilates.

And I wanted to go and learn how to run a business. I took myself up to New York. It took like the bus, there's this like. $30 round trip bus that you can take from Washington DC to New York. And I, I remember going to the super posh conference, and all these big deal people. And I sat and listened to everybody talk about how they were running these like giant wellness businesses and they were all doing it with one secret, what was it?

Meditation. And like, I, I could roll my eyes a lot on this, but yeah, that's what they were doing. They were all meditating and it was, I'm sure they all were sitting on like a lot of VC money. I'm sure they all had assistance up the wazoo, but effortlessly they were like, oh, I meditate. And I was like, done. I'll meditate. So again, I started meditating, and it was not a success. I had a little chart and I'd be like, "Okay. I meditated. Good? Bad?

How long?" And I keep my chart and I will, I tell you, all the bad was marked off more times than not. And actually I don't think I can do this. And also, y'all are gonna be surprised by this. It didn't fix the fact that I wasn't sleeping more than four hours a night. It wasn't a magic wand. It was a total bummer. I kept teaching Pilates, I kept building my business, and I would go home to LA and take classes there. I'd go up to New York and take classes there.

And I kept seeing "breathwork" on schedules, but again, I'm from the Valleys, like, going all the way up to like the Venice for a 6:00 PM breathwork class wasn't gonna happen. So I kept seeing breathwork, but I kept not doing breathwork. And finally, I just started Googling around and like trying

to figure out what it was. And I think I found like a podcast of somebody talking about breathwork and then they talked about their teacher. And I was like, "Cool". Believe it or not, that's the short way. Because I was also working with somebody at the time who was guiding me through breathwork, but I just didn't know it was breathwork. So that's how we got here. I didn't become aware of breathwork as a thing until my long COVID recovery.

That was when I realized I'd been exposed to breathing and breath stuff as part of mindfulness practice. There are a couple nuggets that you've said, like the breathing part of mindfulness is doing something, and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that’s so true, that makes sense." That's one of the ways that some of us who are more somatically challenged or more sit-still-be-quiet challenged, you know, gives us something to do.

What would you say to people who are new to somatic practices or who are resistant to somatic practices?

How would you suggest folks get started? Yep. So I have two suggestions. One is to get extra curious and try different things. There are hundreds of different ways to develop a somatic practice. And I think what happens a lot of times, and that's certainly been my personal experience, is that we try one or two and we're like, "No, thank you. That's not for me. I tried it, it was awkward, I didn't enjoy it. No thank you. I'm a fitness person. I enjoy moving my body.

And I remember going to a workout class once and they like turned off the music and they were like, "Everyone just feel your body. Move, your body." I stood completely still on that mat. I stood still and I like, watched everybody around me do all this stuff. I was a breathworker by then. This was the developed Chauna. And I stood so still in that mat, and maybe I managed like a two-step, but I was like, "I don't. I can't. What?" It was such an outrageous invitation to ask of me.

And I don't fault the teacher at all. It was obviously like that's what people do in that class and they looked amazing. Like, I can now go to that class and do it, but it took me a while. Luckily, that specific class, they started doing virtual workouts during COVID, so I was able, like in my apartment, like two-step eventually. But we're talking months of getting there.

And really I'm like, "How am I like telling people to like, feel their bodies, and then when I'm invited to feel my body, I can't do it at all?" So that was a fun little life lesson. I think it's just, you know, find different things. And the second thing that I'm a big fan of is titration. And that's like a microdose of things, and just let that microdose ride. Small bits, whatever you're doing. Try like a minute, try two minutes.

Holotropic breathwork is one of the more original forms of breathwork that has been talked about and acknowledged in the history books. This is one of the more well-known styles of breathwork. One that made breathwork more popular in the States. Those sessions are like two hours, three hours. That's a lot. Rather than going like in the most hardcore fashion, whatever somatic practice you're trying to practice, give it two minutes and then get out. Give it two minutes and then get out.

Find those two minutes. If you get two minutes of breathwork every day, every other day, once a week, whatever is regular to you, it'll build. Just give it a little bit of time. It's okay to not have to, plunge yourself into the full experience right away. it's totally fine to just build into that practice little bit by little bit. That's the way to start to build that body tolerance, that body connection.

With that, you are showing your body that you're listening and that you're not going anywhere and that you can keep showing up and you can celebrate those little moments. It doesn't have to be this giant thing. Just let those little moments happen. And eventually the two minutes are gonna be nothing. And then maybe you move to two and a half, maybe we have to

three, but it doesn't have to be a 45-minute experience right away. I always wonder if these things are just me, and I think they aren't. One of the things I've become aware of is, since a certain point in therapy, I've been aware of my all-or-nothing tendencies thinking. I also have some perfectionist wiring that I really struggle to coexist with in a productive way.

What you're saying is just very soothing to me when I think about practices that challenge my all-or-nothing and challenge my perfectionism. I'm the hardcore, "You gotta do it right." I gotta do it right. And so I really love the permission to just say, start anywhere. I met my wife in CrossFit. Like we. A very much hardcore person. And and like I get really, if I compare it to fitness and if I think about squats and I'm just like, there's no point.

If you're not gonna go full depth, you might as well not do it at all, you know, half reps, half results. All of that plays in my brain constantly. It's hard to give this a little bit of space and I'm gonna just try a little. It's hard to just try a little. I'm certainly the same way where I'm like, not only am I gonna do this, I'm gonna do it so well, I'm gonna do it better than anybody here. that's not the way to that body connection, unfortunately.

For a lot of us who have busy brains, patience is gonna be our first form of body connection. Just a little bit of patience. One of the things you've done is made the transition from being a student expert to being a really awesome teacher of what you do. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that transition and why you decided to start teaching your practice and what teaching does for you. Thank you. That's a good question. What it comes down to is that I've been teaching forever.

I have a sister that's two years younger. Anytime I learned anything, she learned something. So I learned to read at five, she learned to read at three. Everything I learned, I taught her. And it was fun for me. And then I taught movement. I taught people how to use their bodies, how to relax into an exercise while keeping your muscles engaged, for 15, 20 years now. I think I've always been a little bit of a different learner. It was hard for me in school.

I always worked much harder than everyone and got like C's. I had a really hard time. It takes me way longer to understand anything than most people around me. But once I get it, watch the fuck out, I can explain it in 80 different ways. I can figure out which way your brain needs to hear it. I can bridge it together. As long as I stay on track, as long as I keep going straight and I don't get caught off on six other stories or two soapboxes, I can teach stuff. And I enjoy doing it.

I love being able to figure out what someone's thought patterns are and then find ways for them to understand the topic. And also the other side is that I'm a Pilates instructor, which is important for the story of breathwork because I saw breathwork really exploding. And we walked away from our training community. And I was like, we can't let what happened to Pilates happen to breathwork. And it did.

With Pilates, you can do a Pilates certification that's 800 hours or 8 hours, and they hold the same weight. It's an unregulated deal, which is good for some reasons and not for others. I had so much respect for it. After my first set of training that I took, I kept running into situations where I felt very untrained to be there. And I think that's a big part of why I had to learn so much. I am unprepared to be here, and I'm not gonna have that again.

I was like, " You won't catch me uninformed again." That's not going to happen twice. I kept learning and when I started to think about where I wanted breathwork to go and what I wanted to see in the breathwork community, I recognized that I was going to have to take a step towards creating a pathway for people to learn and to hold space responsibly. So that way not only could they be great breathworkers, but also like great wellness professionals.

I do run a breathwork training, my training will give you the tools to facilitate anything in a responsible way. It will give you the tools to relate to others, to hold space for others, to show up for others, and that can be yourself, that can be your community, that can be your spouse, your best friend. we talk a lot about how to just show up for one another even in ways where we're maybe a little bit uncomfortable, even in ways where we don't feel completely like well-versed in the subject.

How to show up, and how to hold space, and how to let people feel like they are seen, and they're witnessed, and they are valid, and all of their things, their thoughts and their dreams are valid when they're around us. And that's what I train, but also how to responsibly facilitate a breathwork session. That all came through for me so strongly when you talked about your school. One of the things I think is really cool in what you just talked about that I relate to is learning was hard.

And once I do figure something out, then I feel like I have a duty to make it easier for other people who might also struggle to learn. Especially in therapy and mindfulness and other kinds of wellness practices, it's just a really good reminder to look for the teachers who you can learn from. Teachers whose work makes sense to you and makes you feel welcomed and educated instead of confused. So I think that's a really important point that you brought up.

Can you tell me anything, this might or might not be possible, but when you think about the folks listening to this podcast who are Thinkydoers, like we're the folks who overthink, and overdo. When you think about those listeners, what would you say to folks who maybe aren't as experienced with nervous system regulation and the role that the nervous system plays in how we operate? So much. Starting with a bit of a lecture.

I think that the nervous system is something that is really sexy to talk about right now, and I think has turned out to be quite profitable for a lot of people to talk about and to find different ways for all of us to focus in on specifically what's being said so that way we can change our lives, change our nervous system, train our vagal, whatever. Throw a rock and you're gonna hit somebody selling you something or promising you this is the way to train your nervous system.

So first, what I wanna say is that your body is your body. Your nervous system, your nervous system. Try, when you're thinking about ways to learn about the nervous system, to do so with an open mind and to do it without an intended goal. Because obviously we all wanna be less stressed out. I get that on its face. We live in a very crazy, hard world. So those are all incredibly honest and genuine goals.

But when I was creating the nervous system, like introduction to the nervous system, the trauma-informed care, lectures of Breath Abration Society, I promised my students, and I have to tell you, my students are the best, because in the building of this, every time I ran it, I was like, I'm still building. People were like, yep, I'm in.

And the patience they had, and this happened because I was like, I'm gonna make these lectures showing people how breath interacts with the nervous system and how we can use the breath to help us regain more of a sense of normalcy and things like that. And it took me a year to make those lectures because I felt like I was pulling out a little string. And that's my first point around like nervous system care and integration, there's always gonna be so much to learn.

The doctors, the people, the neuroscientists are still learning. There's so much to do it. We know, I think, like 2% of what our nervous system's doing. So I want you, as you're learning about the nervous system, to do so. Again, with an open mind with the idea that this is like one out of a hundred things that we know about. There's so much that we don't know about. As I was learning, it took me like a year, when I can really dial it in, I'm very like check mark, nail it.

But I kept learning, and it was really hard for me to decide what to include and what not to, because there's so much to learn and there's so much material. But what I ultimately took away from creating those lectures was life-changing, because I learned all about how, when we are stressed out, how it affects our physical body. And I learned about how when we are stressed out, and using a really simple term.

I hope it's not weighted to anyone, but when we're in stress mode, we're less likely to learn. What I recognize and what I ask my students, when they're going through these lectures, to recognize is that when we red line our life, and that's whether it's by choice or not, it affects our health. And in making those lectures, I completely change the way I do. So many different things in my life, like as somebody who was perfectly fine redlining, I was like, whatever, I'll muscle this out.

I was like, how can I run this business much, much easier? How can I be nicer to myself? I think I started to understand who I'm as a person a lot more, the more I learned about the nervous system. When I got into the polyvagal theory and all of those different things. Again, none of those are hard and true facts, but I learned so much about me. And I think if I just walked in there like, I wanna learn how to be less stressed out, then I would've missed a lot of the points.

Ultimately, what I did is, and it's hard to not like self-diagnose through a lot of these things, but like I said, when you're going into any sort of nervous system work, allow for so much curiosity and just learn. And follow what feels interesting to you and just follow let the rabbit holes happen, and be fascinated with how beautiful and how unbelievable our bodies are. And then take what tiny bits you can and play around with it. Like I said, I was like, okay, I work too much.

I work too many hours. How can I work fewer hours? That's it. I wasn't like, I guess I'm gonna re-do that my whole life. I was just like, simply put, I need to work a little bit less. What's the first thing I can do around that? And that's where I took it. And I know that the nervous system can feel like this giant thing, and anyone who tells you it isn't is not telling you the whole story. I recommend like a self-guided tour. Just, figure out what learning style works best for you.

One of the other focuses you have is on being trauma-informed and really practicing in a way that's trauma-informed. Big T and little T trauma I think are really common in my listeners. I can only speak for myself, but that has been one of the barriers for me in doing any kind of body-based or somatic work. It's like those cables just got disconnected when I was really, really little.

For folks who have a trauma history, and who might have felt like mindfulness or body-based practices were like touching a burner that's on the stove, so we recoil and then don't try it again. You already mentioned titration, but is there anything else that you can say for folks who have experienced trauma where that's one of the barriers to breath work? For somebody who has experienced trauma, a couple points. There are different types of breath for different types of days.

Breathwork is this like very vague umbrella term. You'll see people like post jog videos and they're like tag breathwork. they're like riding a bicycle, tag breathwork. It's an anything term at this point. But specific breathing exercises, there's hundreds of them that you can do. And what I recommend is a little bit of self-practice around determining what breath is helpful in what situation.

When someone's really in an activated place, doing an activated breathwork that is not gonna be helpful to them. But if someone is in a place where they tend to always default into almost like sleep state, where they're just going to just numb completely out, maybe an activating breathwork session might be better to help them start to moderate that. Ultimately with breathwork, what I recommend everybody understand is that activating breath is intended to activate.

I'm not gonna make any assumptions, I think sometimes there's a misunderstanding with breathwork that it's meditation, and a meditation that's only there to help us calm down. And so if someone tries breathwork because they're trying to calm down again, they're gonna be like, "What the fuck? I got more upset." The way I explain and understand breathwork to be is that breathwork is intended to create these moments of agitation so that we can practice small or micro-dosing stress here.

So that we can practice feeling a little bit of that agitated, amped-up feeling and then go into our sense of normalcy. And really what we're doing is we're just like feeling like pushups with our nervous system. We're going voluntarily, which is very rarely the case in most traumatic experiences. We are voluntarily moving into an agitated space and then we're completing that stress cycle. So we're going from an agitated space to a sense of normalcy with our control.

If you are wanting to learn trauma integration through breathwork, that's the first understanding. It agitates, it stirs the pot. So go in with that expectation, unless you want to feel more calm. If I'm feeling pretty anxious, there are breaths I go to. If I'm in a spot where I'm feeling like really supported and really ready to go, and I'm like, "Let's go heal some shit," then I'm gonna go into a more agitated breath.

But just recognize that there are different types of breath for different days. And the last thing I'm gonna say is that the reason why it's so helpful for those of us with traumatic life experiences, it's because it does allow us to start to experience little bits of stress without having to talk about it, without having to name words to it, without having to feel it in our bodies or tell a therapist about it. We can feel it, and then we can go into a state of normalcy.

I hate when I hear people talking about releasing trauma. We're not. The goal here is to create ways for us to be able to experience moments of stress and not be completely derailed.