A few years ago, I remember having this constant, odd feeling that my child self was haunting me. I’d be in the kitchen and suddenly notice pain in my body, and the nearness of her presence would come soon after. She was asking me to pay attention to something, to connect dots I’d yet to connect. It was as if she was begging me to notice things in a new way and step into an active relationship that I’d been denying myself for years.
It happened the same year that I began trauma therapy and realized that my body was constantly carrying ongoing signs of trauma. As an Indigenous woman, I carry generations of trauma in my body. I have lived trauma in ways I’ve yet to understand; I have memories that are blocked out and unavailable to me, gaps in time and place between my family’s many moves across the country and the poverty of my upbringing. Details are difficult to retrieve because I lived in a near-constant state of worry.
When I was 9, my father left our family and my parents divorced. In my teen years, the effects of daily colonization and my own trauma led to a reality in which my Indigenous identity got muddied into my evangelical Christian upbringing, leaving me in a fog of disembodiment that lasted over a generation. But I know when I am triggered, because my aching, upset stomach tells me. The dull throb in my lower back tells me. My overwhelm and anxiety tell me.
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Then, in 2019, I attended a spiritual conference in New Mexico and signed up for a breathwork session. We were practicing holotropic breathwork, which was created in the 1970s by psychologists and breathwork experts Stan and Christina Grof, who focused much of their inspiring work on transpersonal psychology, or spiritual psychology. In this type of breathwork (which you should never participate in unless you are with a safe, certified practitioner), participants lie down and practice a series of rapid breaths that put them in an altered state of being for the duration of the process, which can last up to a few hours. The session I attended was shorter, but still very effective. Because this was new to me, I assumed we’d just be sitting there, taking some deep breaths together while listening to classical music. I was wholly unprepared.
After a few minutes of the practice, I was sure nothing was going to happen. Call me a skeptic, but I mostly felt very self-conscious, surrounded by other people also breathing oddly as they lay on their backs. I didn’t want to experience anything. Not really. But toward the end of our time, I did.
As I lay there on my back, knees up, I was reminded of the way I had been positioned while giving birth to both of my children. Breathing through the memory of every contraction, my body recalled the slow sensation of a coming birth. Then, out of nowhere, a mental image of myself as a young child emerged: I was hiding underneath a table, knees pulled up to my chest, hiding from the environment and world around me that felt like danger and chaos. I was scared and lonely, and no one seemed to notice. This mental image shocked me, and as I continued the breathing exercise, the juxtaposition between that little girl hiding under a table and the woman giving birth became what I am now coming to recognize as an opening to my own integral realm, to my heart center. The integral realm is the space at the very center of our souls where we align with all that we are, and we accept everything that we are learning as a sacred gift. So even in this moment of immense overwhelm, I recognized that I had an opening into an experience of great healing.
The room where I was physically seemed to disappear. Around me, others were still lying on their backs and breathing, and my own self-consciousness disappeared if only for a moment or two. As we came back to ourselves after the breathwork portion ended, those who were comfortable shared what they’d experienced.
I will hold on to that moment forever because it confirmed not only the inner world of anxiety I’ve held since childhood but the strength I have found in becoming who I am today. The image that presented itself to me of this little girl, Little Me, hiding under the table, didn’t have to be a real, true memory to mean something. Instead, it was an embodiment. And it isn’t just the physical act of giving birth that has made me stronger but the willingness to ask questions, to engage with myself and others, to set boundaries, to grieve—it is all a gift to my child self, a way of pulling her out from under that table and into my arms.
For years, I blamed her for my trauma, for the pain I was carrying in my body. But it is entirely necessary for our child selves to haunt us, to find us when we least expect it. It is entirely necessary that we carry on conversations with them that last months, even years, that change us along the way. While it’s terrifying, it’s also complex, holy, and even magical. I was afraid of what might burst open if I allowed my child self to reveal herself, but in that moment, she found me and reminded me that I am her, and that she is me, and our belonging to one another is at the very center of my healing.
Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day
Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day
Excerpt adapted from Living Resistance by Kaitlin B. Curtice, copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group.
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Robert Litman hosts our “The Life You Want” Class on the art and science of breathwork. You will come away with a tool kit of simple breathing techniques to help with stress, anxiety, sleep, asthma, and more. Become an Oprah Daily Insider now to get access to this conversation and the full “The Life You Want” Class library.
