Beyond Force: Cultivating the Skill that Changes Everything

Every breath offers a choice: to embrace more aliveness or to pull away from it. How we respond in that moment—the way we think about what we’re feeling—shapes how the breath is received, and how life moves through us.

Each moment becomes a seed for the next because our brains are ditch diggers (a concept explored in Neuroacrobatics™): they groove the same patterns deeper unless we intentionally shift attention.

If we’re truly working with the breath, we’re working with creative thought (as Binnie Dansby teaches).

The deeper level of practice isn’t just about feeling better by the end of a session—it’s about transforming our relationship with the world and not remaining beholden to the confines of anything external (within reason, of course). This becomes a practice of remaining present with the things we once disliked, watching, and feeling with compassion until enough space is created within us around these energies—energies that, when expressed outwardly, form our preferences and, in turn, limit the energy we could otherwise be open to.

Sensation, thought, emotion—life in general—none of these are inherently negative. But when they’re tied to the past, and in that past, we created a negative story around them (meaning we did not remain in a position of choice or perspective regarding our sensations in the moment and in the future moments that followed), they start running a show designed to break our hearts over and over again—and not in a good way. Yet, we become comfortable with heartbreak—or whatever form of suffering is familiar—and thus get stuck in cycles of incoherence. Our system will always choose familiar suffering over the unknown.

The mind is wired to look for threats, constantly scanning for what could go wrong in an attempt to protect us. The problem is that whatever we are trying to avoid, we tend to drive straight into. It’s like staring at a pothole while trying not to hit it. The trick is to see the pothole, and then shift our gaze toward where we want to go instead.

Repatterning Attention

Breathwork, at its core, is about repatterning our attention. Instead of looping on old fear-based reactions, we learn to redirect awareness toward something more open—restoring our personal power, bringing us back into choice, and reconnecting us to the fluid, life-affirming aspects of our experience.

This repatterning happens on a physical and neurological level, as our nervous system gradually stops confusing the past with the present. Beneath our conscious awareness, past experiences still register as if they are happening now. Through practice, as these old energies surface, we learn to witness them with compassion while simultaneously creating the spaciousness within us to feel resourced enough to bear witness to these sensations and bodily memories.

In a Somatic Alignment session—or daily life—this process shifts our system from being locked in survival mode to experiencing openness, expansiveness, and safety. We stop reinforcing the pattern of avoidance and instead, allow life to move through us rather than bracing against it. And we do this by simply being willing to breathe and feel.

As our nervous system shifts out of survival mode, this transformation takes place on all levels, physically there is a cellular shift in how we feel the moment and it unfolds mentally and cognitively as well. It’s both a bottom-up and a top-down process happening simultaneously.

When we notice this phenomenon, we might still resist it or try to avoid it. That’s where practice—and eventually skill—comes in. How practiced are we at breathing, feeling, and refraining from immediately passing judgment on our experience?

On a very general level, most of us, especially early on, try to force our way into change. We push harder, breathe more, think deeper, and sometimes develop an armor in the form of an addiction to our own intensity. We apply pressure, convinced that effort alone will carry us all the way, not realizing that eventually, we’ll be asked to reassess this relationship.

Force doesn’t guarantee transformation. If it did, we’d all be gods by now.

Real change doesn’t come from pressure—it comes from presence. Not through willpower alone, but through willingness, and a shift in how we engage with our will.

It’s about how we relate to what’s arising, not just how hard we try to change it.

It’s natural—and even expected—for people to rely on force in the beginning stages. In my experience, trying to bypass this phase doesn’t necessarily work either. For those of us with a fire in our belly and a deep need to understand the forces that drive us, pushing hard can feel inevitable as there are lessons to be learned in all things.

Everything is a practice. As Miyamoto Musashi, the most decorated samurai swordsman in history, said, “If you know the way broadly, you will see it in all things.” If we are truly skilled at this—really, really skilled—then nothing could ever stand in our way once we set our minds to something.

As Binnie Dansby says, “Healing begins the moment a life-depleting thought shifts into a life-affirming one.” That is the power we possess.

This isn’t just about feeling good after a session or having a routine that helps us stay balanced that we become beholden to. The real work is about changing how we relate to ourselves because the way we relate to ourselves is the way we relate to the world, and that energetic pattern of relating communicates volumes before we even open our mouths.

Sessions with me aren’t just designed to support your well-being in the short term—they’re meant to facilitate a deep shift in how you experience life itself. And that shift isn’t something I give you—it’s something you generate for yourself through your practice and willingness. The skill gained is something you take with you into every other aspect of your life.

Now, of course, this will speak to some more than others. Many of us are already overwhelmed and not looking to sign up for a lifelong practice of internal kung fu—and that’s to be expected. That’s part of the beauty of it: This process doesn’t require something you don’t have to give.

We each carry a unique energetic design, with both a limited and limitless capacity for life. The limitless side emerges when our awareness is open, relaxed, and spacious. The limited side takes over when we dig ditches with our brains without any support or lifeline.

So we practice. We love what we love.

And we stay present with what we don’t.

Because that presence—that breath—that willingness to feel—is what reshapes us.

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Closing remarks with a segue into the next blog:

As discussed, the breath doesn’t happen in isolation. It responds to the mind, the stories we carry, and the thoughts we think while breathing. Each thought has its own waveform—its own frequency and tone. We can breathe in a way that may appear calm on the surface to the untrained eye, yet still generate internal chaos if our thoughts are fragmented or rooted in control. Breath alone doesn’t bring us into harmony; it works in relationship with awareness. Life-depleting thoughts disrupt the rhythm of the breath, fracturing coherence and distorting the nervous system’s ability to connect—with itself and with the world. Life-affirming thoughts, on the other hand, generate patterns of resonance—waveforms that support ease, flow, and integration. This isn’t just poetic metaphor—it’s measurable. In the next piece, we’ll explore the science behind this relationship: how thought and breath affect frequency, influence brainwave states, and either fragment or restore coherence across the entire system.