Breath is a Choice: Repatterning Attention.

The Skill That Changes Everything in the Face of the Emotional Plague.

Opening Prelude:

In Fascia to Fascism, we looked outward, at how these inner tensions and emptiness show up in the structures and systems we create as a society. But the Emotional Plague isn’t really out there… It’s inside, in how we show up for ourselves.

Let’s kick this next piece off with an example of how subtle the Emotional Plague can hide in plain sight, and how our bodies may notice it before our brains do.

It’s everywhere, especially in language and the way we frame healing.

The other day, I was scrolling the Polyvagal Institute feed:

“Love and connection heal trauma.”

Simple. Clear. True. And then, in tiny letters underneath:

“Dr. Frank Anderson, Harvard-trained psychiatrist and psychotherapist, renowned for his expertise in trauma treatment.”

…and a link to their latest podcast.

It struck me because it’s exactly the kind of pattern we’ve been tracing.

But it’s hiding not just in plain sight… almost inside itself, something so subtle I’m not even sure I trust my own reading. So hear me out.

“Love and connection heal trauma.”

Say it again. What does that feel like in your body?

How about now?

Now follow it with Harvard credentials. Add the podcast link, the professional frame, maybe the potential ad revenue, the course offerings we don’t know about.

What does it say now? How does it land when authority is added, validating something that was already inherently true?

Here’s the thing: it is true. Overwhelmingly true. Love and connection do heal trauma. They always have. They don’t need validation.

And yet now it comes wrapped in credentials, professional context, an authoritative punch from some guy named Harvard.

To me, it says a lot about how we’ve been trained to live in our heads. To filter life, relationships, and experience through sanctioned knowledge instead of feeling it in our bodies, in our interactions, in the flow of life itself.

The Emotional Plague has colonized even these spaces. It shapes how truths are communicated, how trust is earned, what presence even means, and who’s deemed qualified to know it.

Even when the work is meant to open the nervous system, to cultivate attunement, we operate in a culture that asks us to translate embodiment into something disconnected, then repackage it with credentials, scientific proof, and Harvard authority… before it’s legible to anyone else.

And that’s the subtle work we’re left with: noticing it, feeling it, naming it, and still practicing presence anyway. Not because it will be recognized or validated, but because our bodies already know, and we owe it to ourselves and each other to be honest… for once. Not in judgment, but in allowing ourselves to move out of unnecessary pain and suffering.

So now we look more closely at how we have agency in each moment, and also how we don’t.

Every breath offers a choice:

to embrace more aliveness, or to pull away from it.

How we think about what we’re feeling shapes how breath is received by the body, 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.

Or, in the words of Binnie Dansby:

“A thought planted in the mind, nourished by the breath, takes root in every cell of the body.”

The mind will dig whether we’re watching or not, but with presence, those ditches become a garden. And we begin to choose what we’re planting.

Repatterning Attention

Breathwork, at its core, is about repatterning attention. Instead of looping in old, fear-based armored reactions, we redirect awareness toward something more open and resourced, restoring personal power, reconnecting us to choice, and aligning ourselves with who we are underneath the stories… the life-affirming current beneath everything.

Binnie goes on to say:

“If we’re truly working with the breath, we’re working with creative thought.”

Not in the sense of coming up with clever ideas, but in the sense of generating new meaning, new possibilities, through our presence. Breath invites us into that generative space. It softens the mind’s grip on us and reawakens the parts that can see, feel, and imagine something beyond the current self-imposed limitation.

This repatterning happens physically and neurologically.

The nervous system gradually stops confusing the past with the present.

Beneath our conscious awareness, past experiences still register as if they’re happening now.

But through practice, as these old energies surface, we learn to witness them with compassion, while also becoming spacious enough inside to stay resourced in the face of what once felt overwhelming.

In a session or just in life, this shift helps us move out of survival mode and into openness.

We stop reinforcing avoidance. We stop bracing. We begin to let life move through us. And we do this by simply being willing to breathe and feel.

As the nervous system shifts out of survival, transformation happens on every level.

Physically, there’s a cellular change in how the moment feels.

Cognitively, patterns begin to rewire as our perception of sensory and motor input is restored.

It’s both bottom-up and top-down.

Still, even when we know this… a part of us may resist.

Maybe we resist because we have a case of the Emotional Plague.

Maybe it’s for other reasons.

Either way, this is where patience (practice) comes in.

How willing are we to breathe, feel, track, and refrain from instantly judging ourselves?

Or in more Darrylish language, can we really just attend to ourselves, making ourselves available to life?

Most of us try to force our way into change at first.

We push harder and try to breathe deeper.

We build armor out of our intensity, or out of our collapse.

Underneath the armor is the fact that life loves and recognizes itself in all things.

What if our only problem was that we as humans cared so deeply for ourselves, each other, and the planet that we spent the last [X amount of years] just trying to cope with not knowing how to actually feel all of that?

We pressure ourselves, convinced that effort will carry us all the way, never realizing we’ll eventually be asked to let that go too.

Force doesn’t guarantee transformation.

If it did, we’d all be gods by now.

Not only does force not generate transformation, but it’s actually what prevents it.

Real change doesn’t come from the releasing of built-up pressure; it comes from the presence that we learn (earn) by being willing to sit with discomfort long enough for our container to expand.

At that point, the pressure IS released not because we kicked and yelled and had a big release, but because our whole system grew beyond our belief about what our capacity was to begin with.

It’s not through willpower, but through willingness, and a shift in how we engage with our will.

It’s about how we relate to what’s arising.

Darryl says that when we say “I love you,” it doesn’t fully capture what we’re trying to convey. Instead, he says, “Always, always, always.”

I can’t claim to know all of his wisdom, but here’s my current take: when we say “I love you,” we position ourselves as a static thing making a static statement. Boom. Done. Next thing. It suggests something fixed, unchanging. But we are constantly changing.

Darryl often talks about how long it takes for different parts of our body to fully regenerate, or how every seven years we are made up of entirely new cells.

Saying “I love you” as if it’s fixed only applies to a stagnant moment… a snapshot… when in reality, nothing stays the same.

So saying I love you is fine, but it begs the question… will you love me in seven years when all of the cells that make me me are different and new?

So, when Darryl says “Always, always, always,” he is choosing life-affirming, life-giving, loving intent and action in this moment, and saying that he will choose it again in the next, and the next, and the next… continuously.

Part of that is knowing and owning that this love might change, and it might end up taking the shape of something we never could have anticipated or even wanted. It might even become something that, to the current versions of ourselves, would feel sad about—but we can’t know that until we arrive. And all we can do is arrive where we are now, and commit to continuing to arrive here, always, always, always.

He is showing that love is not a single declaration but a dynamic practice, and a choice.

Life changes, we change, the world changes, and we can only show up with intention for whatever is happening in each present now.

So this is what I mean when I say it’s about how we relate to what’s arising.

Can I essentially choose love? Can I choose a life-affirming mentality to the best of my abilities, to the degree that I am currently able and know how?

And it’s not about love or life-affirming in the sense of what those words have come to mean to us individually or collectively, but rather what lies beneath them, which is what Darryl so beautifully speaks to and embodies.

And of course, this is the way we hold our own in loving opposition to the Emotional Plague.

Can I choose to show up for myself?

Me being life, thus can I show up for life?

Can I be in service to life?

Why would we choose to be in opposition to life unless we had a death wish for ourselves?

Per the last blog, Reich called this the Emotional Plague: a blocked life force armored against its own vitality, generating destructive patterns.

The death‑wish isn’t always obvious… it doesn’t always take the form of self-harm directly, though it can… it often shows up as chronic opposition to life‑affirming movement, connection, and expression.

It’s unconscious, rationalized, yet deeply biological and relational.

And it’s a part of life too. The Emotional Plague is not an evil villain we must defeat… that’s what it would think if it were us looking at itself, but we can see how it IS us, a part of life: another expression of biology’s brilliant display of self-preservation, and another aspect of consciousness coming to know itself in this specific way.

_____

It’s natural, and even necessary, for many of us to go through a phase of pushing and fighting with ourselves. For those with fire in their belly, lessons are found there, too.

But eventually, we’re asked to see that effort isn’t the same as openness.

Intensity isn’t the same as intelligence.

Everything is a practice, but even our ideas about practice might change and have to be let go of, too.

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’re truly skilled, really, really skilled, then nothing could stand in our way…

because the only thing in our way was us, and we’d have finally stepped aside.

As Binnie Dansby says,

“Healing begins the moment a life-depleting thought shifts into a life-affirming one.”

This isn’t about feeling good after a session or having a routine to stay balanced.

The real work is about changing how we relate to ourselves, because how we relate to ourselves is how we relate to the world.

And that energetic pattern of relating communicates everything 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. And that shift isn’t something I give you; it’s something you generate for yourself through your own willingness to practice.

Of course, this won’t resonate with everyone.

Many of us are already overwhelmed and not looking to sign up for a lifelong practice of internal kung fu, and that’s okay.

The beauty of this work is that it doesn’t require anything you don’t already have.

We each carry a unique energetic design, with both a limited and limitless capacity for life.

The limitless part emerges when our awareness is open, relaxed, and present.

When we stop to pause and notice.

The limited part comes out when we forget who we are.

We can’t always remember who we are in a sense, but that’s why slowing down and taking time to become aware that we are aware is so helpful and life-affirming.

What starts as an anchoring practice grows into an inner sort of natural self-orientation.

Darryl says he doesn’t get tired from overnight ceremonies because he stops to pause and notice. That’s when he rests. And that ceremony isn’t tiring because it’s a specific time to come together and rest with each other in the slow stillness of attending to ourselves in these ways.

I think ultimately that is what ceremony is, in the sense that we can either honor ourselves, our ancestors, and life, by slowing down enough to notice it, or we don’t, and it’s gone poof… we missed it.

If we don’t slow down, we end up running around like chickens with our heads chopped off, but in this analogy, it’s really like we are running around with our bodies chopped off our heads.

So we practice.

But even that word is a little misleading; practice implies doing something to get better at it in the future. It comes from a Teleological mindset, the kind most religions operate within… the idea that there’s a purpose to life, a Grand Plan, and that one day things will finally be better, either for you personally or for the world.

Darryl’s approach is different. He doesn’t frame what we’re doing as practice. It’s not about getting somewhere. It’s about making ourselves available for life, here and now, getting to know the sound that we make, asking the questions that matter, and being with the full breadth of whatever arises. That’s where real rest and real presence live.

So we don’t practice per se,

We pay attention.

We track.

We love what we love.

We stay present with what we don’t.

That presence, that breath, that willingness to feel, is what reshapes us.

And it’s the only line of defense we have from the Emotional Plague.

Closing remarks & segue into the next blog:

As discussed, the breath doesn’t happen in isolation. It responds to the mind, to 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 appears calm on the surface, yet still generate internal chaos if our thoughts are fragmented or rooted in control. Breath alone doesn’t create 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 a poetic metaphor; it’s that too, though.

In the next piece, we’ll explore the relationships and science behind this: how thought and breath affect frequency, influence brainwave states, and either fragment or restore coherence across the entire system.