The First Breath: A Call to Return Home
Audio Transcript:
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Hello. Such a warm and welcoming hello to each one of you tuning in today. I want to begin today by simply calling you in and honoring your presence in this very moment. Let's just pause and land together right now. Are you seated deep into your comfiest chair or are your hands gripping the steering wheel? Are you gently moving your fingers through a soft, familiar texture? Or can you feel your pulse heavy beneath your ribs? Is it a cold early morning or warm late evening where you are? Is your skin cool from the
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breeze? Or are you tucked in bed all warm and cozy? However you arrive and whatever you are holding today, let me fully welcome the wholeness of you. I'm so glad you are here exactly as you are. Together with every one of us listening, whether you're rooted in your ancestral land or navigating the complex currents of the diaspora to find your way home across oceans and generations. Let us acknowledge the vast and varied human existence we all carry. Let us honor our lineage, our ancestors, and
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the wisdom they weave through our very breath. And as we move through these precious breaths, let me introduce you to myself and this podcast. Think of this podcast as a pilgrimage, a sacred journey to integrate the healing of the inner body with the liberation of the outer world. And here together we are reclaiming self-rust, rooting our safe space within our bodies and moving away from the search for external systems to quote unquote fix. Hi, I'm Suks. I'm a student of this work and for the longest time my life has
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been defined by constant motion. It hasn't been just physical movement. You know, it has been this restlessness, this relentless chase for external authority, the next teacher, the perfect retreat, the definitive answer that was finally supposed to make me whole. I have felt utterly exhausted trying to fit my complex, highly sensitive body into this perfectly linear, individualistic, and frankly commercialized blueprint of mainstream wellness. And here's the thing I realized on that journey.
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None of those quick fixes or temporary soothing were sustainable because the work never actually addressed the source of my trauma. It never once spoke to the historical, systemic, and cultural context that my nervous system was constantly battling. I was basically applying temporary bandages to deep wounds. wounds caused by systems like patriarchy, capitalism, and inevitable inherited trauma. And then insult to injury, I was being told the failure was totally my own. So this podcast, the breath of
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liberation, and the work I am now rooting myself in is the direct necessary result of that breakdown and the radical rerouting that followed. This is the moment I stopped looking for quick fixes outside myself and committed myself to drawing my own map towards true embodied sovereignty. For this foundational episode, I am joined by someone who guides and teaches in this field with profound integrity, Hannah Kandaru. With over 12 years of experience rooted in embodied social justice and decolonial healing, she is
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the founder of inspire breath work and serves as a director at the UK breath work association bringing in deep training from diverse modalities of personal healing and social justice for radical change. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome my co-traer and anchor in this work for this crucial conversation. Hannah, thank you so much for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I want to start by exploring the deep root of this work for you, beginning with your personal history. I
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know your work is so deeply rooted in ethics and community now, but we all start somewhere, right? And I'd love to hear about a specific moment in your early days, a turning point maybe, uh, where you realized the mainstream model wasn't working and that this work actually had to be political. So I started doing breath work fortunately and unfortunately from a very young age. Unfortunately, because it was a harrowing experience that included sexual violence that I went through in my later teens and I was seeking
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approaches and methodologies towards healing. I was in my second year of uni and I noticed what was happening in my body and it wasn't something that I could really explain. It felt wordless and preverbal. It was a freezing like I'd never really felt before. It was a theft of life and it was something that I had recognized within myself, but I wasn't sure how to attend it. And when I was looking at ways of healing around this, there were only a few kind of pathways that were available. The first one was speaking to
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a doctor. I was living in Glasgow at the time and one of the only three folks of color in my uni degree. The doctors that I had access to were elderly white-bodied Scottish men. And in that moment, I knew that I didn't really want to be talking to them. The other modality that was available was medication, and that wasn't something that I really wanted to do. And so living as a brown-bodied person in a white dominant society where things are always inherently political, that was something that I already recognized as a
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teenager. And so when I was looking at alternative models, I started looking at yoga and movement and meditation. I got really quite into looking at esoteric philosophies and even stoicism and things that could actually back up or even support the freezing that was happening in my body. These processes helped me to elevate or to escape or to even dissociate from what I was experiencing. I had gone through multiple modalities at this point and it didn't really feel like I was attending to anything in my body. It was doing a
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lot of soul stuff or spirit stuff if we were to speak about it like that. But my body was always left behind. Many of these practices, especially the ones that have been co-opted and taught in the west, were taught in a way that I could escape from my body. It was an elevation, an ascendance, an escalation. And what I was feeling inside was dead. And so it was only when I was asking around and sharing this experience with my mom that she suggested that I try breath work. and breath work. It was the
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first modality that I had tried that really brought my body with me. It was a reminder of how alive I was. It was visceral. Electricity and vibration and I was able to reconnect with that. And I hadn't felt that for a really long time. It felt like the silence had been broken. And this was a deeply personal kind of revelation. This was how I realized how healing work is political. The ways in which the healing modalities and alternative approaches were really ignoring my body. And so when I came to breath work and
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practiced what it means to remember my body and remember who she is, it wasn't just me, my body as a soma or viscera, but actually my personal experience of living in a white dominated society, in a male dominated society. It was living in a woman's body under patriarchy. It was being the only person of the global majority. It was a kind of attendance to all the ways that I had tried to shrink or assimilate myself or become invisible. And so stumbling across breath work has always been decolonial for me, even if I
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haven't really used those words up until the latter half of the last decade. because it's about bringing the body with us and the body is a politic always and whenever I was attending to my body it felt like I was attending to all the systems that my body has experienced all the systems of oppression and so this is with a beautiful lens of hindsight now and I think at the time I wouldn't have had the words to articulate that but I think what I was moving through right from the beginning is that breath work
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is a liberatory act it has always being political because we're living in a society who dictates who gets to breathe and who doesn't. Who dictates who gets to be healthy and who doesn't, who gets to have complexity and emotion and who doesn't. And so, yeah, I guess that's the spark. >> Wow. Thank you so much, Hannah, for that radical honesty and vulnerability. That turning point I think is what brings us all here together exploring these topics. Now you often speak about the body being
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a site of political truth which is something I have loved in everything that you teach. When you look at the world right now, what are the big forces according to you? um the collective harms that make breath work feel less like a luxury and more like a necessary act of resistance and trauma release. >> M yeah big question. Okay, let me see. There are three big forces that make breath work necessary right now. The first one is that we have undergone a very violent process of forced amnesia.
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Amnesia is a consequence of physical violence, of ruptures in our lineage, ruptures in the connection to the land and ruptures of where we actually find ourselves. This forced migration, forced disconnection from the food systems that we are a part of, the ecologies that we are a part of, to the rivers and mountains that we used to call home that are now covered in cement and concrete. We don't really listen to this because we don't know and we don't remember the fact that we are all collateral damage
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of colonization. We are all collateral damage of the colonial imagination. Which means all of us have been ripped away from our homes, ripped away from what we used to know, ripped away from knowledge systems and rituals and prayer and practice. And this means that we are a generation of lost ones. We are a generation of those looking and seeking and kind of fumbling through the threads of our memories. And in this lostness, in this void of knowledge, we're deeply vulnerable and deeply susceptible to
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other knowledge systems swooping in. And so this leads us to the second one. The second biggest force I would say that has contributed to this is the undervaluing of our own power. because we have been dominated so severely that we've lost power and lost trust in our own ability to heal. We've lost trust in our own ability to know things, to seek things out, to practice, to learn. And so what we've done is kind of gone through a process of outsourcing that looking outside of ourselves, seeking
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validation, seeking teaching, doctors, authorities outside of ourselves to tell us what to do. It's a really valid attempt. Like all of these attempts to seek that connection is really valid because the grief is really real. And so what is happening here is and in this moment we're not taught to have that discernment and understanding of our wider politics and our wider history. We end up playing into the systems of power and kind of learning how to go against people. Instead of looking at how we've
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been systemically brought here, we end up contributing to the conflict between people. And then the final one is probably the abstraction. The abstraction and the shaming and blaming that happens in this lostness. Part of this training is really understanding that understanding that we're all collateral damage of this process of this paradigm is that we need to actually be hard on systems but soft on people which means bringing people in. And even though we may embody those systems, we may have
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them within us, we may perpetuate them, there are people who do so more than others, they are also under this imagination. They are also suffering. And it's not to condone anything that is happening, but it's to understand that they are also products of systematic force. And so, how can we actually bring them into the fold in terms of trauma and healing? the ways that the characteristics of supremacy culture show up in our healing world and how we end up perpetuating those characteristics
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as let's say progress or being healed. Those characteristics of the binary thinking of healed and unhealed, right and wrong, broken not broken. This idea of perfection, of what healing looks like, what healthy looks like. And then because of these characteristics being really present also in our healing and in our trauma work, we end up really not attending to our core wounds. And so just looking at these very superficial level attempts which can be remedial in the moment and it can be helpful to help
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us to return back to what what it might mean to be functional but it doesn't actually help us heal the core wounds. So I think those are the three big forces >> that really lands with such immense gravity. When I hear you uh speaking some of these words, if I had to put labels on them in my mind translated into words like capitalism, systemic oppression, hustle culture and that's the thing, right? we we we don't know what's happening, but our body is keeping the score. It really is
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such um intense work to hold space for all of this complexity. I'm really thankful to you um for helping us on this journey, for guiding us on this journey. Thank you. This next one is very interesting for me because it is a topic that we touched upon just last week in our session. Um, and I genuinely was so enriched by that conversation that I had to bring it up and have everyone hear our, you know, um, viewpoint on these this this topic. We talk a lot about decolonizing breath work here, but it's a term that I feel
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can get a bit lost. What I want to know from you is how you see this difference. What does a colonial approach actually look like in practice and how exactly do we flip that to create something truly decolonial? Yeah, great question. I think first and foremost I would like to say that we are limited by the language that we have and the English language is also very limited in terms of what is actually available but this is the colonial language that we are using. So decolonization has primarily been rooted
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in government systems and processes of independence for nation states. And so adopting that into wellness and healing is actually quite a challenging task, but it's a really valid question. So within the healing paradigm, decolonial healing is an awareness of the ways that we've been disconnected. Colonization has seeped into every single cell of our body. It's not just happening in our countries, cities, communities. It's something that has happened to our bodies. And understanding that our body
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is a politic is also looking at it in a fractal way. So if it's present in the social body, it is present in our body. We have these beautiful eastern philosophies that follow that thought, right? but without the kind of politics around it. The statement of as within as without right or as above as below and similarly if it's in our collective it's in our personal. So let's start with colonial colonial paradigms knowingly or unknowingly. And there's a pain in this work as we're doing it, right? Because a
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lot of it is unconscious and we don't realize how much allegiance we have to the systems of power. The wellness framework and the western psychological framework in its attempt to help is actually helping you to return back to a highly dysfunctional society. The systems in which they employ are really around calming down or regulating or returning you back to become a productive member of the society. Meaning somebody who continues to work, somebody who maintains their money-making capacity, someone who
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participates in social and cultural capital. And so I think just with one sentence we can say that a colonial healing paradigm is one that returns you back to work which is quite funny I think. >> And without even assessing what resources are available for each body individually either is the sense I'm getting. >> Yeah. Exactly. It's like how can I dampen the troublemaker in you? How can I dampen the ways that your body is protesting the systems of oppression? And it uses things like physical tools,
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sematic tools, medication to get you back to becoming quiet, obedient worker. And those of us that are outside of that may be sectioned or maybe imprisoned or exiled. And so a decolonial approach is actually a traumatilic approach. Traumatophilic meaning trauma loving, meaning that we really enjoy the ways that our body has leared to survive because it got us here. We are really curious about the ways in which our bodies are trying to create possible futures for us. But it might mean the sacrifice of our current system. And it
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might mean that we don't return back to who we were. It means actually shephering and stewarding ourselves through the transformation into something that we've yet to discover about ourselves. And so a decolonial approach is really about how can I be there with you as the earth crumbles? How can I be there with you as the earth within your bones crumble? And then we remember we remember who we are outside of these systems of oppression. And it's really challenging task for people because it invites us to go through
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processes of dissolution, personality dissolution. It's changing who we are and how we think. It's changing our value systems that we've inherited from our parents or grandparents. And it's stepping into a role of responsibility that may not yet have happened in your lineage. And so a decolonial approach is really about the reclamation of power from the systems of domination. And there's agency here. There's a cultivation of safety in the body. There's an inherent curiosity of what
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possible futures can emerge through this work. H that's such a necessary dismantling. And it's so crucial to define these terms of our liberation this clearly. It it really is not just I suppose destroying the present but also rebuilding the past, midwifing it into existence. Yeah. Um this was this was really enlightening. Thank you. So I'm curious, what's a life for you right now? Is there a radical thought or a new realization maybe that's reshaping how you guide people or
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maybe how we just spoke about an old assumption about breath work that you think we just have to let go of at this point? >> Yeah, this is an old thought but it's coming in with new terminology that I'm appreciating in the moment. And just like all of this learning spiralic, I am also learning on this journey. And I'm grateful that there are moments of teaching that I get to share. But the thought is about how prescriptive we are with our healing modalities that there's a certain desire
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for specificity and certainty. We reveal the part of us that just wants something to work. The way that breath work is evolving right now and the way that it's been commodified really reveals parts of us that kind of want not necessarily a quick fix but a guaranteed one. And what I mean by prescriptive in breath work, what we can see sometimes is that we get sold these specific breath work patterns that will make us feel something. If you do this, then this will calm you down. If you do this, then you can
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focus. If you do this, then you'll be energized. And there are moments like this that we can see trends of this happening. But I think one of the things that's really pertinent in this revelation is it's kind of an absurd way to attend to our nervous systems. We have so many different nervous systems at play with so many different lineages coming through them, so much collective and intergenerational trauma. And so there is an absurdity of saying that one thing is going to make you feel something,
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that there's going to be a universal piece across all of humanity. It's actually quite funny when we start thinking about it like that. And so what is really emerging more and more is that we actually need to attend to our own nervous system and we can create our own practices that we can reclaim and that's really important. And a tangential thought around this is also the idea that breath work breath work isn't something that has recently resurfaced or has been rediscovered. It has been the foundation of every
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single lineage. breath work makes sense to you and makes sense to me in very different ways because of the ways that our ancestors have used the breath. And so right now I really feel like there's a little bit more of an opening, a space for us to remember. If we used to pray together, then we used to breathe together. If we danced together, then we breathed together. If we drumed together, then we breathed together. If we sang together, then we breathe together. And these kinds of recollections of our
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own lineage and the reclamation of who we are and these tracings is actually allowing us to explore what breath work means for us and for every single lineage in a different way. And that's really exciting. And the exciting thing about this in a decolonial approach to breath work is that the breath work that we might see right now that is marketed online may not make sense for you in your community. They may not be what breath work looks like for you. And so in this process of remembering of
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retracing is a really exciting time for me, especially with a practice and a school rooted in bringing breath work through the wellness industry and into the public domain into where the communities are. Breath work might not look like you lying down in a beautiful white yoga studio with linen curtains. It might not look like you surrounded in soft lighting and everyone's wearing white. It might look very very different. And so something that is really interesting for me right now is this curiosity at this edge where
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more and more students are coming through this training and more and more people are learning about their own lineages and the evolution of breath work and what that actually looks like and how we can incorporate that into our industry in our learning environments. Oh wow, that brought up such visceral imagery for me when you spoke about um dancing together and singing together as a lineage. I I I literally could play a um film role in my mind around it, you know, that was beautiful and it really
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is such a powerful shift moving from say the intellectual theory to felt experience which is how I saw this. So thank you so much for that insight. While you spoke about um nervous systems and how we need to address different kinds of nervous systems and make space for them. my mind wandered and I'm now curious about the idea of of your thoughts your thoughts on you know what do you think about maybe one single body having multiple nervous systems at a given time maybe not so much medically but what are your
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thoughts on a concept like that do you think it's possible do you think it's something we tap into as individuals ever. >> It is not an uncommon experience when we're practicing breath work in this way that we can feel into other beings, other presences. I don't think it's fair to say that this is an abstract thought. I think there has been anecdotal evidence. There is definitely a resonance in the felt experience because we are engaging with our soma and we are engaging with
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our system. However, in the years that I've been doing this work, there have been moments where people have been very clear that what they've experienced isn't something that they personally feel, but it may be something that their grandparents have felt. Or there's clarity in knowing that this feeling isn't mine. I don't recognize it, but I'm willing to feel it and hold it and get curious about it. There's a desire for certainty within the breath work industry. And it's really
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interesting because breath work straddles both the clinical medical space as there is very physiological benefits of breath work that attend to our nervous system. But it also straddles the spiritual space outside of religion. It's a secular practice that welcomes all belief systems and it taps into our experience of life. And so I can see there are parts of the breath work world really wanting to get into certainty around it. This is what happens. This is how it happens. This is what's going on
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and yet there is so much unknown about it. The multiple nervous system theory is actually quite interesting. It shows up when we do inner child work or inner elder work. When we look into or engage into different parts of us, parts of us that are able to traverse time and engage with nervous systems that we used to have or systems that we are emerging to have and those dialogues are real. And I think there's another piece around the idea of multiple presences or spirits or ancestors visiting. There's a
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collective nervous system, a global one, right? That we're all kind of connected to and something that some may call a collective consciousness, but we can feel it viscerally in our body. And without it being too abstract, it's actually very real. We do and can feel each other if we let ourselves. And I think this speaks into one of the challenges that we also see in the western kind of psychological framework and wellness and healing is that it is highly individualized which means our capacities are limited
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to the bodies that we have. But when we remember that we are a collective we can actually use everything around us. The system is also connected to the soil underneath you to the grass outside. And if I can't hold it, if there's something that I that is moving through my body and my body can't hold it, I can maybe give it to a bigger body. Which means our conversation around capacity shifts. And there's an element of remembrance here of what happens when we allow ourselves into the deep
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medicine of imagination. And sometimes it can be really hard for us to move out of our very systemized and reductionist view of life because we think we're separate. And so I can imagine this being quite hard to hear for some people, but the remembrance that we're all connected kind of blows the idea of individuality out the window. I think sometimes the wellness industry reveals its allegiance to supremacy culture by saying that. by saying that you only have capacity for this, you only have resources for this.
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But your capacity and resources are wider and broader than you think. So it's not just you, it's your land, your soil, your waters, your trees, and your mountains. And we have much more capacity than we think we do. But by saying that we only have a limited capacity, it's also a way for us to keep small and powerless. >> Thanks. Thank you for that. I really do believe I always have believed um in the idea of a collective consciousness and how we are able to feel one another even when we don't we're not in physical
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presence. And this all everything you just said puts that idea into such simple language. So it's really beautiful. I believe that is how we exist as a collective. That's how revolutions take place. Not every person involved in a revolution might might be impacted so directly by what they're standing up against. But the ripples can be felt far and wide and we do feel things as a collective. So this definitely sits really well with me. So for the person uh listening who feels that deep misalignment that we just
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talked about that exhaustion, what is the one thing you think they can do today? Just one shift or action to step out of that consumer cycle and reclaim a little bit of their own sematic sovereignty. We often think that change or revolution requires a lot of energy, requires a lot of fight. And I would really invite them into the simplicity of a breath awareness. There's actually so much time and time is elastic if we let ourselves sit in it. And so even three or five minutes of noticing your own breath,
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noticing your own movement of the breath, your awareness of the breath is radical. In this sense, it's a resistance to the ways that you are forced to rush, to be urgent, to always be productive, to always be on a mission, to always think that you're not doing enough. And so coming back into that present state, it's really powerful. But I can also imagine because I've felt it before when people say this that it's such an annoying invitation because it's so simple and quiet but
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yeah it is really powerful. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. That definitely I hear you. Such a necessary invitation back into the body. Um thank you for that grounded advice Hannah. Before we move into a guided breath by Hannah to close this episode, I want to leave you with a voice from the lineage of wisdom that informs this work. This is a short poem by contemporary Palestinian American poet Naomi Shahab Nye, whose work since the midentth century has offered many of us a path through loss and grief, reminding us
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that transformation begins in the interior spaces of the body. kindness. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth, what you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved. All this must go. So you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop. The passengers eating maze and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of
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kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you. how he too was someone who journeyied through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes
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sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread. Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. As I read those words, I'm reminded that we often spend our lives trying to outrun the sorrow she described so beautifully, only to realize that it's the very thread that connects us to our humanity. For me, this practice is about finally
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stopping that race. It's about standing still long enough to see the size of the cloth we are all woven into. And now to close our first session, I request you Hannah to guide us through a final grounding breath. A simple way to connect with that sovereign ground within us. All right. So, we're going to do one of those annoying practices. So, thank you. Thank you for listening. So, I invite you to look around the space that you're in. I invite you to look at the corners and the edges,
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the colors and the textures. I invite you to look all the way around you if you can, twisting your neck and your shoulders, looking all the way behind you. twisting your hips maybe and taking a moment to notice where you are. Where are you right now? I invite you to notice the relationship to the windows and the doors. or if you're outside your relationship to the other living breathing beings. And as you're looking around and noticing, I want you to really see if you can let yourself accurately discern your level
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of safety, physical safety, or threat right now. and knowing that this invitation is going to be in accordance to that level of safety. Nothing more, nothing less. And so acknowledging where you are, acknowledging your level of safety, bringing your attention inward. And inward may mean bringing your gaze towards yourself. It may mean softening your eyes. It may mean closing them if that feels good. It may mean softening your eyebrows, your jaw, softening your shoulders if you can, softening your belly if you can.
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Maybe in this next moment, bringing your tongue off the roof of your mouth and taking a moment to notice your mind. What's happening there? I wonder if you can bring your awareness and attention down into your breath. And without changing your breath, I invite you to follow it. How fast is it moving right now? What temperature is it? Where can you feel it? Can you feel your breath on the top of your lip? Can you feel your breath in the back of your throat? How does it travel down? Does it have a sound?
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How is it moving? Is it smooth or jagged? Is it sharp or does it have flow? I'm curious if you can see where the breath turns around in your body. Where does it land and pivot? Where does it change direction? I wonder if there can be a little bit of curiosity here. Noticing how your body is holding. Noticing where it's resisting gravity. Is there tension or tightness? I wonder if you can give yourself permission to soften. To soften in accordance to your level of safety for a moment. And taking a few more breaths here.
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Becoming aware of the surface that you're on where your body meets the ground. Being gentle as you bring more light back into your eyes, noticing the temperature of the space that you're in. I invite you to take a look around again. You are more powerful than you think. And reclaiming our power isn't engaging in the power grab or the fight or the bigness of it all. It's taking these little liberations, tiny little moments, subtle ceremonies that can happen really quietly. We often think that we need to be part
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of a big movement, a big political act, often without really addressing or assessing where we are. So, taking a moment to really notice where you are, how your body is, what your surroundings are, and moving in accordance to that. It's a really powerful place to start. Thank you. And thank you, Suks, for inviting me. Thank you immensely, Hannah. And to you, dear listener, walking this path with us so courageously, thank you for showing up for yourself and your breath today. As you carry this
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breath back into your world, remember the path is not a place you arrive at. It is the rhythm you carry within your own ribs. It settles when you settle and it rises when you rise. In the next episode, we will dive into reclaiming the root where we'll try to uncover the exact moment wellness systems fail us and explore how we may begin to build something more authentic from the ground up. Until then, you can find the breath of liberation wherever you get your podcasts. If you felt something move inside you
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today, stay connected by subscribing and sharing this journey with anyone who might need this breath. See you so very soon for the next step of this sacred pilgrimage.
