Ginny Muir has been immersed in the studies of gut health, hormonal balancing, the conscious feminine, relationship dynamics, energy work & breathwork. She wants to live in a world where we love ourselves for who we are: body & soul, light & shadow, pain & brilliance. She is a healer and a soul guide. In this episode, we talk about how to use breath work to transform stuck emotions in the body, ginny’s personal transformation, and more.
Tell us about your journey the breathwork and what some of the benefits you have experienced?
As we heal ourselves, we bring the healing forward. That’s how her way of life is. The year before was the most challenging and rewarding year of her life, both emotionally and physically. She was grieving in divorce, as well as physically incapacitated as she tore her ACL while skiing. She had spent the last two months of the year living in Hawaii. The Hawaiian religion pays heavy significance to breath. The word ha itself means breath. You can’t pray without breathing, you can’t even connect to spirit without it; the breath is the spirit. She came across the podcast of her teacher Erin Telford, teaching a breath pattern. Practicing that breath pattern made her feel the energy move through her body. She could feel emotions clearing from her body, and she knew after that experience that she was on the right track. So she gradually started building up, practicing on her own day by day. For her, connecting with our breath is like connecting with our own unique energy. That’s how her journey to breathwork began.
As you were practicing the breathwork, resistance came up and you got through it. How was that experience?
Everyone experiences resistance in the first ten minutes of the practice. The first three minutes probably the trickiest, as you are probably settling to something that feels like work. There are two choices whenever you face resistance, you can either go along with the resistance and stop, or you can push through. But once you get through you find your ease and rhythm and feel so much grateful for pushing through.
Can you lead us to breathwork pattern?
Lay down and get yourself comfortable. We will do breath pattern from the mouth, as it cleans out emotional residue from the body. In and out through the nose has a more healing effect on the mind. Take a first sharp breath into the belly, sending the breath into the emotional center of the breath. Then we take second breath into the heart, where we hold all our love and connection to self and the others, along with grieve and sadness. So you are accessing the emotional center of the body, then washing it into the heart and then exhaling. So its two breaths in, into the belly and into the heart, and exhale. It’s normal to feel tingling in the hand, tightness in the jaw or heaviness in the legs at first. You will just notice what’s true for you, feeling every cell in your body and pushing out anything that’s not yours.
What perspective do you have for anyone going through deeply emotional and challenging period? I would love to hear how you are on other side of it and what lesson you have learned.
For her, nature is a church. She is the one who goes to the woods and the oceans to seek guidance. So she was kept shown again and again as she was going through this process butterflies. When caterpillar goes into a chrysalis, it completely dissolves itself, changing form and coming out as a butterfly. Just like that the painful process can’t be skipped, just like winter can’t be skipped for spring. She says that for her the hard part wasn’t the divorce, it was two years leading up to it, pretending like it wasn’t going to happen and resisting it. She says that often our resistance to pain is way worse than the pain itself. You have to be with pain before you can let it go. So every step of the process is beautiful, including winter as there would be no spring without winter.
Was there a moment for you when you can tell you are on the other side?
She says that it came when she finally stopped waiting for it. She had stopped waiting to feel good again. Then the moment came while she was on a plane to California to meet with her old friends and she felt that old spark again. That’s why she used to say that it will come back, and it will when you stop waiting for it.
What songs do you like to dance to?
She is a big fan of ecstatic dance. It’s a form of free dancing in community with no choreography. The only rules are no drinking or drugs, no talking and no shoes on the dance floor. It’s just the experience of communicating with your own body and own consciousness. One such song she likes is Bad Karma by Axel Thesleff, and everything time it comes on she just light up.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given?
One of the best advice she has ever been given was by a Shaman she worked with in Peru, which was “stay in your own experience”. She realized that she had spent so much of her life worrying, wondering and feeling into other people that she wasn’t even intimately familiar with her own experience. Now whenever she perceives something wrong or bad, she always remembers to stay in her own experience, rather than casting blame or being angry outside of herself.
How can we get in touch with you?
You can always visit her website (ginnymuir.com). She writes the most on Instagram (instagram.com/ginnymuir) where she most spontaneously share with her heart. She is also available on Facebook (facebook.com/ginny.muir)