Chapter 14: Breathing Across Time

August 2021

Location: Rhinebeck, NY

I’m at a “Freedom From Stress, Anxiety, and PTSD” workshop at the Omega Institute.

I haven't heard of the guy leading it, Brett Cotter*, but he's offering it free for Veterans and frontline health care workers, so I’m giving it a shot.

Brett tells us that his father served in Vietnam, and lived with PTS(D) for decades and didn’t know it. He developed stress relief techniques to help Vets like his dad.

His approach is different. We start the morning with 15 minutes of hip-circles and stretching.

Now we sit together as a group, breathing deep and slow, and “feeling into” our bodies. Brett asks us to raise our hands if we notice a strong sensation coming up.

I watch as people raise their hands, describing what they feel. Brett asks questions like, “When's the first time you remember feeling like this?”

People start sharing stories of hard moments from early in their lives.

Brett guides them into what seems to be the core wound in their story. He adjusts his approach for each one, helping that person be with their painful memory. 

A woman shares a story from when she was seven. She says she was punished and locked in her room. She describes sitting on her bed for hours, feeling abandoned and sobbing into her hands.

Brett asks, “Are you willing to explore that memory?” 

She nods and says, “Okay.” 

He says, “I’d like you to close your eyes and imagine your present-day self going back into that memory. Bring the wise, loving adult version of you into that room, and sit down on the bed next to your younger self.”

She closes her eyes and takes a few breaths.

“Are you sitting next to her?” Brett asks.

She nods.

“Put your arm around her and say to that little girl, ‘I love you. I’m here for you. From now on, I will always be here. I will never leave or abandon you.’ Say it out loud if you feel comfortable.”

She's still for a few moments, then speaks the words. Tears start falling. 

As I watch, I’m reminded of a time when I was around eight, on my bed, feeling terribly lonely. 

I decide to follow along with Brett’s instructions. I close my eyes and imagine my adult self stepping into that childhood memory.

I walk to the bed and sit. My eight-year-old self looks up and asks, “Who are you?” 

I'm stunned. I didn’t expect the younger me to talk. That didn’t happen in the woman’s story. Whatever, I’ll roll with it.

“This might sound strange, but, uh, I’m you, when you're older,” I say. “I’m here to hang out so you’re not alone.”

In the background, I hear Brett ask the woman to teach her younger self to breathe deep and slow. I decide to do the same.

Returning to the memory feels like entering a lucid daydream. Except there’s a sense that I want to change things as little as possible. I just focus on being there for him the way I wish someone had been.

We sit quietly. “Try something with me,” I say. "Whenever you feel anxious, or scared, breathe into the area below your belly button until it’s really full... then let the air out slowly. I’ll do it with you.”

We breathe together.

After a couple of minutes, he looks up at me, messy hair in his eyes.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Thirty-seven,” I say.

He looks down, seems to consider this, then looks back up at me. “How is this possible?”

A wave of shock hits me. How is this possible? I don’t know. I feel completely like he is me, yet also separate—like I’m talking with my consciousness from that age. A tingling runs through my body.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “But I’m here now, and from now on I’ll always be here.”

He leans his head against my shoulder. I hold him. It feels good to hold him.

I hear Brett wrapping up with the woman, and I'm pulled back into the room.

Brett says, “Let’s break for lunch. Meet back at 2:30.”

That moment stayed with me. Nothing like it happened the rest of the retreat. I had other meaningful experiences, but that one was different. I didn’t know how to explain it to people, so it faded from my thoughts.

Until September 2023. 

September 2023: The Channeled Scablands, WA

In 2022, my mentor, Brian Stafford, tells me about Veterans Rites, a nonprofit running Rites of Passage for veterans. I sign up in March 2023.

The program starts September 12, 2023, in Washington State. I fly into Sea-Tac on September 11—a fitting day to answer this call.

I’ve been preparing for a Rite of Passage (ROP) for years. Traditionally, ROPs mark major life transitions, such as leaving one social identity and entering another. Many cultures have used them to guide young people into adulthood and to welcome warriors home. They also reconnect us to the Earth—our shared home.

This ROP, the Rite of Return, is created by Veterans, for Veterans. It includes four days of prep, four days of fasting alone in the wild with just a tarp, a sleeping bag, and five gallons of water, then four days of sharing in council and integration.

Most of those twelve days is a story for another time.

One part stands out.

Part of my intention for the program is to try out that technique again of revisiting past memories. This time I want to target memories from my military years.

On the first afternoon of my fast, I lie under a tarp stretched between sagebrush in the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.

Heat on my face, I close my eyes and let my mind drift to the deserts of Iraq.

Normally, I avoid these memories. This time, I meet them head-on. I picture my present-day self entering those moments—standing beside my younger self as he moves through his days in Iraq. Shoulder to shoulder with him in Humvees, guard towers, and on missions.

Sometimes my present-day self sits beside the younger me—like I did with the eight-year-old version of myself. Other times I drop straight into his body, and the faded memories light back up through his senses. His breath, his heartbeat, his eyes scanning.

I revisit the boredom, hyper-alertness, homesickness, and helplessness. It sucks. I relive horrors I tried to forget.

If I had distractions, I’d use them.

But I don’t. I’m in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a tarp and a burning determination not to waste a second. I need to know what happens if I give this everything I have.

For twenty years, my body has been at war. It’s ready to come home.

Memory by memory, I show up for my younger self like the best older brother. I help him reconnect with his body—notice the tension his nervous system keeps storing each day.

We track his body: shoulders tight, jaw locked, gut braced. We breathe through the tension together—deep and slow—especially after intense missions.

At one point I sit in a Humvee with my nineteen-year-old self and tell him:

None of this changes what’s coming. You’re still going to have some horrible, brutal years ahead. But this can keep you from going numb. When we go numb to our body, we go numb to the world. Learn to breathe like this—now, here in the past—and it will help me breathe differently today.

He nods. He trusts me.

As the hours pass, something shifts.

The younger versions of me from Iraq—2003, 2004, and beyond—each stuck in their own memory space, start breathing in sync with the me I am now.

My belly rises and falls in the Scablands, and at the same time rises and falls in Iraq.

It feels like I'm breathing across time. Each breath builds a bridge between past and present. As I revisit more memories, the gaps between those fragmented versions of me close.

Each separate me—that had been stranded on his own island of memory—now breathes as one.

I go back into happy memories too: seeing a turtle for the first time at five; driving friends to parties at sixteen; my first real kiss at eighteen; qualifying with my rifle in boot camp; my first jump in airborne school; riding into Mosul on the back of a Humvee with Iraqi kids doing cartwheels behind us.

As I breathe in each scene, the darkness behind my closed eyes lights up. It’s like gathering scattered home-movie clips and restoring them into one smoothly connected, brightly colored timeline.

Tears come. Grief. Anger. I curse the time it took to get here. Years spent isolated from my own self.

After a while, gratitude finds a way in. Somehow, I made it here. It all led to this moment. And this is a moment I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life—one where I feel whole, complete, unwounded.

Ever since leaving the military, it's felt like my inner peace has been permanently disrupted. Therapy and healing work helped, but I still felt stitched together in awkward parts.

At birthday parties, Fourth of July BBQs, and Christmas mornings, I’m the one who knows too much about the cost of the safety everyone else enjoys. I carry what they fear, so they don’t have to.

Now I feel the wholeness that was always there.

I collapse into deep sleep.

Present Day

Trauma scrambled time in my body; the past kept invading my present.

I learned that to feel different now, I had to breathe differently into the past—into the moments where things got stuck.

It wasn't just about understanding the past or talking through it.

I had to go back, find the places my body locked up, and imagine the version of me back then counteracting that freeze response by breathing into those tense areas.

In the next chapter, we’ll practice a technique called Re-Breathing the Past. It’s one way to release those stuck parts.

I didn’t do this alone. I made progress because I had a group around me. And to be clear, I’m not suggesting you try what I describe in this chapter on your own. These stories came out of carefully held group spaces. I share them to set the stage.

This chapter is about getting your imagination ready for the next steps we’ll take together.

Before my first Rite of Passage, I spent months getting ready. I made sure I was mentally and emotionally prepared, and I had a team around me. I wasn’t about to sit for hours with my worst memories—or step back into them as my older, wiser self—without backup.

This series is part of that backup. But reading this doesn't replace having someone you trust beside you. Support is available. It's essential. It's what made the difference for me.

These chapters are designed to work alongside live support to keep you moving.

In Chapter 10, you added sensory detail to your story. You brought it back to life.

Now we build on that.

In Chapter 15, Re-Breathing the Past, we’ll return to that story and breathe through it—right alongside the version of you who lived it.

* Resource Note: Brett Cotter, author of 3 Keys to Managing PTSD: The Warrior’s Guide to Overcoming Combat Trauma and founder of Stress Is Gone.

His workshops hit differently. I’ve never met anyone who listens to pain the way he does. He honored my grief, went in with me, then guided me back to my heart—my good, steady heart—and helped me stand tall again.

If you’re a Veteran, scholarships are often available for his programs. www.stressisgone.org