I recently met someone who felt frustrated that the healing activities I was recommending in my YouTube channel just didn’t have any effect on her. She knew she needed some sort of breakthrough in her life because she was always mad at somebody, but she was grasping at straws trying to figure out where she should start.

I told her it was fine that Christian meditation had no effect on her right now. “That just means your brain and body need something else first,” I said. “Every person’s healing journey requires reaching the same milestones, but their sequence is always unique.”

A Similar Problem

It reminded me of how I experienced deep breathing in my own healing journey. If you don’t know, deep, slow, methodical breathing is one of the most effective ways to calm down your nervous system. That’s because our body associates short, fast breathing with our fight or flight response. By choosing to breathe slowly, we use our body to tell our brain that everything is okay and we don’t have to be afraid.

The problem is, it doesn’t work for everyone in every stage of their healing journey. It didn’t work for me for almost seven years of my healing journey. I tried everything: deep breathing exercises, yoga breathing, meditative breathing—nothing worked! It felt so frustrating when yet another therapist or acquaintance told me how amazing deep breathing was and how I should try it. “I have tried it,” I used to respond, “and it just doesn’t work.”

Well, it didn’t use to work… until it did!

A Quick Change

One day, I started doing the Hangry Hormone Reset protocol including daily 45-minute walks and 5-minute restorative breathing with my legs up a wall. To my surprise, after about a week into the protocol, I felt it during the breathing part: those relaxation molecules flooding my body, the happy molecules coming in after that, the sensation that everything was going to be okay… all of those people were right, it was amazing!

It turned out that I had to heal a few other things first before I got to amazing. That was necessary for my body, and it may be necessary for yours.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water just because something doesn’t work the first time, or the fifth. Just keep it on the back-burner and let God bring it to your mind when it’s time to use it.

That is the curvy path of healing.