What Is Somatic Breathwork and Why Does It Make You Cry
People ask me this more than almost any other question. Usually they ask it quietly, a little embarrassed, after a session where they cried unexpectedly. "I don't even know why I was crying. Is that normal?"
It is not just normal. It is one of the most honest things your body can do. And to understand why it happens, you need to understand what somatic breathwork actually is and what it is reaching that your thinking mind cannot.
What "Somatic" Means
Somatic comes from the Greek word for body. Somatic practices are body-based. That might sound obvious, but it is a meaningful distinction from most of what we do to deal with stress, anxiety, or emotional difficulty.
Most of what we do is cognitive. We think about problems. We talk about them. We journal, analyze, reframe, or try to shift our perspective through reasoning. These approaches work for some things. For feelings that live in language, thinking helps.
But not everything that hurts lives in language. Some of what we carry lives in the body. In the way your jaw clenches when you are stressed without realizing it. In the tension you hold in your shoulders that no amount of talking makes go away. In the thing that tightens in your chest when a memory surfaces. These are not thoughts. They are physical events. And thinking harder at them does not release them.
Somatic breathwork is a practice that works directly with the body rather than around it. Instead of trying to reason your way to relief, you breathe your way there. The breath is the vehicle, and your nervous system is what changes.
How Emotion Gets Stored in the Body
Your nervous system does not distinguish clearly between a threat that is happening now and a threat that happened ten years ago. When something overwhelming occurred and you did not fully process it at the time, your body stored the unprocessed charge in the tissues. It freezes the response rather than completing it.
This is not a metaphor. Bessel van der Kolk documented it extensively in research spanning decades. Peter Levine built an entire therapeutic modality around it. The body does not forget what the mind tries to move past. The tension in your neck, the shallow breathing you default to, the startle response that fires when someone raises their voice. These are often the body carrying old experiences that never completed their cycle.
The problem is that most of us cannot access these stored states through thinking. You can know intellectually that something happened and that it is over. You can have done years of therapy. You can understand exactly why you respond the way you do. And the pattern still runs because the understanding is in your cortex and the charge is in your body.
Breathwork gets below the cortex.
What the Breath Does to Your Nervous System
Your breathing is the one autonomic function you can consciously control. Heart rate, digestion, blood pressure. You cannot decide to slow them down with your mind. But you can decide to change your breathing pattern, and that change reaches everything else through a backdoor.
In a somatic breathwork session, you breathe in a continuous pattern with no pause between inhale and exhale. This pattern does several things simultaneously. It activates your sympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for mobilization and response. Blood chemistry shifts. Carbon dioxide drops. Your tissues become more sensitized. Old physical states that your body was holding dormant get reactivated.
Think of it this way. Your body stored a charge years ago because it was not safe to feel it fully at the time. The breathwork recreates the physiological conditions under which that charge can move. Not because someone told you to feel something. Because your body is finally in a state where completing what was interrupted is possible.
This is why the crying in breathwork does not always match anything specific in your life right now. You might cry during a session and have no idea what you are crying about. There is no story attached. It is not sadness about something current. It is the body releasing something old that had nowhere to go until now.
Why Specifically You Cry
Crying during breathwork is a release response. Tears are one of the ways your autonomic nervous system discharges tension that has built beyond what your body can contain in stillness.
When the breathing activates your system and begins stirring what has been stored, your body looks for the nearest exit for that energy. Crying is one of the most efficient. Shaking is another. Laughing is another. Yawning and sighing. Heat moving through the body. Tingling. All of these are the same thing: the nervous system completing an interrupted response.
What decides which exit your body uses is largely habitual and personal. People who grew up in environments where crying was safe tend to cry. People who were taught that crying was weakness tend toward shaking or heat or anger instead. People who learned to laugh when uncomfortable tend toward laughing. None of these is more correct than another. Your body will use whatever pathway it learned is available.
Over time, with repeated practice, people often find that the pathways shift. Someone who never cried starts to. Someone who always cried starts shaking instead. The body finds new routes once it learns that release is safe here.
What It Means If You Do Not Cry
Not crying does not mean nothing happened. I want to be clear about this because people sometimes leave a session feeling like they missed out if they did not have an obvious emotional release.
Some of the deepest sessions I have witnessed were completely quiet. No crying. No shaking. No visible drama. Afterward the person sat for ten minutes and then said something like "I feel like I put something down that I did not know I was carrying." That is a release. It just did not need the external expression that cinema has trained us to recognize as emotional processing.
Your nervous system is working in every session. The breath is changing your physiology every time. Some releases are dramatic. Some are subtle. Deep relaxation, improved sleep that night, a mood shift that lasts for days, a reduction in the grip of something you have been bracing against. These are all outcomes of somatic release, even when no tears appear.
What Happens in a Somatic Breathwork Session
You lie on a mat. You close your eyes. A facilitator guides you into the breathing pattern and holds the space while the music carries you through the arc of the session.
The first few minutes are usually straightforward. You are following instructions. Your thinking mind is engaged. Then something shifts. The pattern takes over and the analytical part of your brain quiets because it does not have bandwidth to manage the breath and narrate at the same time.
This is when the body speaks. Sensations arise. Physical feelings move through you. Emotions surface not as thoughts but as felt experiences. Tightness in the chest that suddenly releases. Heaviness that lifts. A warmth that moves through you like something unlocking.
Crying, if it happens, usually comes in waves. It is not the kind of crying where you are thinking about something sad. It is more like your body opening a valve. There is no story, just movement. This often surprises people because they have been conditioned to believe that crying needs a reason. In somatic work, the crying is the reason. The release is the point, not a reaction to something else.
After the active phase, which typically runs 30 to 40 minutes, you return to natural breathing and rest in silence. This is the integration period. Your nervous system processes what just moved. Most people feel deeply calm during this time. Some feel sleepy. Some feel an unusual clarity, like a signal has come through that was previously buried under static.
For a more detailed walkthrough of what unfolds during a session minute by minute, I wrote a full breakdown in the what happens in a breathwork session article.
The Role of the Facilitator
When something moves in you during a somatic session, the quality of what is holding you matters enormously.
A good facilitator does not rush to comfort you when you cry. They do not explain what is happening or try to make meaning of it in the moment. They stay present. They stay calm. Their nervous system, regulated and grounded, communicates to yours that what is happening is safe. That you do not need to stop or control it. That you can let it move through.
This is the transmission that makes facilitated sessions different from breathing alone. When you do this work alone, part of your awareness stays in management mode. "Is this okay? What is happening? Should I stop?" That internal management dampens the release. When someone you trust is holding the space, that management function can relax. And the release goes deeper because you are not simultaneously monitoring it.
I have been facilitating this work in Koh Samui for six years. I have watched people cry in ways they had not cried since childhood. I have watched people laugh uncontrollably and then realize they have not felt that free in years. I have watched people sit in silence afterward and say almost nothing because they could not yet put words to what just moved. Every time, the experience is the body catching up to itself.
What to Do After a Session Where You Cried
Give yourself time before returning to normal activity. The hour after a release session is valuable and most people waste it by immediately jumping into stimulation. A phone. Food. Conversation. Noise.
If you can, sit quietly for a while. Drink water. Go outside if there is somewhere calm to go. Let the nervous system finish settling. The integration that happens in the silence after a session is part of the work. Do not cut it short.
Sleep that night is often notably different. Deeper. Less broken. Many people report waking up the next morning feeling lighter than they have in years, sometimes without being able to say exactly what changed. What changed is that your nervous system released something it has been holding. The resources that were tied up holding it are now free.
Notice what shifts over the following days. Some changes from a somatic session are immediate. Others arrive slowly. A relationship dynamic that softened. A pattern that did not fire the way it usually does. A body sensation that is gone. Old patterns often return as the nervous system settles back into familiar grooves, which is why regular practice matters more than single sessions. But each session moves the baseline.
Is Somatic Breathwork Right for You
You do not need to have a specific emotional issue to benefit from somatic breathwork. Most of the people who book sessions with me are not in crisis. They are people who carry a low level of chronic tension, people who feel disconnected from their bodies, people who know something is stuck even if they cannot name it.
You are probably a good candidate if you recognize any of the following. You hold tension in your body that talking does not release. You feel a disconnect between knowing something intellectually and feeling it change. You rarely cry or rarely feel much of anything in your body and suspect something is switched off. You cry easily but feel like nothing ever fully completes. You have done talk therapy and found a ceiling. You want to go deeper into your own experience than surface relaxation offers.
There are also contraindications. Somatic breathwork is not appropriate if you have certain cardiovascular conditions, a history of seizures, are in the first trimester of pregnancy, or are in an active psychiatric crisis. A qualified facilitator will ask about these before a session. If you are unsure whether breathwork is appropriate for you, consult your doctor first.
What UNTAMED Offers
The UNTAMED full day experience is designed around somatic processing. We do not rush. There is no agenda beyond going as deep as your body needs to go on that particular day.
We begin with breathwork. A full guided session that gives your nervous system time to do what it needs to do. After the session, we move outside. Nature, time, space. Then we add the ice bath, which is its own somatic experience and integrates powerfully with what the breathwork opened. We eat together. We talk, or we do not. By the end of the day most people say they feel like they have been away for a week.
The setting matters too. Koh Samui's heat, the outdoor environment, the absence of the rushing pace most people live at. Everything about the day is designed to support what the body needs to do. If you want to understand what somatic breathwork actually feels like rather than just reading about it, this is where to start.
You can book via WhatsApp or read more about the full day on the UNTAMED page. Individual and small group sessions available. No experience necessary.
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About Diego Pauel
I have lived in Koh Samui for 15 years. I discovered breathwork through freediving, which I have trained in for over a decade. When COVID hit and the island emptied out, I started offering breathwork and ice baths for free to help the local community feel better in their bodies. I was the first to offer this work on the island. Five years later, I have facilitated countless sessions for people from all over the world. No guru energy. No mystical language. Just the work.
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