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 do not 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.
But the answer most breathwork articles give you is vague. "Emotions get stored in the body." Okay. How? Where? And why does changing how you breathe suddenly release them?
Those are the right questions. Here is what is actually happening.
What "Somatic" Actually Means
Somatic comes from the Greek word for body. Simple enough. But in practice, the distinction runs deeper than most people realize.
Most of what we do to deal with stress, anxiety, or emotional weight is cognitive. We think about it. Talk about it. Journal, reframe, analyze, or try to reason ourselves into feeling differently. These approaches work for feelings that live in language. If you can name it and narrate it, thinking helps.
But not everything that hurts lives in language. Some of what we carry lives in the jaw that clenches without you noticing. In the shoulders that climb toward your ears the moment someone raises their voice. In the thing that tightens in your chest when a particular memory surfaces. These are not thoughts. They are physical events. And thinking harder at them does not release them.
Somatic breathwork 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 shifts your physiology, and your nervous system responds to that shift, not to your intentions.
How Emotion Gets Stored in the Body
Your nervous system is not a simple on/off switch between stressed and relaxed. It has three gears, and the terrain map shows you exactly where you sit across them.
When you feel safe, you are social, present, connected. Your face is soft. Your voice has warmth. You can listen and actually take in what someone is saying. This is where you want to live most of the time.
When danger appears, your system mobilizes. Heart rate spikes. Muscles tense. You are ready to run or fight. This is useful in short bursts.
But when the threat is too big and you can neither run nor fight, your system does something else entirely. It shuts down. You go numb. You disconnect from the body. You freeze. In extreme cases, you feel nothing at all.
Here is what matters for understanding somatic breathwork. When something overwhelming happened and your system went into freeze, the response did not complete. The energy mobilized for fight or flight got locked in the tissues instead of being discharged.
This does not require a dramatic event. Most of us began storing things as children. A baby cannot survive without a caregiver, so it learns fast: which emotions earn approval, which ones get punished. A crying child hears "stop crying, you are fine." An angry child hears "calm down." Over years, we build an entire way of being around what feels safe to express. The parts we suppressed did not vanish. They went into the body.
There is a teaching I use in every training that makes this concrete. Open any nature documentary. A zebra grazes peacefully. A lion approaches. The zebra runs. If caught, it fights. If overwhelmed, it goes limp and plays dead. Sometimes the lion brings it to the cubs and loses interest. The zebra escapes, shakes its entire body, drinks water, walks back to the herd, and resumes normal life. The trauma is released immediately through the shaking.
Humans do not do this. We suppress. We bury. We tell ourselves we are fine. We try to forget. And the charge stays exactly where it was, waiting.
That tension in your neck that no amount of massage resolves. The shallow breathing you default to without realizing it. The startle response that fires when it should not. These are often the body carrying unfinished business from experiences where the freeze response activated and never completed its cycle.
What the Breath Actually Does
Your breathing is the one autonomic function you can consciously control. You cannot decide to lower your heart rate or change your blood pressure with your mind. But you can change your breathing pattern, and that change cascades through everything else.
In a somatic breathwork session, you breathe in a continuous pattern: inhale, exhale, inhale, with no pause between breaths. This does specific, measurable things to your physiology.
Carbon dioxide levels drop as you exhale faster than normal. Blood pH shifts toward alkaline. Tingling appears in the hands, face, and around the mouth. Some people experience what we call tetany, where the hands curl into a claw shape. This looks alarming but it is not dangerous. It happens because the shift in blood chemistry changes how calcium ions bind, and it resolves completely within minutes of returning to normal breathing.
I mention this because it is one of the most common questions after a first session. "My hands cramped up. Is something wrong?" Nothing is wrong. Your body is responding exactly the way it should. If anything, the tingling and the hand tension are signals that the breath has reached the depth where real work can happen.
Here is what matters more than the chemistry. The continuous breathing pattern activates your sympathetic nervous system. Your system mobilizes. Energy moves. And this is the key: the breath recreates the physiological conditions under which stored charge can finally complete its cycle.
Think of it this way. Your body locked an experience in freeze years ago because it was not safe to process it fully at the time. The breathwork brings your system back to a mobilized state, but this time you are safe. You are on a mat. Someone trained is holding the space. Your body gets a second chance to do what it could not do the first time around.
The shaking, the tears, the sounds that come out of you: that is the cycle completing in real time. That is the zebra shaking after the lion lets go.
There is a line I come back to often in this work: one breath created the trauma. Sometimes one breath of release can also release it. That is not always true. Some things take many sessions. But I have seen it happen enough times to know that the body does not operate on the same timeline as the mind. Years of carrying something can end in a single exhale if the conditions are right.
Why Specifically You Cry
Crying during breathwork is a discharge response. Your autonomic nervous system releases tension through whatever pathway is available.
Tears are one of the most efficient. Shaking is another. Laughing. Yawning. Sighing. Heat moving through the body. Vocal sounds you did not plan. All of these are the same mechanism: the nervous system completing an interrupted response.
What decides which pathway your body uses is largely personal. People who grew up in environments where crying was safe tend to cry. People who learned that crying was weakness tend toward shaking, heat, or anger. People who learned to laugh when uncomfortable tend toward laughing. None of these is more correct than another. Your body will use whatever exit it learned is available.
And here is something people do not expect: the crying in breathwork often has no story attached to it. You are not crying about something specific. There is no narrative. It is not sadness about anything you can name. It is the body opening a valve. The release is the point, not a reaction to content.
I have watched people cry in ways they had not cried since childhood. Five minutes later they cannot tell you what it was about. They just feel lighter. Something completed. Something put down that they did not know they were carrying.
Over time, with repeated practice, the pathways shift. Someone who never cried starts to. Someone who always cried starts to shake 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.
Some of the deepest sessions I have witnessed were completely quiet. No tears. No shaking. No visible drama. Afterward the person sat still for ten minutes and said something like "I feel like something just lifted that has been sitting on me for years."
That is a release. It just did not need the external expression that most people associate with emotional processing.
Your nervous system is working in every session. When the breathing slows your brain waves from beta into alpha and theta, you enter a state where your critical filters lower. The body processes what it needs to process, sometimes without any outward signal at all. The shift shows up later: deeper sleep that night, a mood that stays steady for days, a reaction pattern that simply does not fire the next time it normally would.
There is no hierarchy of experiences. A quiet session and a cathartic session can both move the needle. The breath meets you where you are. What that looks like depends on what your system needs that day, and you will not know until you are in it.
The Facilitator Changes Everything
When something moves in you during a somatic session, who is in the room with you changes what is possible.
There is a teaching I return to often when training facilitators: think of yourself as a mountain. Rock solid, so people can put their weight on you. Strong enough to hold what they bring. But not rigid. A mountain that is also sensitive, agile, responsive.
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. Their own nervous system, regulated and grounded, communicates to yours that what is happening is safe. That you do not need to stop. That you can let it move.
This is the transmission that makes facilitated sessions different from breathing alone. When you do this work solo, part of your awareness stays in management mode. "Is this okay? Should I stop? What is happening?" That internal monitoring dampens the release. When someone you trust is holding the space, that management function can relax. And the body goes deeper because you are not simultaneously watching it.
You cannot heal what you cannot feel. And you cannot feel what you are too busy managing.
There is a pattern I notice in the sharing circle after sessions. When someone starts apologizing before they speak, I know something real is about to come through. The apology is the signal. It means they are about to say something they fear will cause rejection. In six years of holding these spaces, the thing that follows "sorry" is almost always the truest, most human thing anyone says that day. That only happens when the container is held well enough for someone to risk it.
After six years of facilitating this work on Koh Samui, the thing I do best in a session is stay out of the way. Not absent. Present. Steady. Breathing my own breath while someone on the mat does the hardest work of their week. The breath does not need my help. It needs me not to interrupt it.
For anyone considering the path of learning to hold this kind of space for others, the facilitator training page has the details. It is not a weekend certification. It is 21 days of learning by doing.
What to Do After a Session Where Something Moved
Give yourself time before returning to normal activity. This matters more than most people realize.
The hour after a release session is where integration happens. Your nervous system is in a receptive state. What you do with that window shapes what you take from the experience.
Do not immediately reach for your phone. Do not jump into conversation. Sit quietly. Drink water. Go outside if there is somewhere calm to be. Here on Koh Samui most people walk to the ocean afterward and sit there for half an hour without saying much. That silence is not empty. The nervous system is still working. The clarity about what just moved usually arrives in the days that follow, not in the first hour. Let it come on its own schedule.
Pay attention to your sleep. Most people report the deepest sleep they have had in months after a somatic session. Some have vivid dreams. This is part of the process. Your system is still integrating while you rest.
And notice what shifts in the following days. A relationship dynamic that softens. A reaction that does not fire the way it usually does. A chronic tension that eases. These are not coincidences. They are what happens when your nervous system finally completes something it has been holding.
If you want a more detailed guide on how to prepare for and recover from a breathwork session, the preparation guide covers the practical side.
Is Somatic Breathwork Right for You
You do not need a specific emotional issue to benefit from this work. Most people who book sessions with me are not in crisis. They are people who carry a low grade of chronic tension that talking does not seem to touch. People who feel a disconnect between knowing something intellectually and feeling it change. People who know something is stuck without being able to name it.
You are probably a good candidate if you recognize any of the following. You hold tension in your body that years of talking have not released. You rarely cry, or rarely feel much of anything in your body, and suspect something is switched off. You cry easily but feel like the tears never fully clear the weight. You have done therapy and found a ceiling. You have tried meditation and your mind refuses to quiet. You want to go below the surface and into what your body is actually carrying.
There are contraindications. Somatic breathwork is not appropriate if you have certain cardiovascular conditions, a history of seizures, are pregnant, or are in an active psychiatric crisis. A qualified facilitator will ask about these before every session. If you are unsure, consult your doctor first. The breathwork for anxiety article covers how breathwork interacts with anxiety-related conditions in more detail.
What UNTAMED Offers
The UNTAMED full day experience is designed around somatic processing. The whole day is built for depth.
We begin with breathwork. A full guided session that gives your nervous system the time it needs. After the session, we move outside. Nature, movement, grounding. Then the ice bath. After a breathwork session where your system has already opened, the cold water hits differently. Your body wants to fight it, clench, escape. And instead you breathe. You stay. You let the discomfort exist without reacting to it. That is the same skill the breathwork just taught you, but now it is physical, tangible, and impossible to intellectualize. Most people come out of the ice bath understanding something about themselves that no amount of talking would have shown them.
We eat together. We talk, or we do not. By the end of the day most people say it feels like they have been away for a week.
The setting contributes. Koh Samui's heat, the outdoor environment, the absence of the pace most people live at. Everything about the day is designed to support what the body needs to do.
For groups of 4 to 16, private workshops bring the same breathwork and ice bath experience to your hotel, villa, or venue anywhere on the island. Two hours. All equipment included.
If you want to understand what somatic breathwork actually feels like rather than just reading about it, this is where to start.
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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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