Episode #66 - The Pivot From Chiropractor to Breathwork Guide

Brandi walked into the recording session for this episode undone.

Two phone calls before 10 am. One with a doctor about a test she'd been putting off, one about her kids and a health situation at the hospital. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to pull her completely out of herself. By the time she sat down with Dr. Desiree, she was reacting, complaining, in her own words, not herself at all.

Dr. Desiree suggested breathwork.

Less than three minutes later, Brandi's only words were: "That's not who I am."

She came back. Fully. And then they made this episode.

That story is the best introduction we have to Dr. Laura Foster and to what this conversation is actually about.

She Almost Said No to Breathwork

Dr. Laura Foster has spent over 25 years working with the nervous system, first as a chiropractor, and later as a certified breathwork facilitator and retreat leader. She did not find breathwork by seeking it out. She found it during the pandemic, during a period when she was feeling more dysregulated than she had in years, despite having an extensive professional toolkit.

Someone offered to guide her through a session. Her initial reaction: really? My soul wants to take a decade nap and you want me to breathe hard for what feels like forever?

She did it anyway.

What happened on the other side of that session was something she had never experienced before. She uses the word unburdened. Not relaxed, not calmer, not better. Unburdened. And that feeling stayed with her longer than anything else she had tried. Longer than massage. Longer than talk therapy. Longer than all the things she had been recommending to patients for years.

She went back. She had another experience a few months later, then another. Each one different, but each one leaving something behind. A subtle, sustained shift that she started tracking across weeks and months.

When she moved to Costa Rica, she started facilitating for three to five people at a time. Rented space, called people in, showed up even when only one person did. Took it online and watched the sessions grow to 50, 60, 80, 100 people. Built the Breathe Into Being membership. Launched the Heart Spark retreat series. And has been running women's retreats in Canada, Costa Rica, Italy, and Portugal ever since.

What Breathwork Actually Does

The simplest version of what Dr. Laura explains in this episode is this: whatever you don't process and digest, you host. It lives somewhere in your body's cells. And you can have a very difficult time thinking your way into resolution.

When you breathe intentionally, and when you sustain that breathing over time, you start to move into altered states of consciousness. The analytical mind quiets. The thinking brain, the one that wants to replay the story and find the right answer and figure out how it all happened, steps back. And the body does what it already knows how to do.

Dr. Laura is direct: you don't have to know what you're holding. You don't have to understand it. You don't even have to know how to release it. The breath is the portal in, and the body handles the rest.

This is also why the release can look different from person to person. Shaking. Tears. Tingling. Heat. Numbness. Movement. None of it is wrong. None of it is performed. It's the body completing something it started.

Why Staying in Your Head Has Limits

Dr. Laura talks carefully about talk therapy. She is clear that it has value. She is also clear about one limitation.

When we repeatedly retell the story of what happened to us, we reinforce the neural patterns connected to that experience. We keep the nervous system wired to it. Many therapists work around this, and somatic approaches address this problem directly. But the default mode of talk therapy, which is to think and speak our way through what we're carrying, can sometimes keep us looping in the same place.

Breathwork takes the thinking mind out of the process entirely. You're not reliving it. You don't need to understand it. The healing happens at a different level, in the body itself, and the body already has everything it needs to complete it.

The Cumulative Shift Nobody Tells You About

Most people come to breathwork for the big release. The tears, the shaking, the feeling of being unburdened at the end of a session. That release is real, and it matters. It's what brought Dr. Laura back to breathwork the second and third time.

But what changed her life most wasn't those peak moments. It was the quiet, behind-the-scenes shift that accumulated over time. The gap that opened between stimulus and response. The way she stopped clinging to the sides of the river and started flowing with life. The parts of herself that started showing up again, parts she hadn't met yet or hadn't seen in a long time.

This is what she watches for in the people in her membership. Not just the session experience, but the cumulative version of themselves that emerges over months. She calls that the real thing.

Online Breathwork Works. Brandi Was a Skeptic.

When someone first told Brandi she could do breathwork through a screen, her reaction was: how? She was certain she needed someone physically in the room, that the facilitation required presence, touch, shared space.

Her first online session changed everything she thought she understood.

She realized, somewhere in that session, that she was the one doing it. No one was doing it to her. And that realization was its own kind of medicine. The body that was shaking and releasing and releasing was hers. She was doing that.

Dr. Laura has facilitated online events with hundreds of people across different countries, time zones, and life circumstances, and she has watched the same thing happen again and again. The location does not limit the depth of the experience.

Women's Retreats and the Power of Circle

Dr. Laura's retreat work started with a single co-facilitated event with Jenn Pike, Eversio Wellness ambassador and longtime collaborator. They planned to spend two days teaching women what their clients kept asking about in practice. Instead, the conversation went sideways in the best possible way. They stopped teaching and started talking about what it meant to live in the truth of who you are, and the room opened.

That moment shifted everything about how Dr. Laura approached her retreats.

She signed a contract for a retreat in Costa Rica before she had a program. Before she had a yoga certification, she wanted to include it. Before she had anything except a name (Heart Spark) and a conviction that something important happened when women gathered in circle together.

Her retreats are now women-only, held in intentional locations around the world, and they run four times a year. Italy is upcoming. Portugal is on the calendar for next year. And at the end of every one, she says the same thing and means it: this is the best one yet.

She talks about why the women-only format matters to her, and it comes down to this: a veil lifts when you put a group of women in a room together with the intention to heal. The power of story. The resonance of presence. The way being in a circle connects women to each other and to themselves at the same time.

How to Get Started

If this is your first time hearing about breathwork and you're curious, Dr. Laura's suggestion is simple: come as you are. You don't have to believe in it. You don't have to know what you're holding. You don't need a transformational experience to benefit from the session. Your breath will shift. And that shift will carry something forward.

The Breathe Into Being membership is designed for exactly this, with shorter sessions (15 to 45 minutes) so that you can come in when you need it, build the practice over time, and feel the cumulative version of what breathwork makes possible.

Her website is soulinspiredgirl.com, and she's at @dralaurafoster on Instagram.

What This Comes Back To

Dr. Laura says it clearly in this episode: your body's natural default is to heal. Not disease, not stuckness, not whatever you've been carrying. Healing. That's the default. What we practice is learning to get out of its way.

Brandi came back from a fully dysregulated state in under three minutes before we hit record. Not because Dr. Laura was there. Not because of any supplement or technique. Because she used the tool that was already inside her.

That tool is inside you too.