The Night I Saw the Stars

My Breathwork Experience in Glasgow

What is Breathwork?

Breathwork is basically using your breathing in a more intentional way to shift how you feel. Some styles are really calming, while others can bring up much stronger physical and emotional reactions.

People often talk about the body “storing trauma”. That doesn’t necessarily mean trauma is literally stored somewhere in the body. Rather, difficult experiences can leave lasting patterns in the nervous system, affecting how we breathe, tense our muscles, react to stress and feel inside ourselves long after the original event has passed.

This also connects with Polyvagal Theory, which looks at how the nervous system can shift between states of safety and connection, fight or flight and shutdown.

“Breathwork accesses the emotional part of the brain” is a simple way of describing what can happen when the thinking, analysing mind becomes quieter and more attention shifts towards emotion, memory, survival responses and body awareness.

That idea really interested me because most of the time my thinking brain is busy analysing, judging and trying to stay in control. Breathwork seemed to offer a way of getting out of my head and into my body, quietening some of that mental chatter and bringing more attention to what I was actually feeling.

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My First Experience with Intense Breathwork

This was my first time trying a much more intense style of breathwork. Until then, I had only experienced gentler practices, mostly at home before work, to help me feel calmer and more regulated.

Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly aware of how physically I seem to carry stress and emotion. When my nervous system becomes activated, I feel it affects my communication, my confidence and the way I present myself to the world.

I’d already tried CBT, therapy and speech therapy, so breathwork felt like another way of exploring what was happening beneath all of that, but this time through the body rather than through talking or thinking.

The session combined breathing techniques, music, physical exercises, connection with other people and periods of emotional release.

I went in open-minded and curious, but I had absolutely no idea how strongly my body was going to respond.

A Rocky Start

I wasn’t particularly relaxed when I arrived.

It had been raining and I was worried that I was going to be late. I initially struggled to find the venue and accidentally went to the wrong building, where there was a protest happening outside and people were shouting towards a queue.

What on earth is going on?

By the time I eventually found the correct building, I already felt quite heightened.

When I arrived, James McCauley, who was leading the session, came over to greet me. I instinctively went in for a handshake.

He went in for a hug.

In a strange way, that immediately set the tone for the evening. It felt like the message was: drop some of your boundaries, drop some of your walls and allow yourself to be here.

We had been asked to bring our own yoga mat, eye mask and blanket. Headphones were provided for us, so I placed my mat on the floor and got myself settled.

The “Marie” Moment

Before the session had even properly begun, the woman beside me introduced herself as Marie.

Naturally, I told her my middle name was Marie, even though my middle name is actually Louise.

Marie was my mum’s middle name.

At the time I didn’t really think too much of it. It was just a strange slip.

The Connection Deepens

We began by lying on our yoga mats, loosening different parts of our bodies and trying to connect with the ground.

We were asked to think about somebody we loved. It could be somebody who was still here or somebody who had passed away.

Initially I thought of Justina, but I couldn’t hold onto her image.

My mum came into my mind instead and suddenly felt very present. Once she was there, I couldn’t seem to shift the image of her.

We were then told to place our hands onto our hearts and think about how our hearts have been beating long before we were even born.

That created one of the first really strong images for me.

I imagined myself inside my mum’s womb before I was born, with my tiny heart already beating inside her.

Something about that made me think about how physically connected we had once been, , long before I had any memory of her at all.

We were then asked to imagine the person we loved as a ball of light inside us.

For me, that person had become Mum.

Within the first few minutes of the session, I already felt this really strong connection to her, which made that strange “Marie” moment before we started feel even more significant afterwards.

Becoming Aware of My Body

We then did a few exercises designed to make us more aware of our bodies and where we might be carrying tension.

At one point, we walked slowly around the room and were encouraged to lower our gaze and notice the ground beneath our feet.

I remember wondering whether I should take my trainers off so I could feel more grounded.

It was one of several little moments where I noticed how easily my mind found something else to think about rather than simply being present.

Connecting with a Stranger

We were then asked to stop and face somebody.

I ended up opposite a woman whose name I never found out. We placed our hands together and tried to synchronise our breathing before looking directly into each other’s eyes for around ten seconds.

It felt intense, but I smiled and she smiled back.

That broke the tension.

We later sat back-to-back and tried to synchronise our breathing again, although I was mostly aware of the physical contact rather than the breathing itself.

Learning the Breathing Techniques

After that, James demonstrated the main breathing techniques before we partnered up again.

This time I paired with a woman called Alise.

We practised breathing into different parts of the body while placing our hands against each other’s stomach, ribs and chest so we could physically feel where the breath was moving.

I remember noticing how sweaty my hands were, particularly when I had my hand against her stomach. It was another little example of how my mind kept finding something else to focus on instead of being completely present in what we were doing.

We tried breathing through the nose and mouth in different combinations, with the mouth breathing feeling noticeably faster and more intense.

At that stage, I still couldn’t understand how something as simple as breathing could lead to the profound experiences people talked about.

It was still just breathing to me.

I couldn’t connect those dots yet.

The Main Breathwork Begins

Eventually we returned to our individual mats.

We put on our eye masks and the headphones that had been provided for us.

James spoke through the headphones while music played underneath him.

At first the music was relatively slow and I naturally used the nose-in, nose-out breathing technique.

I struggled initially.

Once we were on our own, I found myself wondering whether I was using the right breathing technique or doing it properly.

Part of me was almost waiting for something to happen while simultaneously thinking:

How could anything possibly happen just from breathing?

I was still very much inside my thinking mind.

Then the music began to change.

One of the songs sounded familiar because it was by an artist I already recognised, which immediately gave me a personal connection to what I was hearing.

Different pieces of music seemed to bring up different emotions. Some felt sad. Some seemed connected to grief. Others felt angrier or more intense.

There were also helpers moving around the room who were called “angels”.

On a couple of occasions, one of the angels came over and pressed gently against my chest, which I interpreted as encouragement to breathe more deeply.

That actually helped me.

The Numbness

The first major physical change I noticed was tingling and numbness in my fingertips.

It started in my right hand.

Then I noticed it in my left hand as well.

Because of my medical history, it frightened me initially.

I raised my hands into the air because I was trying to bring the feeling back into my fingertips.

I remember thinking that I might have to leave if I stopped being able to feel my body.

Part of me was worried that the numbness might spread into my legs or across my entire body.

So at this stage, there was still a lot of fear and resistance.

My First Emotional Reaction

At around the same time, I had my first emotional reaction.

It was very brief.

I made one single crying sound and one tear came out.

Then it passed.

That was the first emotional crack.

It didn’t immediately turn into the much bigger response that came later.

I went back into the breathing.

I Hate Christmas

Then the images started appearing.

What felt important was that the first strong image wasn’t of losing my mum or my brother.

It was of them together.

I saw Mum and Cailan standing together in the living room of my childhood home.

There was a Christmas tree in the room.

They were both smiling at me.

Cailan was an adult.

That immediately made it different from an ordinary memory because Mum died long before Cailan became the adult I was seeing.

There could never have been a real moment where the two of them stood together like that.

But there they were.

Together.

Smiling at me.

I remember hugging them.

The Christmas tree bothered me though.

Christmas is a difficult time for me.

Cailan’s birthday is 9th December.

Mum died on 11th December.

We buried Mum on 18th December.

December and Christmas carry a lot of grief for me.

So I didn’t particularly want Mum and Cailan to be standing there beside a Christmas tree.

I tried to mentally move them somewhere else. I tried imagining them outside or in a green field.

But the image kept pulling me back into that same living room.

Back to the house.

Back to Christmas.

Eventually, it began to feel as though there was a reason I kept being brought back there.

Our old childhood home.

Christmas time.

The living room where my mum died.

And only around ten minutes away from where they are now both buried.

The two of them were together in a way they could never have been in real life.

It stopped feeling like something I was deliberately constructing and started feeling like I was being shown something.

Somehow, in that moment, it felt as though our old childhood home had become their spiritual home.

To me, the message felt reassuring.

They were together.

They were happy.

They were okay.

And somehow they were showing me that I was okay too

Then Came the Memories of Losing Them

Only after seeing them together did the painful memories begin coming through.

I saw Cailan in the morgue.

I saw myself looking at him and holding his hand.

I saw my mum dying.

Those images were different because they were connected to things that had actually happened.

So the order felt important to me.

First I saw Mum and Cailan together, smiling and peaceful.

Then I was taken back through memories of losing them.

It almost felt as though I had first been shown that they were okay before being taken into the pain of what had happened.

The Involuntary Sound Begins

As the images, visuals and memories started coming through, the emotional reaction returned.

But this time it was completely different from that first single crying sound and tear.

It didn’t quite feel like crying.

It wasn’t laughter either, even though the sound could sometimes resemble laughter.

There often weren’t tears.

It felt much more involuntary.

It was almost as though I needed to exhale something out of myself, like something inside me needed to be expelled with the breath.

As the sound came out, I would lift my chin and tilt my head slightly backwards, almost as though my body was helping whatever needed to come out move through me.

At first, part of me was still resisting it.

My everyday thinking mind was still there going:

What is this noise?

Am I crying?

Am I laughing?

Can people hear me?

But the more immersed I became in the experience, the harder it became to suppress.

The Veil Lifted

Then I saw the stars...

This was when everything shifted for me.

Despite wearing a dark eye mask, I saw what looked like an enormous dark sky filled with constellation-like stars and flashes of light.

I remember testing it by opening and closing my eyes beneath the mask.

When my eyes were open, the stars were there.

When I closed them, they disappeared completely.

There was something about that which felt strangely significant. I could only see them when my eyes were open.

It almost felt like another message in itself:

Keep your eyes open.

Look up.

Pay attention to what is around you.

The involuntary sound continued.

But the emotion behind the sound had changed.

It wasn’t sadness anymore.

In my mind the feeling had shifted completely from grief into this overwhelming sense of:

This is a message.

More than anything, there was this genuine disbelief. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I was completely amazed by it.

The stars felt incredibly significant to me.

I interpreted them as a message from Mum and Cailan.

For me, it felt like:

It’s okay.

We’re still here.

We’re part of something bigger now.

Wherever you are, look up. We’re with you.

This was also the point where I felt myself really beginning to shift from resisting the experience to surrendering to it.

The sound was still happening and my body was still moving, but I was beginning to stop questioning everything.

Seeing the stars seemed to change something in me.

Instead of trying to control what was happening or wondering whether I should stop it, I started allowing myself to go further into the experience.

Back Home Again

Later I saw Mum and Cailan again.

This time they were standing outside my childhood home, smiling and waving at me.

I was moving backwards away from them and away from the house.

It almost felt cinematic because I could see them getting further and further away as I moved backwards,

But it was me moving.

Then I distinctly remember seeing a skip.

That image carried enormous significance for me.

When I was younger, our family home was sold and a lot of the things inside it were thrown into a skip.

My mum had worked hard.

She had created a home.

She filled that home with furniture, belongings and love.

Then, after she was gone, so much of it could simply be thrown away.

I realise now how deeply that affected my relationship with possessions.

Somewhere inside me, I think I learned:

Nothing is truly yours.

Everything can disappear.

So don’t become too attached.

Throughout my life, I’ve generally owned very little.

Even then, some of the few sentimental things I kept have been moved, opened, lost or taken.

One particularly painful example involved a small box containing my mum’s jewellery, diaries and the bandanas she wore when she had cancer.

Because that small box had remained closed for so long, I could still smell my mum when I opened it.

I could actually smell her.

It was like opening a tiny time capsule from 2002.

When somebody carelessly emptied everything out of that box, the smell began to disappear.

Something that had survived untouched for all those years had suddenly been disturbed and once it was gone, there was no way of getting it back.

So when I saw Mum and Cailan standing outside that childhood home while I moved further away, it carried enormous emotional weight.

They weren’t asking me to stay.

They were smiling and waving.

The feeling was:

Go on.

It’s okay.

You can go.

I experienced it as permission to step away from the house and some of the pain attached to it. Not to forget them, but to understand that I didn’t need a physical place or possession to remain connected to them.

Just like the stars.

I might not always be able to see them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

The Plane

Then the image changed completely.

I was suddenly on an aeroplane, looking out of the window at cloudy skies.

I immediately wondered whether it was connected to my future, perhaps leaving Scotland and beginning the next chapter of my life.

The whole sequence felt almost cinematic.

Mum and Cailan standing outside our childhood home.

Me moving backwards, watching them and the house become further away.

Then a plane.

It felt less like I was being told to leave them behind and more like I was being given permission to keep going.

To have my own life.

To go wherever it takes me.

And to know that they could still come with me in a different way.

The Scream

At one point, we were instructed to take a deep breath and scream as loudly as we could on the out-breath.

I missed the first opportunity because I was so immersed in everything that was already happening inside me.

Strangely, I was genuinely disappointed that I had missed it.

Then we were given another chance.

This time, I screamed.

My first reaction was very me.

That was loud.

I hope people didn’t hear that.

I hope they don’t think I’m strange.

But within seconds, something much deeper took over.

The scream had reminded me of something I hadn’t consciously been thinking about at all.

The day after Cailan’s funeral in 2021, I had screamed in almost exactly the same way.

That scream had been completely uncontrolled. It wasn’t an ordinary cry or shout. It was guttural and almost primal, as though it had come from somewhere beneath thought.

I remember how strange it had felt at the time. It was as though grief had become something physical and had erupted out of me before I could do anything to stop it.

And suddenly, lying there during the breathwork, I recognised it.

Before the shaking started. Before my hips began moving. Before my whole body became involved.

It was the scream that unlocked the memory.

There was this immediate sense of:

I know this feeling.

It almost felt as though my body had recognised it before my mind had fully caught up with what I was remembering.

The Release

So not long after that, my body began reacting much more intensely.

My hands started trembling. Then my shoulders and back began twitching. My teeth started chattering.

The movement seemed to travel further down through my body, into my ribs and eventually into my hips and pelvis, which began rocking and moving from side to side involuntarily.

Eventually, it felt as though my entire body was vibrating.

And because the scream had already taken me straight back to 2021, I recognised something about this physical state too.

My immediate thought was:

I’m having a nervous breakdown again.

But almost as quickly as I thought it, I realised something was completely different.

The Permission

In 2021, everything had happened unexpectedly. I was completely overwhelmed by grief and frightened by what my own body was doing. There was no context for it and no sense that I was supposed to let it happen.

This time, I was lying in a room where I felt safe and supported, surrounded by people who understood that strong emotions and physical reactions might emerge.

I didn’t have to pull myself together.

I didn’t have to stop shaking.

I didn’t have to stop myself from making noise.

For once, I could let my body do what it needed to do without immediately trying to control it.

I could fall apart for a moment and know that I was somewhere where it was okay to do that.

So although my mind immediately labelled it as having a breakdown again, it didn’t actually feel like the same kind of experience.

The physical sensation was incredibly reminiscent of 2021.

But this time I wasn’t frightened of it.

I wasn’t fighting it.

I was allowing it.

Looking back, controlled release feels like a much better way of describing what happened.

A breakthrough.

The White Light

After that huge wave of shaking, movement and emotion, I saw a bright white light spread across my vision.

Again, I still had my eye mask on. I should have been in darkness.

The white light felt completely different from everything that had come before it.

It felt peaceful and calming.

I interpreted it almost like something washing over me.

The white light felt like a release into stillness.

It felt like the finale.

An Angel’s Cry

During one of the strongest parts of the experience, one of the “angels” came and knelt beside me.

She lifted one side of my headphones and, for a moment, I wondered whether she was going to tell me to stop.

Instead, I realised she was crying and she wanted me to hear.

She simply stayed beside me while I continued going through my own experience.

I still don’t know why she chose to stay beside me. It felt like she was there for around ten minutes, which made it even more striking. In a room of more than 40 people, why me?

When I told Justina afterwards, she said:

“What if that was your mum?”

I don’t know what it was, but in the context of everything I had just experienced, having a stranger quietly sit beside me and cry with me felt incredibly meaningful.

Looking back, the whole experience seemed to happen in waves. I would breathe, something would gradually build, there would be some kind of emotional or physical release and eventually I would settle back into the breathing again.

Ending the Session

Towards the end, everyone was guided into a fetal position and encouraged to hug themselves.

The hall was full of people lying around the room, curled up and holding themselves.

I was still going through my own emotional process when one of the angels helped roll me onto my side and placed my blanket over me.

Eventually the shaking stopped.

I simply held myself.

Afterwards we stood and formed a large circle.

Everyone held hands and breathed together.

Then we placed one hand over our own heart and another against the back of the person beside us.

We were asked once again to imagine somebody we loved as a ball of light inside our heart.

For me, it was Mum.

Then we imagined passing that love through our hand and into the person beside us.

At the same time, somebody else had their hand against my back and was doing the same for me.

It felt like a beautiful way to finish.

The session had begun with me thinking about how my heart had been beating inside my mum’s womb before I was even born, then imagining her as a ball of light inside my heart.

It ended with me imagining taking the love I still carry for her and passing some of it onwards into another person.

It felt like everything had come full circle.

What I Took From It

Throughout the session, I felt safe, supported and surrounded by positive energy.

Some of what happened may have physiological or psychological explanations. Other parts felt deeply spiritual to me.

I’m comfortable allowing all of those possibilities to exist.

There was also something freeing about being surrounded by strangers.

They knew nothing about me.

There was no history, no expectation and no version of myself I had to maintain.

I could simply let myself have the experience.

If I did it again, I think I would surrender sooner. I would question less, worry less about being heard or judged and allow whatever was happening to happen.

Less Can people hear me?

Less Do I look ridiculous?

More:

Just surrender.

Afterwards

The following day, I felt tired and incredibly reflective, which is what prompted me to write this blog.

I still don’t completely understand what happened and I don’t think I need to.

What matters more is how it made me feel and what I took from it.

More than anything, I came away with this overwhelming sense of reassurance connected to Mum and Cailan.

That they were okay.

That I was okay.

That moving forward with my life didn’t mean losing my connection to them.

And that even if I couldn’t see them, I could still feel connected to them.

I also realised just how much of my life I spend trying to hold everything together, analysing what I’m feeling and trying to stay in control.

For that hour, I didn’t.

I let myself feel whatever came up without needing to understand it or stop it.

And maybe that was the most important part of all.

What a beautiful, emotional and transformative experience.

If you’re curious about the session I attended, you can find out more about Phoenix Fire Night.

And if you want to follow what comes next for me, I’ve started sharing more through @Ticketyboon on Instagram