Chapter 11: Breathing Across Time

August 2021: Rhinebeck, NY

I’m at a “Freedom From Stress, Anxiety, and PTSD” workshop at the Omega Institute.

I’ve never heard of the guy leading it, Brett Cotter*, but he’s offering it free for Veterans and frontline medical workers, so I’m giving it a shot. Brett tells us that his father served in Vietnam, and had PTS(D) for decades and didn’t know it. He developed his stress relief techniques to help Vets like his dad.

His approach is different. We start the morning with 15-minutes of hip-circles and stretching. Now, the group sits together, breathing deep and slow, and “feeling into” our bodies. Brett asks us to raise our hands if we notice a strong sensation coming up.

I watch as people raise their hands, describing what they feel. Brett asks questions like, “When is the first time you can remember feeling a sensation like this?” People begin sharing stories of negative experiences from early in their life.

Brett guides them into what seems to be the core wound in their story. He’s approaching each story differently, helping that person resolve their painful memory. 

A woman is sharing a story from when she was seven. She’d been punished by her parents and locked in her room. She describes sitting on her bed for hours, feeling abandoned and sobbing into her hands. 

Brett asks, “Are you willing to explore that memory?” 

She nods and says, “OK”. 

He says, “I’d like you to close your eyes and imagine your present-day self going back into that memory. Bring the wise, loving adult version of yourself into that room. Sit down on the bed next to your younger self.”

The woman closes her eyes and takes a few breaths.

“Are you sitting next to her?” Brett asks.

She nods.

“Put your arm around her and tell that little girl, ‘I love you. I’m here for you. From now on, I will always be here. I will never leave or abandon you.’ Say it out loud if you feel comfortable.”

The woman is still for a few moments, then speaks the words. Tears start falling. 

As I watch, I’m reminded of a time when I was around eight, sitting on the bed in my room feeling terribly lonely. 

I decide to follow along with Brett’s instructions. I close my eyes and imagine my adult self entering that childhood memory.

I walk toward the bed and sit down. My eight-year-old self looks up and asks, “Who are you?” 

I'm stunned. I didn’t expect the younger me to talk. That hadn’t happened in the woman’s story. Whatever, I’ll roll with it.

“This might sound, uh, strange, but I’m you, when you're older,” I say. “I’m here to hang out so you’re not alone.”

In the background, I hear Brett having the woman teach her younger self how to breathe deep and slow, like we’ve been practicing during the workshop. I decide to do the same with my younger self.

Returning to the memory feels like entering a lucid daydream. But there’s a sense that I want to change things as little as possible. My focus is on just being there for my younger self like I wished someone would have been.

We sit quietly, then I say, “I want you to try something. Whenever you feel anxious, or scared, breathe into the area below your belly button until it’s really full..., then let the air out slowly. I’ll do it with you.”

We breathe together. After a couple minutes, he looks at me with his messy hair.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Thirty-seven,” I reply.

He looks down at the floor, seems to consider this, then looks back up at me. “How is this possible?”

A wave of shock hits me. How is this possible? I don’t know. I feel completely that he is me, yet separate—like I’m interacting with my consciousness from that age. A tingling sensation goes through my body.

“I’m not sure,” I say, “but I’m here now, and from now on I’ll always be here.”

He leans his head against my shoulder. I hold him. It feels good to hold him.

I’m hearing Brett wrap up with the woman and I'm pulled back into the workshop room.

Brett says, “Let’s break for lunch. Meet back at 2:30.”

That moment stayed with me. Nothing like that happened for the rest of the retreat. I had other meaningful experiences, but that was something else. I didn’t know how to explain it to people, so it faded from my thoughts.

Until September 2023. 

September 2023: The Channeled Scablands, WA

In 2022, my mentor Brian Stafford told me about Veterans Rites, a non-profit holding “Rite of Passage” programs designed for Veterans. I signed up in March of 2023.

The program, starting on September 12th, 2023, would take place in Washington State. I’d be flying into SeaTac on September 11th—quite the day to be answering this call.

I’d been preparing for a Rite of Passage (ROP) for years. Traditionally, ROPs mark major transitions, such as leaving one social identity and entering another. Many cultures once used them to guide young people into adulthood or to honor and support soldiers returning home. They also reconnected people to the Earth—our shared home.

This ROP, called the Rite of Return, was created by Veterans, for Veterans. It included four days of prep, four days of fasting alone in the wild with just a tarp, a sleeping bag, and five gallons of water, followed by four days of sharing and integrating what we experienced.

What happened during those 12 days is mostly a story for another time. But one part stands out.

As part of my intention for the program, I wanted to try out that technique again of revisiting past memories. This time I wanted to target memories from my time in the military.

On the first afternoon of my fast, I lay under a tarp stretched between sagebrush in the desert Scablands of Eastern Washington. I closed my eyes and let my mind drift to the deserts of Iraq.

Normally, I avoided these memories. But this time, I chose to meet them head-on. I pictured my present-day self entering those moments—standing beside my younger self as he moved through his days in Iraq. I sat with him in Humvees, guard towers, and during missions.

Sometimes, my present-day self sat next to the younger me—like I had done with the eight-year-old version of myself. Other times, I dropped right into his body, feeling those faded memories come back to life through his senses.

I revisited the boredom, hyper-alertness, homesickness, and helplessness. It sucked. I relived horrors I’d tried to forget. If I’d had distractions, I would’ve used them.

But I didn’t. I was in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a burning determination to make use of every second. I needed to know what would happen if I gave this everything I had.

For twenty years, my body had been at war. It was ready to come home.

Memory by memory, I showed up for my younger self like the best older brother. I helped him reconnect with his body—helped him notice the tension his nervous system had been storing up each day.

Sometimes he spoke to me. Most of the time, he didn’t. But I stayed with him, showing him how to breathe—deep and slow—especially after intense situations.

I remember sitting in a Humvee with my 19-year-old self and telling him:

This won’t change what happens to you. You’re still gonna have a lot of horrible years ahead. But it will keep you from going numb. If we go numb to our body, we go numb to the world. You learning to breathe this way—now, here in the past—will help me breathe differently today.

He trusted me.

As the hours passed, I felt something shift.

The “younger me’s” from Iraq in 2003, 2004, and beyond—each stuck in their own memories—started breathing in sync with the present-day me. I felt my belly rise and fall in the Scablands desert, and at the same time, felt it rise and fall in the Iraq desert.

It felt like I was breathing across time. Each breath built a bridge between past and present. As I revisited more memories, the separation between those fragmented versions of me began to disappear. Each “me” stranded on its own island of memory, started breathing as One.

I went back into happy memories too—seeing a turtle for the first time at five, driving friends to parties at sixteen, my first real kiss at eighteen, qualifying with my rifle in boot camp, my first jump in airborne school, riding into Mosul on the back of a Humvee with Iraqi children doing cartwheels behind us. 

With each new memory, the darkness behind my closed eyelids lit up. It was sort of like gathering scattered old home movie clips and restoring them into one connected, vibrantly colored timeline. 

Tears came. Grief. Anger. I damned the time it took to get to this point—years spent in isolation from my own self. But after lying there for a while, gratitude found a way in. Somehow, I’d made it here. It had all led to this moment. And this was the moment I’d been waiting my entire adult life for—where I was whole, complete, unwounded.

Ever since I left the military, I felt like my inner peace had been permanently disrupted. Therapy, healing work—it helped, but I still felt like parts stitched awkwardly together. At birthday parties, July 4th BBQs, and Christmas mornings, I was the one who knew too much about the cost of the safety everyone else enjoyed. I’d become the thing the people in America had feared, so they didn’t have to be afraid.

Now, I felt the Wholeness that had always been there.

I collapsed into deep sleep.

Present Day

Trauma scrambled how time existed in my body—my past kept invading my present.

I’ve learned that if I want to feel different today, in this moment, I need to breathe differently into the past—into the moments where things got stuck.

It wasn't just about understanding the past or talking through it. I had to go back, find the places where my body locked up, and imagine the version of me that existed back then counteracting that freeze response by breathing into those areas of tension.

In the next chapter, we’ll practice a technique called Re-breathing the Past. It’s one way to release those stuck parts.

I didn’t do this alone. I made progress because I was part of a group that supported me. I want to be clear: I’m not suggesting you try what I described in this chapter on your own. These two stories come from carefully held group containers. I share them to set the stage.

This chapter is about getting your imagination ready for the next steps we’ll take together.

Before my first Rite of Passage experience, I spent months getting ready. I made sure I was mentally and emotionally prepared, and I had a team around me. I wasn’t about to sit for hours with my worst memories—or step back into them as my older wiser self—without backup.

This series, Overcoming Military PTS(D), Moral Injury, and MST, is part of that backup. But reading this doesn't replace having someone you trust right there with you. Support is available, it's essential—and it's what made all the difference for me.

The chapters so far are designed to work alongside live support to help keep you moving forward. In Chapter 7, you added sensory details to your story. You brought it back to life. Now, we’ll build on that.

In Chapter 12, Re-breathing the Past, we’ll return to that story, and breathe through it—right alongside the version of you who lived it.

* Brett Cotter wrote 3 Keys to Managing PTSD: The Warrior’s Guide to Overcoming Combat Trauma and founded Stress Is Gone.

His workshops hit differently. I’ve never met anyone who listens to pain the way he does. He honored my grief, went into my pain with me and then guided me back to my heart—my good, pure heart—and helped me stand tall again.

If you’re a Veteran, scholarships are often available for his programs. https://www.stressisgone.org.