Rock Bottom Is Not a Failure: How to Reclaim Your Power One Breath at a Time
You’ve hit the point where you feel like you have nothing left to lose. And a part of you is calling that a failure. It feels like the worst thing that could happen, ever, to be in that position.
I want to offer you a different read on it. What if having nothing left to lose is an access point? What if it is a position of great power, and it is the way your system chose to reclaim your personal power?
What I want you to walk away with
By the end of this article, I want you to see rock bottom as a doorway instead of proof that something is wrong with you. I also want you to have a very simple practice, one breath and one sensation at a time, for reclaiming your power without forcing yourself through trauma and without bypassing it.
The practice comes from a hypnosis recode session I did with a real client who gave permission to share her healing journey, without any identifying details of her rock bottom experience. She felt she had nothing left to lose and was hopeless about ever recovering. Your story is different from hers, but there are similar energetic threads that can support your own shift.
Why bypassing and forcing both keep you stuck
In a lot of spiritual communities, I see a lack of willingness to feel the challenging feelings, to embrace them, or even to take ownership of feeling powerless or hopeless. That unwillingness creates a fight response in your body, mind and heart.
One of the core teachings of oneness is not “only love and light.” The path of oneness embraces everything that is. That includes feeling hopeless and powerless, and it includes trauma held in the body and mind. Trying to bypass the human experience of pain and trauma keeps people stuck.
The opposite move has its own problem. If you force yourself to go deeper and deeper into the trauma, it can simply reactivate and make things worse. So the question I ask is how deeply you can allow your system to move into the challenging emotions, and you are the one regulating how far you go.
Capacity on both ends of the spectrum
If you are not willing to feel bad, or not willing to go into the trauma, then the opposite end is limited too. You end up with a very narrow field of experience.
The practice I teach increases your capacity on all sides of the spectrum. You become able to be with the most challenging aspects of yourself and your life, and your capacity to feel good, whole and perfect grows along with it.
I compare it to learning a yoga pose. You wouldn’t force your body into the pose. You would move slowly, stay present with the sensations, notice what your mind is saying, get to the edge, and breathe gently there, looking for the place of opening and presence.
Being present with what is may be the part so many people miss. The mind says, I have to change it, I have to fix it, I have to get past it, why isn’t it done yet? The alternative is to sit with the feelings and sensations beyond the story of powerlessness and hopelessness. As wild as it sounds, going toward that and being present with it is a golden key that I feel so many practitioners and modalities are missing. When you meet it, you stop actively fighting it.
One breath, one sensation
This is the practice at the center of the episode. When you notice your mind rolling a familiar pattern tape, a habit loop or a stress response, simply notice it without being hard or mean to yourself. Then return to one breath, one sensation.
Here is how I guide it:
- Bring one hand to your belly and one hand to your heart, and notice how these words land in your body.
- Pay attention to the sensations more than the story your mind is telling. What is the quality and movement of your breath?
- Take gentle breaths without forcing yourself open into a deeper one.
- On an exhale, release a sound: Ah, then Oh, then Uh, then Mm. The vibration matters more than the sound.
- If you notice yourself moving only toward discomfort, or trying to escape it, take one inhale and one exhale with a single sensation, then find something else.
- Try inhaling for a count of four and exhaling for a count of four, for as long as you can without straining.
Even if it is hard to move your awareness, simply repeating the phrase “one breath, one sensation” helps move a stressed mind into a new experience. The mind is not the bad guy here. The work is bringing the mind into service of the connection between mind, heart and body, so the three become a team.
Reclaiming power is smaller and quieter than you think
We often think reclaiming power is a one-time event. I did this thing, so why aren’t I having a different experience? But the invitation to reclaim your power comes with every single breath you take. Those peak experiences will not sustain you for long.
It also does not need to be some rebellious shouting match. If you are in an interaction that triggers your stress response and activates old patterns of giving your power away, reclaiming it can be as small as breathing and being in your own experience. Then you ask what your body is inviting you to do. It might be to breathe more, get up and leave the room, or ask a question. The body doesn’t lie, and the smaller the act, the easier it is for your system to calibrate and expand its capacity.
Why this feels terrifying at first
When a child is conditioned to be a people pleaser and a caretaker, which is the dominant conditioning for girls, her energy goes up and out and stays focused on others. Your value gets tied to your doing, and you become disconnected from your being.
Pulling your energy back into your own body is a radical act of reclamation, and it can feel terrifying to your system at first, because your attention outward was set up as a survival strategy. So I suggest starting gently and in low-stress situations, like when everyone in the room is quiet and watching television and the focus is somewhere else, or when you’re alone. Ask yourself what you are experiencing in this moment and what you notice in your system. Place your hands on your own body in a way nobody will notice, and breathe into your hands. Avoid going into the story of the override mind, because that disconnects you from your physical sensations.
Creating a sense of safety in your own body sounds simple, and in a traumatized system it is not easy.
Make powerlessness playfully dramatic
It is much more challenging to receive the things you say you don’t want, like depression, despair and powerlessness. One thing that can make it easier is to make it playfully dramatic. Oh, powerlessness, I don’t like it when you visit me. The human experience is the divine play, the comedy and tragedy of being human.
Then say what you want out loud, when you are by yourself, driving or walking alone. I want to feel powerful. I want to feel delicious, sensual, rich. I want to feel like a queen, but I don’t, and I feel the fire of desire brewing in my belly. Your voice creates momentum.
Where you speak from matters. Speaking your desire from powerlessness perpetuates the powerlessness. Speaking it from a place of turn-on in your body creates momentum, and I believe it fuels the timeline of what you desire so your reality shifts more quickly, because your being and your doing are working together.
A thousand choices each day
Reclaiming your power is a thousand choices each day: to breathe, to be with your body, to move gently, to drink water, to rest, to be in nature. It is also choosing to fill your mind with resources and people, books, podcasts and audiobooks, that support you in believing your being is valuable.
Your being has been deeply traumatized, and you are not broken. If you need more rest than you have been allowing yourself, moving out of a fight or flight state of high adrenaline and high cortisol needs that. You are allowed to say no, gently and with kindness.
And when you feel trapped, stuck or hopeless, I don’t care what you chose five minutes ago, yesterday, last week or forty years ago. What are you choosing now? How can you care for and tend to yourself in this moment, with one breath, one sensation and one gentle movement?
The question to sit with
If you truly have nothing left to lose, what is the smallest quiet thing you could choose in your very next moment? Maybe it is one breath, or your hand on your own body, or a step out of the room. I hold that the first moments of reclaiming your power are going to be quiet.
The full hypnosis journey walks you through all of this in real time, with the sounds, the breath and the guidance, so you can feel it in your body instead of just reading about it. I invite you to listen again and again until it becomes easier to be with yourself no matter what is happening.