There’s Nothing Wrong With You, You Just Forgot How to Breathe...

A letter of relief for anyone who feels broken, anxious, or lost.

Sitting in Peace @ Beautiful Phrathat Chom Thong Temple in Chiang Mai/Thailand, a Few Months Before I Ordained as a Monk.

For years, I thought something was broken inside me.

Every morning I woke with a heavy chest, my heart already racing before I had spoken a word.

The smallest tasks felt overwhelming. Simple conversations felt exhausting.
And no matter what I tried, I couldn’t shake the sense that I was failing at life.

Doctors gave me labels. Stress. Burnout. Anxiety.
Friends told me to rest more, take holidays, try new hobbies.
I tried them all. Nothing worked.
The heaviness always came back.

I carried the secret fear that I was fundamentally flawed.
That something in me was cracked in a way that could never be repaired.

It took me decades to see the truth: there was nothing wrong with me.
I had simply forgotten how to breathe.

Not the mechanical act of pulling air into the lungs. I was doing that.
But the deeper breath — the one that softens the nervous system, that roots you in the present, that tells your body it is safe.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost it.
Anxiety had trained me to breathe in quick, shallow bursts, always bracing for the next blow.
Stress had taught my body to hold itself tight, chest rising high, shoulders stiff, stomach clenched.
Even in rest, my breath was rushing, panicked, incomplete.

And because my breath was frantic, so was my mind.

When I first came to meditation, I thought I was failing at it too.
I would sit and immediately notice the storm inside me.
The racing thoughts. The pounding heart. The short breath.
I thought, this practice is not for me.

But my teacher told me: Don’t fight the breath. Don’t control it. Just notice it.

So I noticed.
At first, it was painful.
Each inhale felt thin, each exhale cut short.
I wanted to fix it, to make it longer, calmer, smoother.
But I was asked to simply observe.

And then something small began to shift.
In the act of noticing, the breath began to change on its own.
The more I allowed it, the more it softened.
The chest loosened, the stomach began to move, the shoulders lowered without me forcing them.

And with every fuller breath, I realized something incredible:
It wasn’t that my life was unbearable.
It was that I hadn’t given myself the air to bear it.

Breath by breath, I felt my body remember something older than my anxiety.
The natural rhythm of being alive.
The quiet safety that was always here, hidden beneath the panic.

One morning, sitting in meditation, I felt my breath drop deep into my belly.
For the first time in decades, it felt like oxygen was reaching parts of me I had abandoned.
My heart slowed. My mind softened.
And the thought came: There is nothing wrong with me. I just forgot how to breathe.

Tears came, not from sadness, but from relief.
The relief of realizing I wasn’t broken.

The relief of remembering that peace is not earned, it’s breathed.

Since then, I’ve met many people who carry the same fear I once did — the fear that they are defective, that life is harder for them because they are somehow less capable.
But when I guide them to the breath, I watch the same realization dawn in their eyes.

You are not broken.
You are disconnected.
Disconnected from the most natural rhythm of all — the breath that has carried you since the moment you arrived on this earth.

The body knows how to heal.
The mind knows how to rest.
All it needs is the breath to lead the way back.

Even now, whenever anxiety returns, I no longer ask, What’s wrong with me?
I ask, Have I forgotten to breathe?

And almost always, the answer is yes.

I remember after my crash more than two and a half years ago, when suicidal thoughts shadowed me, I made a decision: No. Never. I must fight.
Easier said than done.

I would wake at 5 in the morning with panic, my chest so tight I thought it might explode. In that state, I threw on my clothes, went out into the dark, and biked to the gym. I played motivational speeches in my headphones, restless in my chest, trying to move the heaviness through exercise.

Sometimes the tears came right in the middle of a set, but still, I finished my 45 minutes. Every.single.day.

Then I would return home, sit in silence for twenty minutes, meditating with whatever storm remained inside. And then it was off into Bangkok traffic on my scooter, smog and noise pressing in as I tried to keep myself together.

At work, with a stressful job and a narcissistic boss, I sometimes fled to the toilet when the panic attacks arrived, just to breathe — closing my eyes, meditating for five minutes so I wouldn’t break.

(Even now, in this moment that I’m writing this, I feel the sadness in my chest.)

It was a cycle that repeated itself, day after day.
And only later did I realize: I hadn’t taken a full breath in years.

Here’s what I know now:

Every anxious thought is mirrored in the body.
Every shallow breath is a message to the nervous system that danger is near.

And yet, the opposite is also true.

When we relearn to breathe deeply, the body receives a different message.
Not a command, not a demand, just a signal of safety.
And slowly, the mind follows.

This doesn’t mean life becomes free of challenge.
But it does mean we stop fighting ourselves.
We stop mistaking our survival patterns for our identity.
We begin to live again.

So if you carry that quiet fear — that something is wrong with you, that you are broken beyond repair — let this truth sink in:

There is nothing wrong with you.
You just forgot how to breathe.

And the beautiful thing is — you can remember again.

The breath you are searching for is already inside you, waiting to bring you home.

Because every breath, when taken with awareness, is a reminder that peace was never gone — it was only waiting for you to return.

Until next week
With metta💛
Sadhu 🙏🏼

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You can always reach out to me for a free, quiet chat about the practice or anything you carry in your chest. Sometimes a single conversation is enough to soften the heart and begin again.
Get in touch 👈