February 10, 2025 • 24 mins
"I was one of these slight skeptics; I was like, well I've been breathing all my life, what can breathwork do for me?" -- Kellan Bacon
Hear the transcript of this episode here: https://app.swellai.com/t/tp_01JKBNQJYFFZT18Z0XSMHHTH37
EPISODE SUMMARY:
In this episode of Unraveling Adoption, I had the pleasure of speaking with Kellan Bacon, a gender-expansive, transracial adoptee from China, who was adopted as an infant in 1998 and now resides in Cardiff, Wales. Kellan has recently launched a professional practice called Kai Ming Holistics, where they utilize breathwork and other embodied modalities to support others on their healing journeys.
Kellan shared their personal adoption story, highlighting the complexities and challenges they faced growing up in a transracial family. They discussed the common narrative of being "saved" through adoption and how they eventually came to realize the profound impact of adoption trauma on their life. This awakening occurred during a mental health crisis around the age of 20, leading Kellan to explore their identity and the interconnectedness of their experiences as an adoptee and a queer individual.
We delved into the transformative power of breathwork, a healing modality that Kellan discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic. They explained how breathwork can help individuals access and process trauma stored in the body, particularly for adoptees who may have pre-verbal or pre-cognitive trauma. Kellan emphasized the importance of having a trained guide during breathwork sessions to ensure safety and support.
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RESOURCES:
Kellan’s information:
-
Kellan’s Substack: https://kellanbacon.substack.com/
-
Find Kellan on Instagram both ways at: https://www.instagram.com/kaimingholistics/ AND/OR https://www.instagram.com/kellanbacon/
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Find Kellan on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/kellan.x.bacon
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Music written and performed by Joseph Nakao
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to
delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson.
I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant and insightful young adult
son, Joey, who is on his healing path. I'm
walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. Joey
and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and
(00:24):
we want to help the general public understand adoption's complexities better
too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who
want to move their lives forward. So listeners, have you ever
heard of breathwork? It's a powerful healing modality that
goes beyond simple awareness of the breath, which is also a great tool,
and it provides significant healing for people, especially
(00:45):
when trauma is involved. I've had powerful experiences using breathwork
myself and I highly recommend it under the guidance of a practitioner. Today's
guest is Kellen Bacon, a gender-expansive, transracial adoptee
from China who was adopted as an infant in 1998 to
England. Now living in Cardiff, Wales, they've recently
started a professional practice called Kai Ming Holistics to
(01:08):
help others using breathwork and other embodied modalities that
have helped them so much. They are one of our 100 practitioners
in our Healing the Adoption Constellation database. So
I don't know if I'd count as Welsh since I've only just
(01:31):
You're just a transplant. Okay. So you're a Welsh English
hyphenated. Okay. You're living in Wales. Okay. Well, you're the
first person I've known that lives in Wales. Well, first
I always want to highlight adoptee stories. So let us know whatever
Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I was adopted in 1998 from
(01:53):
China. And I feel like adoption was
always one of those things where the dominant
narrative around it was that I'd been saved. And,
you know, I kind of grew up with this belief that I was like, adoption
doesn't affect me. And I'm, I'm totally fine.
And my parents are just my parents. It's all the same. And,
(02:17):
you know, we often use the term coming out of the fog, meaning
that we realise how adoption has impacted us
and the trauma involved, and yeah, the grief,
the loss that is involved in that. And I think that happened
for me around when I was 19, 20, so around, oh
sorry, yeah, 20-ish. around
(02:39):
2019 and that was when I was kind of going through my
mental health crisis and it was actually only after
that that it really hit me
and I was able to kind of validate all the feelings that
kind of been bubbling below the surface, like just like a dam ready
to kind of burst open. And that's, yeah,
(03:01):
that's kind of really where my deeper healing journey
Just curious, did a professional bring up adoption trauma?
Or was this just you that realized, well, this might be bigger
Oh yeah, interesting. I think it was mainly myself
that realised this, in that I'd had a few therapists before, but
(03:24):
most of them weren't trained in adoption or particularly adoption
competent. And actually, I did have a couple of therapists before
that perhaps worked with me around certain aspects that
are impacted by, well, everything's kind of been impacted by adoption.
It's all interconnected. Um, well, I think they actually did quite
a bit of harm. You know, they, they kind of reinforced that
(03:47):
very traditional narrative around being saved and,
Oh, you were so little. You don't even remember stuff
like that. Yes. Yes. We've heard that too, from therapists that have tried
to help Joey. Yeah. They can definitely make it
worse. If they don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Well, so
(04:08):
it just bubbled up for you. And that's a pivotal time for many people,
that young adult age, you're trying to figure out who the heck
you are, what is going on. And you were raised
Yeah, so you had the transracial aspect of it as well. How was
(04:30):
Yeah, I think growing up, you know, I got the kind of really stereotypical racist
comments that a lot of Chinese people get, you know, people doing
thin eyes at you. it depended on where I
was at really and again it was one of those things that I
didn't acknowledge it at all. I thought it was just
very normalized to be Chinese and have two
(04:52):
white parents and I think it's only in more recent years
and actually it's still something that I feel like I'm still processing. and
things around it are still landing for me in that
i now feel quite a big severance with that where
i'm just like my family often doesn't quite feel
(05:13):
like family anymore like there's this
disconnect there and it almost feels like untrue
to me to kind of see it as like a yeah like a normal normal
family connection when there's just this So before coming
out as trans and presenting more masculine
as myself, I was mistaken as my
(05:35):
dad's wife quite a few times. Yeah, where there
was this massive age difference as well and it was just very
Like the, what do they call those? Like when people go to Thailand and buy
That must have felt terrible. Yeah. Oh, awkward. Yeah,
(05:57):
that's, that's yuck. And did you want to talk about your trans
experience? Transgender? You've got like two, transracial and
Many, many trans transitions going on. yeah
so i think my my kind of coming to terms with
my queerness um actually very much was
instigated by my coming out of the fog oh interesting and i
(06:18):
think it was only after i'd kind of come to terms with
where i'd come from and this like this truth
around my roots and the the trauma with
adoption that i actually felt safe enough
to start exploring my authentic self more and
realizing that actually i wasn't like meant to
(06:41):
be the perfect golden you know daughter that my
parents went over and got um and actually
there was just so much to explore around gender and
sexuality and you know so many other aspects of life
Yeah, so this has been a four or five year trek for you so
(07:01):
Yeah. Wow. And that is huge. And it indicates that our
identities are not in little nice, neat boxes and pockets. We
are a whole person and all of these things that impact us and
have to get all unraveled together, intertwined back
however you want them to be. It's a major transformation and
I very much admire you for I
(07:24):
can't imagine how much effort and insight and work
you've had to do to parse all this out and
to stay safe and to be productive and
do your life through the whole thing. That's a lot. Plus we had COVID in
the middle of all that. And I think you said that
COVID affected you getting some help. Is that right? Am I remembering
(07:47):
yes yeah so covid is actually how
i got into somatics in the first place so
it wasn't straight off the bat when covid was kind of rife but
i i did contract covid and i
recovered and i was fine for a few days and then all of a sudden this
covid fatigue set in And I'd, you know,
(08:09):
I'd always been really active. I'd always enjoyed working out and
just fitness. And suddenly I was
just too tired to like get out of bed. My brain fog was
so intense, like I was not remembering things. And
with that came like so much depression. It was like my
body was just going into this like collapse, shutdown
(08:30):
response. Yeah, my nervous system was just not, not happy
so i was doing nutritional therapy at the time and i was doing so
much to help my body physically but then it
wasn't until somebody just offhand mentioned breathwork
for energy and you know i was one of these slight
skeptics i was like well i've been breathing all my life like what
(08:52):
what can breathwork do for me what does it have to offer um
but i was getting a bit desperate at this time and because yeah
i was really fatigued and nothing was really kind
of getting me back to where I wanted to be. Which just, yeah,
as a side note, I kind of don't believe that we get back to where
we were. I feel like illness is very much like a catalyst for our
growth and becoming so much more than
(09:15):
we were. And sometimes that does look different and does look
like, you know, using different supports and working around
your energy in a different way. But anyway, I'll get back to the story. And
yeah, it wasn't until I did breathwork that I
actually felt my energy was kind of starting to
heal and starting to be restored. And then I, again,
(09:36):
randomly just signed up for a breathwork facilitation event
that I thought would be very much similar to what I'd been practicing. So
more like traditional, they call it pranayama, energising breathwork.
Yeah, just kind of being aware. Yeah. Yeah. Like focus
Yeah, breathing exercises, you know, calm, energise, that
kind of thing. But this was much more of
(09:58):
an intense, deep experience where something
called conscious connected breathing and instead of
you know it kind of just energizing you or calming you,
you go inwards, you go deep with it and it's a very activating
breathwork style where you're actually purposefully
raising your oxygen levels like hyperventilating and
(10:20):
this can put our nervous system into like a very activated
state which might not always be a great thing. but in
this context it is kind of like it's allowing the
body to get to the nervous system state where
trauma occurred so it's kind of being able to access
that and through doing that in this state we can
(10:43):
the body can naturally start to process the stuck trauma
and the stuck energy that we've been holding in the body for so,
so long, like potentially all our, all our lives, you know, especially
for adoptees where potentially that trauma happened at
For sure. Yeah. So I wonder if you would be
(11:08):
yeah okay so i've not heard that before that's interesting but
the breath is it sounds so simple as well but it's just
a very quick inhale through the mouth which is which
is more activating than a nasal breath and then it's almost
like a sigh of relief so what we're doing with that is
we're taking in so much oxygen and expelling the
(11:30):
the co2 so we're really reducing the co2 so it
looks and sounds like So
we're breathing like deep into that like lower belly, the diaphragm.
Yeah. And like I said in the intro, I've done breathwork a few times and
it's kind of the work part is no joke. It's
(11:50):
like a physical activity. It's not like laying on
your yoga mat and just relaxing. This is like intense. It's
like a physical exercise, but it does get
you places. And it gets you similar places that psychedelics
get you, I think. And it can get you to some of those
other layers that your regular old brain doesn't
(12:11):
want to go to. So I think it's wonderful. And I also think that it
is important to do it with somebody that knows what they're doing. Because like you said, you
know, it can pull up trauma and you don't really want to be by yourself completely, you
Yeah, definitely. It can be a very intense experience
and a lot can come up and it's important to have a guide there
(12:31):
to like resource and bring some external
safety, especially for those kind of people that
maybe haven't done so much somatic therapy before and don't have
a strong connection to their internal safety resources just
Yeah, because it might bring up some stuff. And if yeah, if you're not really
well versed in your inner world, and how to handle all
(12:52):
this trauma, you need somebody to help you navigate that.
And also, like, what if you get into a spot in
breathwork? Like, for instance, if you're using psychedelics, you're gone
for hours. Like, you have no choice. Once you've taken it,
But breathwork, how do you get out of it? Like, what if you don't want to be there
(13:13):
Yeah that's a good question because I think the I
guess the upside with breathwork is that we're in control
of the breath at all times and so if it's
too intense we can actually just slow the breath we
can raise our co2 by breathing into our hands there's a lot of different
little things we can do to just bring that physiology back
(13:34):
to its more baseline state and they call conscious
connected breathing psychedelic breath as well sometimes. So
we can enter these almost like trance-like psychedelic
experiences or in that we have so much agency where
we haven't taken something that's like now in our blood. We're just
(13:55):
Yeah, and you're never really completely gone. When
I was doing breath work, I definitely had some very, very
strong visionary experiences that have still affected
me to today. But at any time, I
could have said, stop, I don't want to do this anymore. And I
could have just slowed down my breathing and been done with it. So I, it's
(14:16):
like my soul or myself or my whatever's watching it
all happen was conscious and ready to stop it
if I felt too scared or too whatever. So I think breathwork is
amazing for people that might want to go a little deeper
into their trauma if they want to kind of start. looking
(14:37):
at stuff, looking at some of those layers. You know, the cognitive behavioral
therapy, that frontal lobe stuff is great, but it
Yeah, it's great up till it's not. Like it can take
Yeah. It's great for day-to-day living, for, you know, problem solving,
whatever, those kinds of things. So I'm not, you know, it's fine,
(14:58):
it's good, but it won't get to, especially for adoptees. How
do you think breathwork particularly is helpful for adoptees
with maybe some really old, old, very early childhood trauma?
Yeah exactly because our trauma goes back
so so far in alien life it's often
pre-verbal or pre-cognitive sometimes people say where
(15:20):
we can't directly access the memories to it
so unlike I guess traditional talk therapy we
might not be able to to talk about it and process it
from that rational mind and you know when
trauma occurs um you're probably familiar with
like internal family systems and this idea that there's parts of
(15:42):
us within us and often when we're triggered the
parts of us that are activated have the i guess the
mental age the capacity and resources that that part had
and when our parts are so, so young, it's
Yeah, they have to feel it, they have to process it in the body where
(16:03):
it's been held in the nervous system. And so yeah,
our trauma isn't just in the stored memory in the brain, it's
literally in ourselves, in our nervous system, maybe even
in our DNA, you know, the there's a lot of connection
between adoptee trauma and, well, anyone's
(16:24):
And, you know, chronic pain, things like IBS. I
don't know if you've noticed, something that I've noticed is
Yes. Well, that was a brilliant explanation of how
trauma lives in the body and how breathwork can really get to
(16:46):
it in a really unique and gentle way. Like
we said, without substances, you're not putting anything in your body. And
just with a guide helping you, I think when I've done
Yeah I like to use to use music
that people may not have like heard of before and
maybe like cultural music and music that like invokes
(17:10):
that kind of like ancestral like feelings
Oh, it's interesting you said that because I'm a musician and I resonate deeply
with music. And when I did my first one, the
whole soundtrack was amazing, but then it hit a song I knew. It
was kind of an obscure song from a film, so I'm sure most people had
no idea, but it was one of my favorite films. my favorite pieces
(17:32):
of music, I'm like, got right out of it.
Then my mind was like, oh, I remember that movie. Oh, I love that song. It's
interesting that it's important to find the music that is
not going to remind you of stuff or it should be fresh
and new. I love that. You went to school for this
(17:53):
Yeah, I did a breathwork facilitation course. It
was mainly online and I actually work virtually a lot with
people. I know a lot of in-person stuff can be really beneficial,
but I tend to work with queer people
and adoptees and we're kind of spread out, so I
didn't want to limit myself to just the people in my travelable distance.
(18:21):
It seems like COVID made the breathwork explode. Is
Yeah, I feel like before it was perhaps very niche and
not many people knew about it. They'd maybe heard of Wim Hof, you
know, the Iceman. But I feel like the interest
in it really soared after COVID because suddenly people were interested
in their lungs and breathing and being able to breathe when
(18:47):
Yeah. I didn't think of that correlation. Yeah. And you can do
it. I did it in a big group. I just had headphones on and there was a
facilitator and you could ask for help if you needed it. But everyone was
just, you know, in our own bedrooms with our own headphones. And yeah,
it's pretty amazing. So you work with people throughout the world and you're on
our Healing the Adoption Constellation database and you love working with
(19:08):
queer adoptees. And I think you have a group, right?
Yeah, that sounds amazing. And if people wanted to
use you as a practitioner or find your trans-adoptee group,
(19:30):
Yeah, so I'm probably most prevalent, I guess,
on Instagram. So I've got my, you know,
my kind of public normal account where I do share
about like trans things about my life. And then
I've got my Kaiming Holistics account and people can
find me on either of those and DM or email me
(19:55):
Okay, I'll make sure and put those links in the show notes. So everyone look
in the show notes, just scroll either down or to the side underneath
where you pressed play for this. Is there anything else you'd like to share about
Yeah, we can talk a little bit about root cause healing, like
root cause therapy. So that's something that I've just been training in
(20:20):
Root cause, yeah. Like really going to the root of
our kind of, well, it involves a few different kind of
modalities, really. Yeah. The synthesis of them. And
it's a way to basically get to our subconscious limiting
beliefs and just the, yeah, the beliefs that we kind of stored in
our, not just our brain, but our entire system. Things like
(20:42):
I fear abandonment or I'm not good enough. And
it's, it's so interesting because often. we
have like an intellectual desire to
do things and we're like oh i'm ready for this but then we sabotage
and we have these blocks and it's like where is this coming from
our beliefs are always trying to
(21:02):
prove themselves right so the root cause
is basically it allows us to to see
what they are and to go back and using different
techniques and timeline therapy to go back to when these beliefs
were kind of instigated in the first place. And what's
been interesting on my journey is that I thought I'd
(21:25):
be going back and looking at birth and my birth mother
and mother wounds. And for some of them, I went
to past lives. I'm like, I went way, way back. Yeah,
and I don't know if it's something that I expected or
not, but it's really opened my mind to the
possibility of this energy being passed on.
(21:48):
You know, we've got transgenerational trauma, but perhaps even
beyond that, where our trauma has maybe
From one life to the next. Yeah. I am open to the possibility of that
happening. I don't know. Maybe we get
another chance at it. Okay, here's another whack at this. You still
(22:08):
aren't figuring this part out. So let's give you another try here. And I
don't know. I don't know how the universe works or what's going on.
It's fascinating. It sounds like you're really doing some deep work. And
I'm kind of amazed and impressed with you because you're just in your
yeah yeah i just uh i just turned 27 which is
(22:29):
yeah it's a comment sometimes where people like i didn't realize how young you
were and like um you know but i i've worked
with you know some 60 year olds and 50 year old sure i
That's great. I mean, a lot of people your age are just trying to figure it
out, like just day-to-day living and you're really going deep with it.
(22:52):
Oh, we all are. Believe me, I'm in my 50s. We're still just working
out at it, hacking away at it. Well, I really am
so glad you came on to talk. I am very glad that
you're in collaboration with me and doing the Healing the
Adoption of Constellation database and that you're providing
these wonderful, wonderful resources for adoptees and others.
(23:17):
But I think that your modalities, the somatic work,
the breathwork is so critical for adoptees. And
I think it's a wonderful tool to get to some of those layers that
So if they're willing, I really hope people reach out to you
or to find breathwork on their own, maybe where they live or whatever.
(23:37):
you know, these these practices are available, they're out
there, there are folks that are really wanting to help other people. So I hope people really
dig into it. We'll leave some links in the show notes, like we said,
and I'm just so glad to know you and glad you're here. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you for reaching out to me as well. Yeah, really happy to
Very good. Thank you. Thank
(24:07):
you all for listening and supporting Unraveling Adoption and make sure
and go check out Kellen's website and all
their offerings. And Kellen and I want you all
Welcome to this episode of Unraveling Adoption, an intentional space to
delve into adoption's complexities together. I'm Beth Syverson.
I'm an adoptive mom of a vibrant and insightful young adult
son, Joey, who is on his healing path. I'm
walking beside him while working on my own personal growth and healing. Joey
and I are committed to helping anyone impacted by adoption, and
(00:24):
we want to help the general public understand adoption's complexities better
too. I'm also a certified coach, helping seekers who
want to move their lives forward. So listeners, have you ever
heard of breathwork? It's a powerful healing modality that
goes beyond simple awareness of the breath, which is also a great tool,
and it provides significant healing for people, especially
(00:45):
when trauma is involved. I've had powerful experiences using breathwork
myself and I highly recommend it under the guidance of a practitioner. Today's
guest is Kellen Bacon, a gender-expansive, transracial adoptee
from China who was adopted as an infant in 1998 to
England. Now living in Cardiff, Wales, they've recently
started a professional practice called Kai Ming Holistics to
(01:08):
help others using breathwork and other embodied modalities that
have helped them so much. They are one of our 100 practitioners
in our Healing the Adoption Constellation database. So
I don't know if I'd count as Welsh since I've only just
(01:31):
You're just a transplant. Okay. So you're a Welsh English
hyphenated. Okay. You're living in Wales. Okay. Well, you're the
first person I've known that lives in Wales. Well, first
I always want to highlight adoptee stories. So let us know whatever
Yeah, sure. So as you mentioned, I was adopted in 1998 from
(01:53):
China. And I feel like adoption was
always one of those things where the dominant
narrative around it was that I'd been saved. And,
you know, I kind of grew up with this belief that I was like, adoption
doesn't affect me. And I'm, I'm totally fine.
And my parents are just my parents. It's all the same. And,
(02:17):
you know, we often use the term coming out of the fog, meaning
that we realise how adoption has impacted us
and the trauma involved, and yeah, the grief,
the loss that is involved in that. And I think that happened
for me around when I was 19, 20, so around, oh
sorry, yeah, 20-ish. around
(02:39):
2019 and that was when I was kind of going through my
mental health crisis and it was actually only after
that that it really hit me
and I was able to kind of validate all the feelings that
kind of been bubbling below the surface, like just like a dam ready
to kind of burst open. And that's, yeah,
(03:01):
that's kind of really where my deeper healing journey
Just curious, did a professional bring up adoption trauma?
Or was this just you that realized, well, this might be bigger
Oh yeah, interesting. I think it was mainly myself
that realised this, in that I'd had a few therapists before, but
(03:24):
most of them weren't trained in adoption or particularly adoption
competent. And actually, I did have a couple of therapists before
that perhaps worked with me around certain aspects that
are impacted by, well, everything's kind of been impacted by adoption.
It's all interconnected. Um, well, I think they actually did quite
a bit of harm. You know, they, they kind of reinforced that
(03:47):
very traditional narrative around being saved and,
Oh, you were so little. You don't even remember stuff
like that. Yes. Yes. We've heard that too, from therapists that have tried
to help Joey. Yeah. They can definitely make it
worse. If they don't know what they're doing. Yeah. Well, so
(04:08):
it just bubbled up for you. And that's a pivotal time for many people,
that young adult age, you're trying to figure out who the heck
you are, what is going on. And you were raised
Yeah, so you had the transracial aspect of it as well. How was
(04:30):
Yeah, I think growing up, you know, I got the kind of really stereotypical racist
comments that a lot of Chinese people get, you know, people doing
thin eyes at you. it depended on where I
was at really and again it was one of those things that I
didn't acknowledge it at all. I thought it was just
very normalized to be Chinese and have two
(04:52):
white parents and I think it's only in more recent years
and actually it's still something that I feel like I'm still processing. and
things around it are still landing for me in that
i now feel quite a big severance with that where
i'm just like my family often doesn't quite feel
(05:13):
like family anymore like there's this
disconnect there and it almost feels like untrue
to me to kind of see it as like a yeah like a normal normal
family connection when there's just this So before coming
out as trans and presenting more masculine
as myself, I was mistaken as my
(05:35):
dad's wife quite a few times. Yeah, where there
was this massive age difference as well and it was just very
Like the, what do they call those? Like when people go to Thailand and buy
That must have felt terrible. Yeah. Oh, awkward. Yeah,
(05:57):
that's, that's yuck. And did you want to talk about your trans
experience? Transgender? You've got like two, transracial and
Many, many trans transitions going on. yeah
so i think my my kind of coming to terms with
my queerness um actually very much was
instigated by my coming out of the fog oh interesting and i
(06:18):
think it was only after i'd kind of come to terms with
where i'd come from and this like this truth
around my roots and the the trauma with
adoption that i actually felt safe enough
to start exploring my authentic self more and
realizing that actually i wasn't like meant to
(06:41):
be the perfect golden you know daughter that my
parents went over and got um and actually
there was just so much to explore around gender and
sexuality and you know so many other aspects of life
Yeah, so this has been a four or five year trek for you so
(07:01):
Yeah. Wow. And that is huge. And it indicates that our
identities are not in little nice, neat boxes and pockets. We
are a whole person and all of these things that impact us and
have to get all unraveled together, intertwined back
however you want them to be. It's a major transformation and
I very much admire you for I
(07:24):
can't imagine how much effort and insight and work
you've had to do to parse all this out and
to stay safe and to be productive and
do your life through the whole thing. That's a lot. Plus we had COVID in
the middle of all that. And I think you said that
COVID affected you getting some help. Is that right? Am I remembering
(07:47):
yes yeah so covid is actually how
i got into somatics in the first place so
it wasn't straight off the bat when covid was kind of rife but
i i did contract covid and i
recovered and i was fine for a few days and then all of a sudden this
covid fatigue set in And I'd, you know,
(08:09):
I'd always been really active. I'd always enjoyed working out and
just fitness. And suddenly I was
just too tired to like get out of bed. My brain fog was
so intense, like I was not remembering things. And
with that came like so much depression. It was like my
body was just going into this like collapse, shutdown
(08:30):
response. Yeah, my nervous system was just not, not happy
so i was doing nutritional therapy at the time and i was doing so
much to help my body physically but then it
wasn't until somebody just offhand mentioned breathwork
for energy and you know i was one of these slight
skeptics i was like well i've been breathing all my life like what
(08:52):
what can breathwork do for me what does it have to offer um
but i was getting a bit desperate at this time and because yeah
i was really fatigued and nothing was really kind
of getting me back to where I wanted to be. Which just, yeah,
as a side note, I kind of don't believe that we get back to where
we were. I feel like illness is very much like a catalyst for our
growth and becoming so much more than
(09:15):
we were. And sometimes that does look different and does look
like, you know, using different supports and working around
your energy in a different way. But anyway, I'll get back to the story. And
yeah, it wasn't until I did breathwork that I
actually felt my energy was kind of starting to
heal and starting to be restored. And then I, again,
(09:36):
randomly just signed up for a breathwork facilitation event
that I thought would be very much similar to what I'd been practicing. So
more like traditional, they call it pranayama, energising breathwork.
Yeah, just kind of being aware. Yeah. Yeah. Like focus
Yeah, breathing exercises, you know, calm, energise, that
kind of thing. But this was much more of
(09:58):
an intense, deep experience where something
called conscious connected breathing and instead of
you know it kind of just energizing you or calming you,
you go inwards, you go deep with it and it's a very activating
breathwork style where you're actually purposefully
raising your oxygen levels like hyperventilating and
(10:20):
this can put our nervous system into like a very activated
state which might not always be a great thing. but in
this context it is kind of like it's allowing the
body to get to the nervous system state where
trauma occurred so it's kind of being able to access
that and through doing that in this state we can
(10:43):
the body can naturally start to process the stuck trauma
and the stuck energy that we've been holding in the body for so,
so long, like potentially all our, all our lives, you know, especially
for adoptees where potentially that trauma happened at
For sure. Yeah. So I wonder if you would be
(11:08):
yeah okay so i've not heard that before that's interesting but
the breath is it sounds so simple as well but it's just
a very quick inhale through the mouth which is which
is more activating than a nasal breath and then it's almost
like a sigh of relief so what we're doing with that is
we're taking in so much oxygen and expelling the
(11:30):
the co2 so we're really reducing the co2 so it
looks and sounds like So
we're breathing like deep into that like lower belly, the diaphragm.
Yeah. And like I said in the intro, I've done breathwork a few times and
it's kind of the work part is no joke. It's
(11:50):
like a physical activity. It's not like laying on
your yoga mat and just relaxing. This is like intense. It's
like a physical exercise, but it does get
you places. And it gets you similar places that psychedelics
get you, I think. And it can get you to some of those
other layers that your regular old brain doesn't
(12:11):
want to go to. So I think it's wonderful. And I also think that it
is important to do it with somebody that knows what they're doing. Because like you said, you
know, it can pull up trauma and you don't really want to be by yourself completely, you
Yeah, definitely. It can be a very intense experience
and a lot can come up and it's important to have a guide there
(12:31):
to like resource and bring some external
safety, especially for those kind of people that
maybe haven't done so much somatic therapy before and don't have
a strong connection to their internal safety resources just
Yeah, because it might bring up some stuff. And if yeah, if you're not really
well versed in your inner world, and how to handle all
(12:52):
this trauma, you need somebody to help you navigate that.
And also, like, what if you get into a spot in
breathwork? Like, for instance, if you're using psychedelics, you're gone
for hours. Like, you have no choice. Once you've taken it,
But breathwork, how do you get out of it? Like, what if you don't want to be there
(13:13):
Yeah that's a good question because I think the I
guess the upside with breathwork is that we're in control
of the breath at all times and so if it's
too intense we can actually just slow the breath we
can raise our co2 by breathing into our hands there's a lot of different
little things we can do to just bring that physiology back
(13:34):
to its more baseline state and they call conscious
connected breathing psychedelic breath as well sometimes. So
we can enter these almost like trance-like psychedelic
experiences or in that we have so much agency where
we haven't taken something that's like now in our blood. We're just
(13:55):
Yeah, and you're never really completely gone. When
I was doing breath work, I definitely had some very, very
strong visionary experiences that have still affected
me to today. But at any time, I
could have said, stop, I don't want to do this anymore. And I
could have just slowed down my breathing and been done with it. So I, it's
(14:16):
like my soul or myself or my whatever's watching it
all happen was conscious and ready to stop it
if I felt too scared or too whatever. So I think breathwork is
amazing for people that might want to go a little deeper
into their trauma if they want to kind of start. looking
(14:37):
at stuff, looking at some of those layers. You know, the cognitive behavioral
therapy, that frontal lobe stuff is great, but it
Yeah, it's great up till it's not. Like it can take
Yeah. It's great for day-to-day living, for, you know, problem solving,
whatever, those kinds of things. So I'm not, you know, it's fine,
(14:58):
it's good, but it won't get to, especially for adoptees. How
do you think breathwork particularly is helpful for adoptees
with maybe some really old, old, very early childhood trauma?
Yeah exactly because our trauma goes back
so so far in alien life it's often
pre-verbal or pre-cognitive sometimes people say where
(15:20):
we can't directly access the memories to it
so unlike I guess traditional talk therapy we
might not be able to to talk about it and process it
from that rational mind and you know when
trauma occurs um you're probably familiar with
like internal family systems and this idea that there's parts of
(15:42):
us within us and often when we're triggered the
parts of us that are activated have the i guess the
mental age the capacity and resources that that part had
and when our parts are so, so young, it's
Yeah, they have to feel it, they have to process it in the body where
(16:03):
it's been held in the nervous system. And so yeah,
our trauma isn't just in the stored memory in the brain, it's
literally in ourselves, in our nervous system, maybe even
in our DNA, you know, the there's a lot of connection
between adoptee trauma and, well, anyone's
(16:24):
And, you know, chronic pain, things like IBS. I
don't know if you've noticed, something that I've noticed is
Yes. Well, that was a brilliant explanation of how
trauma lives in the body and how breathwork can really get to
(16:46):
it in a really unique and gentle way. Like
we said, without substances, you're not putting anything in your body. And
just with a guide helping you, I think when I've done
Yeah I like to use to use music
that people may not have like heard of before and
maybe like cultural music and music that like invokes
(17:10):
that kind of like ancestral like feelings
Oh, it's interesting you said that because I'm a musician and I resonate deeply
with music. And when I did my first one, the
whole soundtrack was amazing, but then it hit a song I knew. It
was kind of an obscure song from a film, so I'm sure most people had
no idea, but it was one of my favorite films. my favorite pieces
(17:32):
of music, I'm like, got right out of it.
Then my mind was like, oh, I remember that movie. Oh, I love that song. It's
interesting that it's important to find the music that is
not going to remind you of stuff or it should be fresh
and new. I love that. You went to school for this
(17:53):
Yeah, I did a breathwork facilitation course. It
was mainly online and I actually work virtually a lot with
people. I know a lot of in-person stuff can be really beneficial,
but I tend to work with queer people
and adoptees and we're kind of spread out, so I
didn't want to limit myself to just the people in my travelable distance.
(18:21):
It seems like COVID made the breathwork explode. Is
Yeah, I feel like before it was perhaps very niche and
not many people knew about it. They'd maybe heard of Wim Hof, you
know, the Iceman. But I feel like the interest
in it really soared after COVID because suddenly people were interested
in their lungs and breathing and being able to breathe when
(18:47):
Yeah. I didn't think of that correlation. Yeah. And you can do
it. I did it in a big group. I just had headphones on and there was a
facilitator and you could ask for help if you needed it. But everyone was
just, you know, in our own bedrooms with our own headphones. And yeah,
it's pretty amazing. So you work with people throughout the world and you're on
our Healing the Adoption Constellation database and you love working with
(19:08):
queer adoptees. And I think you have a group, right?
Yeah, that sounds amazing. And if people wanted to
use you as a practitioner or find your trans-adoptee group,
(19:30):
Yeah, so I'm probably most prevalent, I guess,
on Instagram. So I've got my, you know,
my kind of public normal account where I do share
about like trans things about my life. And then
I've got my Kaiming Holistics account and people can
find me on either of those and DM or email me
(19:55):
Okay, I'll make sure and put those links in the show notes. So everyone look
in the show notes, just scroll either down or to the side underneath
where you pressed play for this. Is there anything else you'd like to share about
Yeah, we can talk a little bit about root cause healing, like
root cause therapy. So that's something that I've just been training in
(20:20):
Root cause, yeah. Like really going to the root of
our kind of, well, it involves a few different kind of
modalities, really. Yeah. The synthesis of them. And
it's a way to basically get to our subconscious limiting
beliefs and just the, yeah, the beliefs that we kind of stored in
our, not just our brain, but our entire system. Things like
(20:42):
I fear abandonment or I'm not good enough. And
it's, it's so interesting because often. we
have like an intellectual desire to
do things and we're like oh i'm ready for this but then we sabotage
and we have these blocks and it's like where is this coming from
our beliefs are always trying to
(21:02):
prove themselves right so the root cause
is basically it allows us to to see
what they are and to go back and using different
techniques and timeline therapy to go back to when these beliefs
were kind of instigated in the first place. And what's
been interesting on my journey is that I thought I'd
(21:25):
be going back and looking at birth and my birth mother
and mother wounds. And for some of them, I went
to past lives. I'm like, I went way, way back. Yeah,
and I don't know if it's something that I expected or
not, but it's really opened my mind to the
possibility of this energy being passed on.
(21:48):
You know, we've got transgenerational trauma, but perhaps even
beyond that, where our trauma has maybe
From one life to the next. Yeah. I am open to the possibility of that
happening. I don't know. Maybe we get
another chance at it. Okay, here's another whack at this. You still
(22:08):
aren't figuring this part out. So let's give you another try here. And I
don't know. I don't know how the universe works or what's going on.
It's fascinating. It sounds like you're really doing some deep work. And
I'm kind of amazed and impressed with you because you're just in your
yeah yeah i just uh i just turned 27 which is
(22:29):
yeah it's a comment sometimes where people like i didn't realize how young you
were and like um you know but i i've worked
with you know some 60 year olds and 50 year old sure i
That's great. I mean, a lot of people your age are just trying to figure it
out, like just day-to-day living and you're really going deep with it.
(22:52):
Oh, we all are. Believe me, I'm in my 50s. We're still just working
out at it, hacking away at it. Well, I really am
so glad you came on to talk. I am very glad that
you're in collaboration with me and doing the Healing the
Adoption of Constellation database and that you're providing
these wonderful, wonderful resources for adoptees and others.
(23:17):
But I think that your modalities, the somatic work,
the breathwork is so critical for adoptees. And
I think it's a wonderful tool to get to some of those layers that
So if they're willing, I really hope people reach out to you
or to find breathwork on their own, maybe where they live or whatever.
(23:37):
you know, these these practices are available, they're out
there, there are folks that are really wanting to help other people. So I hope people really
dig into it. We'll leave some links in the show notes, like we said,
and I'm just so glad to know you and glad you're here. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you for reaching out to me as well. Yeah, really happy to
Very good. Thank you. Thank
(24:07):
you all for listening and supporting Unraveling Adoption and make sure
and go check out Kellen's website and all
their offerings. And Kellen and I want you all
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