A Simple Way to Connect to Your Intuition (No Matter Where You Are) with Emily Spang
Did you know your breath directly relates to your quality of life? Powerful thought. Our guest this week, Emily Spang, is the Founder of Haarbor, which creates a space for people to find connection within themselves and outside of themselves through group breathwork and meditation sessions in their WorkFlow program. Emily shares her journey to find breathwork and its powerful ability to transform our relationship with our intention, body and community. She encourages us to focus on our breath, lead life with more feminine energy, and, most importantly, start from within.
Introducing: Emily Spang
Today we are so excited to welcome Emily Spang back to The Good Space Podcast. Emily is the Founder of Haarbor (she’s since pivoted to a new company called Meln), which “creates a space for people to find connection within themselves and outside of themselves” through group breathwork and meditation sessions.
Emily is a trained trauma-informed breathwork facilitator and has studied energy work, meditation, as well as coaching, and mindset strategies. She has been an entrepreneur for over seven years and has trained her body and mind to go from burned out to balanced. Her mission is to help people incorporate tools like breathwork and meditation into their daily lives so they can reach their goals and live a fully aligned life.
She first discovered the power of breathing and breath patterns through managing her anxiety. She tried meditation and mindset work, but when she paired those with taking deep breaths, “breathing deeply into her belly,” that’s how she discovered breathwork. In 2020, Emily knew she was ready to share this powerful tool with groups and individuals, so she dove into a facilitator program to become a trauma-informed breathwork facilitator.
What is Breathwork?
Breathwork and breath patterns have been used throughout the world for generations, especially in Buddhist cultures and in yoga, meditation and Tai Chi practices, but hasn’t really become popular yet in the Western world. Breathwork can help you get into a state of centered, zen calm in about half the time of meditation alone.
Often, Emily finds people have emotions they don’t know how how to process or they feel disconnected from their intuition. Breathwork can be an incredibly powerful tool to help heal emotional pain, trauma and burnout, and can also help people reach their goals, connect with their life purpose and tap into their Higher Self or intuition.
Breathwork Practitioners are trained guide their clients navigate the trauma, anxiety and negative emotions frozen in their bodies – which can feel overwhelming or scary (at first!) to release with breathwork.
Your Breath = Your Quality of Life
As Emily said in our conversation, “There is nothing more present than breathing, than being able to pay attention to your breath. Every moment, every inhale, exhale is a moment. So if you're aware of that you can fully be present… Being able to feel that breath and feel the moments, and being in those moments is truly the core of the transformation.”
Hopefully you’re taking a moment to notice your breath as you read this. Is it deep or shallow? Fast or slow? Can you feel your heart beating?
Shallow breaths trigger your fight or flight response, making you feel stressed, anxious and/or overwhelmed. Pair shallow breaths with fast breathing and you’ll likely feel even more nervous or anxious. Deep, full breaths increase the amount of oxygen in your blood, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system helps manage stress, release anxiety and bring the body and mind back to a state of calm.
“The more you breathe, the more you do breathwork sessions, the more you're paying attention to your breath, you're training your body to live in the parasympathetic system, and not feel like it's in fight or flight.”
Taking deep breaths helps us to learn how our body feels and what it needs in that moment. That sense of self-awareness can truly change the quality of your life. “Your connection to yourself reflects the connection you have to others” – “the more people we can have breathing, and actually feeling their bodies, the better our world will be.”
“A lot of people have so many racing thoughts. There’s so many things to do, your “doer” is always going. When your “doer” is going and you’re like, ‘I need to do this. What am I thinking about? What is the next thing?’ It’s so hard to hear your intuition. How how can you hear that when there’s all that noise? [Breathwork] is just one of the ways to cut through that. So then your intuition becomes louder.”
Leading with More Feminine Energy
Instead of focusing on a strict regimen or schedule of breathwork, Emily recommends “really feeling into what feels good for the day.” She has also been focusing on what feels good and leading life with more feminine energy:
“The breath is so feminine. It takes us out of the masculine world we live in, and [my breathwork practice] has let me feel into that because I’ve been feeling into my body more, and I know what feels right. I can feel my intuition, so that’s how I’ve tried to lead my life” by focusing on “what would nourish me” today?
Often, “we’re so disconnected from our feelings… breathwork is a huge transformation of suddenly feeling your whole body and what it feels like to be in your body.” That’s when we’re able to notice how we’re feeling. It “is a very feminine thing to be in tune with your body and not just run on a schedule that was designed for us… because it’s what the world is doing.”
To get started with breathwork, Emily recommends doing these three simple, grounding activities:
Pay attention to your breath. How are you breathing? Are you taking deep breaths? Are you taking shallow breaths? Do you stop yourself from breathing?
Get familiar with your body. What do you feel? What are you aware of within your body?
Validate yourself. How do you feel? Share those feelings with those around you. The act of sharing may help you discover tools and people that can help you on your journey.
Each activity will help you understand where you’re starting with breathwork or meditation (or another modality that works better for you).
Final Thought: Start Within
“Find yourself. That's where it starts. Every single thing in your life starts with yourself. If you feel like there's disconnect anywhere in your life, just start within. It’s a hard place to start. But if you can start there, your whole world gets juicier and better. Just because you were able to like take those steps.” When you’re ready to take the next step on your breathwork journey, Emily invites you to try Haarbor’s WorkFlow program.*
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I allow my breath to anchor me to the present and transform my being to higher emotions.
Links From the Show
Follow Emily Spang on Instagram.
Join our private Facebook group here.
*This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through affiliate links helps fund The Good Space at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us!
