#23: What Really Happened At That Transformational Breathwork Retreat

Now ready to begin the next chapter of her life in Spain, Kelly kicks off Season Two of the podcast with the story of what actually happened at that 3-day Transformational Breathwork retreat in the English countryside.

Could the roots of her deep fears of the gynaecologist and childbirth stem from a past life?

As always, the episode ends with a turn-around; an opportunity for you to reflect on how Kelly's story relates to your own life path.

Open your mind, open your heart and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.

New to the podcast? You may want to start from episode 0 and work your way up through the unfolding story. Unless you like watching your favourite Netflix series in random order. 

Come and join Project WE, Kelly's online membership club for women with a growth mindset who want to work on their lives in a positive we-space.

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Read the Transcript for this Episode below:

Episode 23 of the Project Me podcast.

Hi, I'm Kelly Pietrangeli, the creator of  MyProjectMe. com. This podcast is designed to be an entertaining, lighthearted, inspirational, personal growth journey.  Each episode goes in a mostly chronological order as I piece together the books, modalities, people, and experiences that have fallen onto my life path exactly when I needed them.

And how often I resisted the very things I needed the most, or didn't see the gifts contained in the challenges until later.  By sharing my stories, I hope to inspire you to reflect on your life path. What are the seeming coincidences that have led you to where you are today?  What are the hidden gifts within your challenges?

And what magic is out there waiting for you as you let go of resistance and follow your own breadcrumb trail?  At the end of each short episode, there's an opportunity. For you to reflect on how my story relates to your own life. You'll also find a PDF of journal prompts in the show notes.

Hi guys, welcome to season two, or shall I say, hola amigas, bienvenida a la segunda temporada.  I'm finally coming at you from Madrid. If you've been following the story, we had to move out of our house in London back in January, but due to travel restrictions, we couldn't move to Spain as planned. So we did four and a half months of Airbnb surfing in London and finally landed here in Madrid mid May.

All of our stuff is still in storage as we've moved into a fully furnished apartment, but I finally managed to get my podcasting equipment here after paying crazy customs charge taxes on my own stuff. Thank you, Brexit.  But I'm not going to complain as I am back in the land of endless blue skies and sunshine, and I'm feeling fully, solely powered.

It's hot, But, having lived in Madrid before, I know the inferno really kicks off from next month, so I'm fully appreciating getting out and seeing how much this city has evolved since I left here in 2016. Wow. I used to love Madrid except for one major thing. They ate so damn late here. I mean, restaurants didn't even take bookings before 9 or 9.

30pm, and if you actually showed up at that time, you were the only ones in there, and the kitchen hadn't quite kicked into gear yet. And if you wanted to have some nightlife, that didn't happen until well after midnight. I remember we used to get home for the babysitter at 1 or 2 a. m. And then she'd take the money she'd made and head into town to start her night because things didn't really fully kick off until after 2 a.

m. But now, because of COVID restrictions, all restaurants are open early. We're arriving at 8 and people are there and the bars are open early because they have to shut at I think 1 a. m. now. This must be so hard for the Madrilenios to get used to, but for us, we absolutely love it. I really hope it stays this way and doesn't revert once restrictions lift.

Also, the variety of food on offer now is amazing. Before, I'm going to admit, my heart would sink when I'd open a menu and I'd see the same thing over and over again. I'd be like, look honey, solomio de cerdo and patatas served with a limp roasted pepper. I enjoy Spanish food, but not every single day and not the same things all the time.

I love variety, I've talked about that previously. And now suddenly there are international restaurants, there are vegan and vegetarian places, all kinds of places to get healthy food. They've got cool decors. It's not just these places that have like the lighting up way too high and a TV in the corner.

And they've got salads now that are not just iceberg lettuce. They used to be just iceberg lettuce. Raw onions, some olives from a tin, white asparagus from a tin, and they bring you that little caddy which has some nondescript olive oil and vinegar as the dressing. Now the salads are suddenly amazing.

They've discovered pumpkin seeds and rocket and pomegranate seeds and really tasty dressings. So I'm in proper food heaven now.  If you're interested in seeing my Madrid adventure, you can follow me on Instagram, that's kellyprojectme,  or on Facebook, I'm projectmekellyp.  Okay, I'm calling this season two to mark the start of this new chapter in my life as an empty nester living in Spain.

And this episode picks up where I've been leading you in my journey into self discovery. If you're brand new to the podcast, you may want to start at episode zero and work your way up. As otherwise, it's kind of like watching a Netflix series, starting with series two and not really knowing the backstory leading up to this, but it's totally up to you.

Here we go. Episode 23.  It was International Women's Day, March 2019.  The private members club in London I belonged to was hosting a full day event with powerful female speakers and a lovely sit down lunch prepared by Palestinian chef Jody Kala.  I invited Hannah to join me.  Hannah keeps popping up in my podcast stories.

You may recall, she's the one who insisted I give her a tarot card reading when I was not feeling ready to do it at all. And I'm now doing it professionally. Part of my confidence in doing that came from that session with Hannah.  In Brookgreen, London, she owns the local neighborhood beauty salon, Beauty Royale.

Sorry, it's actually called Beauty Royal, but my husband and I call it Beauty Royale. If you've ever seen Pulp Fiction, you'll know about Burger Royale.  Hannah is a real one woman show at Beauty Royale, doing manicures, pedicures, hair removal, facials, and massages. When the door to the salon is locked, it means she's in with a client and the door is almost always locked.

Hannah's from Ethiopia. She has absolutely no sense of time despite me attempting to mentor her with my best time management strategies. She keeps you waiting outside of that locked door past your appointment time and yet so many of us keep going back. There's just something magical about her. She has healing hands and a gift for bringing women together in the vortex.

That's another nickname for beauty royale. We call it the vortex. So on international women's day, 2019, I encouraged Hannah to take a much needed day off work,  closed on the salon, change out of her white uniform and into a nice dress and celebrate in style with me at white city house.  When we arrived, she was in awe of how posh it all was.

We got into the lift with a woman who turned out to also be from Africa. She was wearing a fabulous, brightly colored sarong with a matching turban wrapped around her head.  She and Hannah chatted all the way up in the lift and then parted ways as we looked for chairs close to the stage where the talks would be taking place.

Soon the event kicked off and the MC introduced a panel of female speakers. One of them was the African woman we just rode the lift with.  Her name was Hebo Wardier.  She shared a heartbreaking story of being a survival of female genital mutilation, FGM,  and what it was like to be a young girl in a culture that still to this day practices this inhumane tradition.

For women who reject the practice, it is virtually impossible to get married. And since women depend on men almost entirely to be their protectors and providers, it's a horrible situation to be in.  Hebo now spends her time working to ensure that other girls would not be subjected to the pain and long term physical and emotional damage it causes.

She works in the UK and all over the world advising governments and teaching schools and health professionals about FGM.  She was so inspirational. We all applauded her courage in sharing her story and educating us.  Now, I wish my box of journals wasn't still in storage and I had the program for the event, because I can't even tell you now who else was on that panel on stage that day, except for Mika Simmons of the Lady Garden Foundation, which is a national women's charity raising awareness and funding for gynecological health.

A discussion began about the importance of women having regular cervical smear tests  As soon as this subject came up,  I began to feel very unwell.  Weirdly, Hibo's very descriptive FGM story had only brought up deep compassion, but nothing like the physical and emotional discomfort that suddenly arose as soon as cervical smear tests came up.

As these women began talking about how more and more women need to have their smear tests to detect cancers early enough, One of them said she'd recently had her smear test done live on a daytime television show to show how easy it was and to encourage more women to just go and do it.  I can't tell you anything more about the talk because at that point, I went lightheaded.

Heat rose in my body. Nausea kicked in? Crap. I knew this feeling all too well, because this is what happened whenever I had to have a pelvic exam.  I knew I was either about to throw up or pass out right there in the audience.  I tried so hard to breathe through it, to self talk my way out of it, but it was all encompassing.

I suddenly had to clamber over Hannah's legs to make my way to the aisle, and on wobbly legs, I just looked straight ahead at the rear exit, and I headed that direction. It's all a blur to me now, but I remember bursting into the ladies room, and women were in there washing their hands and chatting, and I pushed my way into a cubicle, locked the door, and sat down on the closed toilet seat.

I put my head between my legs, I was breathing in and out. My heart was beating out of my chest, my head was pounding. And then I got scared because I knew if I passed out in there with the door locked, nobody would get to me. It was one of those full doors with no gaps underneath, no gaps between the stalls or anything.

I'm not sure how long I stayed in that head between my legs position, but at some point I bravely ventured out into the sink area and I washed, splashed my face with cold water and I had mascara running everywhere so I had to clean my face up with paper towels. And after a while, I finally decided I needed to go back.

I couldn't face going back to the main room, but there was an adjacent room where I got a glass of water and I texted Hannah to tell her where in the heck I was.  A woman came up to me and asked if I was okay and invited me to sit down.  Her compassion opened up a memory for me.  I was about 13 years old.

My mother worked the night shift in a factory and we were like two ships in the night, seeing each other only on weekends.  When I got my period, she showed me where a box of pads was kept under the bathroom sink and that was it.  So, at some point later she said to me, Kelly, you're getting through so many pads, you know, you don't have to change it every time there's a speck, you can wait a while.

I said, I don't change it more than once a day.  That's when it came out that I was having my period every single day of the month. Not heavy, but daily. She said, that's not normal. You're going to have to see a doctor.  She made an appointment and I took the morning off school. To me, a doctor appointment had only ever been looking down my throat or in my ears.

So I was shocked when this doctor had me undressed from the waist down. I had to lie down on a reclined medical bed, put my feet into two metal contraptions, which I now know as stirrups, but I'm sure you know what happens during a pelvic floor exam, but I sure as hell didn't, even as it was happening.

It's actually shocking to think of it now.  My mom was out there in the waiting room. I'm a virgin who's never even used a tampon. I know nothing about this part of my body. And I'm having my cherry popped by a cold silver speculum.  Clearly it traumatized me because here I was now, in my early 50s, in a room where someone is even talking about having a pelvic exam and I'm nearly passing out.

Hannah suddenly arrived. There you are, Kelly! Where have you been? Meet Hippo! She had her new African friend in tow. I was in a state, Hebo sat down to talk to me, I burst into worse tears, I mean seriously, I'm being comforted by the woman who's been through female genital mutilation at around the same age as I was having my first pelvic exam.

How can you even compare these two experiences? What a freaking baby I am. What's my problem?  Hebo was very kind and reassuring. She went and got the chief gynecologist who'd apparently spoken to while I was head between my legs. It was quite a scene. I was super embarrassed.  Now, here's where the story takes its woo woo turn.

Later that same month, in March 2019, my friend Denise flew to the UK from Madrid To attend a three day retreat with me. It was run by Rebecca Dennis, the conscious breathwork coach I've talked about in episode 19. Remember where I left my body and became pure light and energy? And yes, this is the same retreat that also came up in episode 17 when Denise got out her tarot cards and laid them on her bed.

Back then, I said I'd go into what actually happened during this retreat. So here we go.  In addition to eating yummy food, doing yoga, and meeting amazing fellow retreaters in the English countryside, the main feature of this retreat was three separate group transformational breathwork sessions.  During these sessions, all of us lay on our mats.

Rebecca puts on incredible music and she guides us into the breathwork.  Transformational breath is a tool that enables us to access unexpressed emotions and heal them.  Traumas, painful experiences and stressful situations trigger strong emotions, and in order to suppress their impact, we stop breathing correctly.

Eventually, this creates a restricted breathing pattern. For example, we may breathe either using the chest or the abdomen instead of using the diaphragm and the whole respiratory system.  The breathing pattern used in transformational breath practice creates a higher frequency field and it changes the lower frequency patterns stored at the cellular level, such as negative thinking, trauma, or pain.

Well, I did not conscientiously head into that retreat with any intention of wanting to heal that old situation from age 13, but somehow that's where my breath led me in a very unexpected way.  In day one session, I felt blissed out. I had these visions of Denise, who was on the opposite side of the room to me, being a Native American Indian, as well as my friend Leonore.

They were like my spirit guides. I knew it was them, but Leonore was like a male chief and I can still see that image of her with the feathered headdress and this beautiful feeling like I'm safe with my soul sisters. It felt clear to me that we are here to expand and grow as some kind of a soul contract.

And thinking about this right now, well Denise is the one who gifted me the tarot cards I now use, and Leonore was the one who repeatedly asked me for readings earlier this year, and now here I am giving several online tarot sessions a week to women all over the world, and I would not have imagined that back then when I was experiencing them as my Indian soul sisters.

I went into day two of the retreat eager and excited for more, but what happened that day was very unexpected.  Once I fully let go, which took some time, my breath took me to an Indian tipi, where I was lying on my back. Going through an incredibly horrific childbirth,  I was trying to scream, but the women who surrounded me put a tree branch between my teeth for me to bite on.

They also had my leg stretched out over a bigger tree branch, holding it on each end behind my knees so my legs were forced open. It was agony. And then, a flash of my baby dying.  The grief that swept over me was one I have never experienced in this lifetime. I howled in agony.  In real life, on my mat, I was semi aware of when Rebecca's assistant, she was holding me, comforting me.

My mouth felt contorted open like that famous painting of the scream.  And then, that grief was replaced by a feeling of being deeply loved and supported.  A sense of pure love enveloped me in a way I can't properly describe.  I slowly came back to reality, absolutely exhausted. I was too wiped out to even speak to anyone at dinner that evening, and many of my fellow retreatees seemed to be the same.

The next day a few of us gathered just outside of the room where our final session three would be taking place. Some were almost afraid to go in, afraid to go back to where they'd gone before. We all reassured each other and headed in.  The third day was magical for all.  I experienced so much pure joy and ecstasy and it really felt like a major healing had taken place.

This happened for the others too.  I now feel like I know where my deep fear of childbirth stems from and why I totally freaked out in that sex education class at school and was traumatized by having my feet put in stirrups for my first birth. I shared that story back in episode five about hypnobirthing.

Like a virus in our encoding system, unprocessed traumatic memories can become stuck within us. Studies on cellular memory shows that it's not just our brain, but our body's cells that could hold an imprint of past traumatic events. So, this is why I threw up in the school drinking fountain after seeing that woman giving birth in sex education class?

Was I a Native American Indian in a previous life who lost a baby after a traumatic child birth? Am I fear of my legs being apart in stirrups?  Was that from the tree branch that held my legs open then? And was that experience repeating itself in this lifetime when I was 13 with the stirrups and the fear that I felt then?

I'll admit, I've always been curious about past lives, ever since reading Shirley MacLaine's book, Dancing in the Light.  And then I read a very convincing book later called Many Lives, Many Masters by Brian Weiss, which I kind of forced my super skeptical husband to read parts of. He won't admit it now, but he was pretty gripped.

It's very convincing. It's called Many Lives, Many Masters, and the author is a psychologist and hypnotist. And in 1980, one of his patients began discussing past life experiences while under hypnosis. Dr. Weiss did not believe in reincarnation at that time. But. After confirming elements of her stories through public records, he came to be convinced of the survival of an element of the human personality after death.

Dr. Weiss claims he's regressed more than 4, 000 patients since 1980 and now advocates hypnotic regression as therapy, claiming that many phobias and ailments are rooted in past life experiences. An acknowledge, acknowledgement by the patient can have a curative effect.  Dr. Weiss also writes about messages received from masters or super evolved non physical souls.

He claims to have communicated with them through his patients.  So was experiencing this traumatic childbirth during breathwork what was needed to finally heal the trauma of the birth of my son in this lifetime and maybe even get me over my deep fear of the gynecologist? Well, I wasn't having any more babies at age 53, so I wouldn't have the opportunity to test that one out.

I was overdue to have my IUD coil removed for the last time since I was now menopausal.  But for some reason, I never made it a priority to make that doctor's appointment in 2019.  And then, In 2020, a pandemic swept in and it wasn't until the very end of 2020 that I realized I needed to bite the bullet and have this coil removed before we moved to Madrid.

But fear and anxiety stopped me from picking up the phone and even making the appointment.  Stay tuned to the next episode of the Project Me podcast to find out what happened next.

Dear listener, relax your forehead.  Take a nice, long, deep breath in,  and let it out with a sigh.  Do you have any irrational fears?  Do you know where they may have stemmed from?

What about unexplained phobias?  Do you believe these could have originated in a previous life?  Have you thought much about past lives or read anything about it?  Do you believe that past traumas may live in ourselves and our psyche and will always affect us in some way until they're healed?

Do you think if they're not healed in this lifetime, they carry a karma, which carries into the next one?

Do you think talk therapy is as effective in healing as other modalities that bypass the conscious mind?

Are you open to exploring anything in your life that needs healing?

Thank you for listening to the project me podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. I'm very grateful too, for your lovely reviews. And you can drop me a message by Instagram Kelly project me.  I got such a lovely email from mags in Sydney, Australia. She wrote, I've only discovered Project Me recently from a good friend who told me about your podcast, and I'm hooked.

I've been pacing myself listening to one episode a week while I go on a long walk in nature, and the combination is definitely lifting my vibes.  You are a wonderful storyteller. Your warmth, sincerity, and positivity are really uplifting, but also melt away the headphones as if I were right there with you listening live.

I know you receive a lot of good feedback via all your social media channels, all well deserved, but I wanted to share mine. I'm not on social media, so email is my only connection point.  I'm on the bus now, and I'm going to fit a cheeky second Project Mew podcast for the weekend before I get to work, so I better wrap this up.

Thanks again, and wishing you all the best life has to offer. Mags.  Thank you so much, Mags. I don't know when you'll reach this episode, since you're going chronological order, but it'll be such a fun surprise when you get here.  My email address is hello at my project me calm and if you're not on the project newsletter list That means you don't have the project me life wheel tool This is my free gift to all subscribers at my project me calm  Subscribers also get the first heads up when a new episode is ready and also when registration opens for my high vibe journey program I'm running my much loved four week program again in September an early bird registration opens this month  First dibs go to my Project WE members, but most members have now done the High Vibe journey, so I think there will be some spaces left.

Go to myprojectme. com to the Courses and Workshops tab for more info. Until next time, open your mind, open your heart, and stay curious. We all need some  space in our lives for the magical and unknown.