Natasha Stewart: Journeying Home One Breath at a Time
The journey of life starts and ends with breath. We take our first breath moments after emerging from the womb and take our last breath as we return to creation. In between that first and last breath are countless others, each as important as the last.
Like life our breaths change, adapt, depending on what life presents at each moment:
Often our breathing is regular and unnoticed.
Sometimes we let out sighs of satisfaction.
A sharp intake of breath when we are startled or frightened.
A gentle (or not so gentle) snore during rest.
Whatever form it takes in any given moment, breath is life. With each breath we welcome in new life and with each exhale we let out the old.
Each of our journeys are traveled on the winds of our breath and with each breath we return to home, to ourselves no matter where we are in the outside world. Wherever our journey takes us, our way home, our way to peace and healing is but a breath away.
Natasha Stewart, a practitioner of breathwork in Portland Oregon, has led a life of journey, discovery and service and continues to do so. Natasha, in her practice, helps her clients journey into themselves, into past traumas, into self discovery as she herself continues to learn and grow on her own journey and self-sustaining practices.
Originally from Tillamook, Oregon, Natasha started offering breathwork sessions in February of 2020, after completing her training with Clarity Breathwork in Costa Rica just a few weeks prior. Her introduction to the practice came at a Yoga retreat she attended in Mexico where and when she discovered first-hand the power of the breath and the potential it held for inner-healing.
Before this encounter with breathwork, Natasha attended Oregon State University where she studied Public Health with an eye on a career in nursing. Her pursuit of a degree in Public Health, her future practice of breathwork and her life itself were put in jeopardy during a wake-boarding accident when she was 21 while on vacation with her family. A small piece of her skull, which had been fractured in six places, hemorrhaged her brain around the temple area. Experiencing memory loss, Natasha’s career in service was put on temporary hold as she recovered from this traumatic injury.
After making a full recovery and completing her degree Natasha, feeling a new sense of spaciousness and appreciation for experiencing the moment, began exploring life in ways that allowed her to practice this in her work whether it was in the public health realm or not. With each career, Natasha consciously made career choices where she was required to be fully immersed in the present moment.
As a nursing intern in South Africa, Natasha learned a different side of humanity both in the lingering ripples of apartheid and in seeing how medical care was approached in a different country. From providing general care to patients, shadowing at maternal health clinics and scrubbing in on a variety of surgeries, including an amputation, Natasha saw and felt humanity in a new and visceral way; in a way that asked for presence and focused on the simplicity of the task at hand.
With a big inhale and a sighing exhale, Natasha, after the internship was over and her schooling complete, decided to travel down a different path and landed a job as a flight attendant.
Getting to travel as part of her new path was something that Natasha appreciated and enjoyed, as an avenue of external and inner exploration. Besides getting to experience new cities and countries, Natasha also satiated her desire to study people, to learn and dive deeply with others. “Jump seat therapy” was a term she used, where she first began to practice holding space for others, in brief meetings and interaction with flight crews, she provided a space to talk about parts of their lives that troubled them and got to know them at a deeper level, before parting ways. The sense of safety that she shows those who experience her breathwork sessions was surely felt by her fellow flight crew as well.
When her time working in the air came to an end, Natasha found herself sailing the seas as a vegan chef on a 60-foot sailboat with but three other people; the owners of the boat and her partner at the time. As they sailed across the Atlantic, and the Pacific and into various ports along the way, Natasha was again afforded the opportunity to hone in on presence, on mindfulness and on focusing on a single task at a time. As her voyage on the boat came to an end, she departed the Spanish island of Mallorca to return to Oregon, Portland this time, to finally set her roots down.
Breathwork, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is conscious, controlled breathing done especially for relaxation, meditation or therapeutic purposes.
The act of breathing in and out in a conscious manner is meant to oxygenate your body and to activate your nervous system in order to become more in touch with your body, with your wholeness if you will. This time of active breathing is also an active journey. It’s a journey within and the destination is always where you are meant to end up but not always where you are expected to go.
After Natasha completed her month-long breathwork training in the jungles of Costa Rica, a training that included participating in an underwater breathwork session with a snorkel, and finding a space to begin offering her breathwork sessions in, her journey to offering breathwork to the community hit a pocket of turbulence.
As COVID hit in full force, breathing in a room with another person (let alone a group of people) was deemed as one of the most dangerous activities you could partake in. Just as quickly as she opened her studio to give sessions, she was forced to close it down.. and wait.
As with many of us during this time, technology proved to offer real community and virtual contact with friends, loved ones and for work. Not being able to offer in-person sessions, Natasha turned to this tool of virtual space and began offering her work to her friends to see how it would translate.
Thankfully for all of use who have, and those who hopefully will someday, experienced Natasha’s practice first-hand the virtual avenue seemed to be effective and surprisingly just as powerful as sessions in person, giving Natasha a place to continue to hone her practice and allowed her to keep the dream, of what she knew to be her calling in life, alive.
With the quarantine lifted and as folks gained more comfortability with breathing amongst each other, Natasha was able to not only begin offering in-person sessions for 1 on 1 or for couples, but, eventually, in group settings as well, something she wasn’t sure she would ever do but, divinely, found her voice capable of offering.
From always offering the perfect cup of tea, to gentle and caring conversation, to the active breathing and rest, Natasha continues to show the compassion, safety and desire to help others that makes these sessions appreciated and felt all the more deeply. Her mindfulness of the moment, of the feelings that one is having in her presence during these sessions helps reveal what the body is trying to tell you and what is meant to be revealed at that moment. Her awareness, her intuitiveness, of what is being felt and what part of your inner self may need to be soothed, or held or, perhaps just heard allows these emotions to come out freely and without embarrassment or fear. She is present and interested and her love for what she does shines through boldly and brilliantly in each session.
Natasha Stewart, breathwork practitioner, vegan chef, flight attendant and nursing-aspirant, has lived a life that was in near-constant movement while being present and grateful for where she was and the life that she still has. As she came to find her true calling and settled in Oregon again she continues to take others on journeys. Journeys into their selves. Journeys into their pasts. Journeys back to home. Natasha does this in a loving and comforting way that continues to show her passion to help others in the way that she can in that moment.
(To learn more about Natasha Stewart’s work and offerings please visit her website at: https://www.natasha-stewart.com/)