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The gravity of Jasmine Marie’s work — and the name of her company itself — is so powerfully encompassed into three words: black girls breathing. Since 2018, she has dedicated her life to activism by helping Black women to heal their nervous systems as a breathwork practitioner, CEO, and speaker. Despite having a vocation that aims to release the weight of the world from marginalized shoulders, Jasmine Marie still finds the conception of her first book to be quite humorous.
“I’m laughing because I didn’t see myself writing a book,” she admits. “Transparently, I had been approached by publishers in the past and I always said no. I was really focused on the work. I felt like writing a book — I always envisioned it later on in my career — would maybe be a distraction to me doing the work right now.”
Thankfully, one publisher was able to cut through Jasmine Marie’s incredulousness: Balance, an imprint helmed by a fellow Black woman. Through the insistence by vice president Nana K. Twumasi that a book could be a continuation of her mission, black girls breathing’s lead visionary now holds the title of author. Her first written work, Black Girls Breathing: Heal from Trauma, Combat Chronic Stress, and Find Your Freedom, serves as a guide for Black women to discover the power of breathwork through insights along her journey from stressed-out hustler to wellness luminary.
In the midst of heightened political combat fueled by hatred and violence against the very community Jasmine Marie serves, the book-that-almost-didn’t-happen couldn’t be more essential. Across the country, Black women are continuing to cope with distress by prioritizing their health, and her latest offering is in deep alignment with their needs. So she’s vowed to set it free.
“I did my part that I felt compelled to do,” she says, “and I hope it finds the people who need the resource,” she says way more modestly than you might expect.
Black Girls Breathing: Heal from Trauma, Combat Chronic Stress, and Find Your Freedom by Jasmine Marie
The systems that we live under gain so much from us staying disconnected from our bodies, especially right now. Talk to me about how breathwork reconnects the mind and the body and why the reestablishing of that connection is so powerful.
Breathwork is a tool that activates our parasympathetic nervous system; it’s the part of our nervous system that governs the ‘rest and digest’ functionalities in our bodies. There’s different types of nervous systems in our body, but the part of our nervous system that governs ‘fight or flight,’ producing a lot of adrenaline, stress hormones, and things of that nature, is activated for most of us people of color—for Black people. Because of our trauma, because of the generational trauma, individual trauma, societal trauma, the daily stressors that we have on our shoulders, that’s our rest state. Our rest state is in ‘fight or flight.’
So when it comes to our bodies responding to additional stress when it’s already in that state, no wonder we’re experiencing depression and irritability; it’s that lack of having capacity. Our bodies simply don’t have capacity. So the breath is meant to reset our nervous systems, to help it allow it to begin to have capacity for those daily stressors and give our body the tool to naturally jump in when there’s anxiety and stress by activating that parasympathetic nervous system.
But it’s just like a muscle. If you’re chronically stressed, that part of our bodies really hasn’t been activated, it’s been suppressed. So using the breath to activate and turn on that part of our nervous system is allowing us to show up in those moments of extreme stress or daily stress as balanced as can be. Having tools inherently and working our body up to where it has what it needs to combat those moments is the work. And to your point, when we’re scattered we don’t feel grounded, we can’t organize, can’t think, we’re making irrational decisions. And so simply making the space to feel grounded in our bodies, have level-headed thinking and making sure our body is functioning properly, is activism.
The Black Girls Breathing book has three subtitles: Heal From Trauma, Combat Chronic Stress, Find Your Freedom. Is that sort of the path that you took? How do those three steps outline your personal journey?
That’s such a great question. I would say yes. I was chronically stressed working in New York City and kept having physical sensations of that stress. I found breathwork as a tool and used it personally. It was many years, six years of usage before I went to go get training for it. And then black girls breathing was birthed out of training for hosting group sessions. I feel like life is cyclical, so I’m always relearning lessons at different stages of my life. But that part of my life was having the blindfold ripped off as far as how I’ve been trained to operate. Graduating from a business school and going out into the working world, it was insinuated that stress is a part of success. So unlearning that in my body and using the tool of breathwork, I found myself uncovering the layers of trauma that led to the decisions I was making.
Taking that step really unveiled all these repressed emotions. Traumas that my brain suppressed in order to protect me resurfaced, and I had to make peace with that and work through that to find my sense of freedom. There’s a whole chapter on how we can see failure as a tool to journey forward in a way that’s aligned and redefines what we feel is success. A lot of things we find ourselves chasing, we don’t even want. There’s things we see other people have and we convince ourselves that if we have that thing, it’ll do something for our worth. Finding that freedom, really sinking down into our own individual truths and allowing that to be our guide, is a constant unlearning.
I do say often in the book and I have said throughout the work of black girls breathing: I know we’re not free; Black people are not free out in the world. My work has never been to exclude that reality, but to incorporate in the ways that we could feel inner freedom, which is the tool that our ancestors used to get by, to obtain, or seek to thrive. And in the 90 minutes that someone is in a breathwork session with us or on our platform, if they feel that inner freedom, then I’ve done my job.
You begin the book with discussing the intergenerational impact of chronic stress, really making it clear that it didn’t start with us and for us to remain conscious of that. Talk to me about the importance of keeping your lineage in mind when you’re trying to tackle your own nervous system.
There are fears we’ve inherited that have nothing to do with our current reality. With epigenetics, trauma gets passed down through DNA; but on the other side of that coin, trauma can be reprogrammed. We don’t have to stay in that state anymore. We can use breathwork and other tools to work with our subconscious mind to reframe our DNA.
Our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were fearful for their lives when they took a chance or did something that seemed like a risk. So you may be upon a new chapter in life and you’re afraid of that uncertainty and change. You’re navigating a bit more fear than maybe a non-Black person or someone whose lineage hasn’t gone through the significant trauma of fears that have been realized in your bloodline, as far as taking risks and having it equal death and seeing that around them. So understanding that component is something we have to grapple with.
It can feel very taxing to be the person who comes to all the work when everyone else just hasn’t had the capacity or tools to do it. It’s about giving ourselves grace; we are the first ones learning self-care, learning trauma care, routine, learning to prioritize ourselves and implementing those tools existing in a world where it’s still dangerous. It can be dangerous to prioritize ourselves, that’s the reality of our lineage and aspects of our current reality as Black women. So having that self-compassion to know that it’s okay if you’re just learning this; as we get new knowledge, not punishing our former selves for not [having] that knowledge.
And having that self-compassion provides wisdom, too. You’re dealing with wounds your parents had to, and you look at the tools that they had, and you’re like, ‘I understand. I can put some compassion towards what they were navigating.’
I want to double down on that, because in the book you also dismantle the idea that self-care is some sort of luxury. I think a powerful component of breathwork is that our breath comes with us everywhere. We don’t have to buy it. We don’t have to sign up for a subscription service to breathe. Talk to me a little bit about breathwork being an accessible tool to a community that is often robbed of access.
I always say if you’ve been breathing, you’ve technically been doing breathwork. Your body breathes, it knows how to breathe. We just focus our attention on making our breath more intentional. And it’s something that we all have access to if we are alive, it’s why it’s my favorite tool. We’re teaching people how to have better awareness of what their breath is doing in their body during different situations. We tend to stress when the part of our nervous system that’s in ‘fight or flight’ gets activated. When something occurs out in the world, noticing that our breathing gets shallow or we stop breathing, And then if we have that awareness, we can help our body. We can slow down our heart rate, we can stop the blood pressure from amping up, just from our breath. It’s a powerful tool that we all have access to. I loved it so much because differently-abled people within our community can virtually dial in with us and be breathing while feeling a sense of community. That’s important.
You round out the book by delving into the realm of possibility, with encouragement to dive deeper into taking up more space and dreaming. How does reconnecting with your body help you to dream?
Beautiful question, wow. I think the first step in what breathwork does in helping is to dream, is to create capacity for that. If our daily reality is so encompassed with traumas that aren’t addressed, we could have an opportunity that we’re not even viewing as an opportunity. Trauma just gets in the way of our progression, especially if we’re not aware of it. So the breath is providing capacity in the body and in the brain to allow for newness to come in, to not operate in past patterns. The breath allows us to heal from that first, and once that stuff has been set to the side — because we don’t forget our trauma, we can just hold them in a different way than we have in the past and not allow them to overcome us. Then we open up space, literal space, to dream.
It is such a contentious time in our country. I wondered if you could share a quick tip or practice for any Black woman who is just scrolling and comes across a headline, or who was having a normal day and then heard about a new policy? Is there a simple offering you can give?
First things first, I’d tell you to protect your peace and limit your scroll time; be informed but not overconsumed. And I’ll leave you with the oceanic breath practice; in each chapter of the book, there are different breathwork practices. The oceanic is one of my favorites.
So your mouth is going to be wide open, and you’re going to be inhaling into the mouth and exhaling out of the mouth. And the point at which you stop breathing in is when the lungs feel full, and then you go to deplete the lungs on the exhale, and upon that depletion go right back into an inhale. And it sounds like the waves of the ocean, that’s why it’s called an oceanic breath. Just a few rounds of that.
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