Just Like Nana

Amy Kuretsky

• Amie Penny Sayler • Episode 4

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In this episode of Just Like Nana, host Amie (Elizabeth) Penny Sayler is joined by acupuncturist, health coach, and breathwork facilitator Amy Kuretsky to dive into the world of trauma-informed healing. 

Together, they explore how active breathwork serves as “vibrational medicine” to complete interrupted trauma cycles, helping you move from a state of fight, flight, or freeze, back into a regulated, peaceful state. 



About Amy

Amy Kuretsky is a licensed acupuncturist, board-certified health coach, and a seasoned breathwork facilitator with the Global Professional Breathwork Alliance. As the co-owner of Constellation Acupuncture and Healing Arts, Amy bridges the gap between ancient healing traditions and modern trauma-informed care. She specializes in helping clients navigate the complexities of nervous system regulation and mental health, with a clinical focus on digestive disorders, chronic headaches, migraines, anxiety, and depression. By integrating her deep knowledge of East Asian medicine with somatic breathwork practices, Amy empowers individuals to move beyond "pushing through" and into a state of sustainable, embodied healing.


In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • When stress is left trapped in the body, breathwork can act as a way to "shake out" this pent-up energy, allowing the nervous system to complete its natural cycle and release stress hormones.
  • When you heal your nervous system, the benefits ripple both backward to your ancestors and forward to future generations.
  • Expanding your "window of tolerance" through a regulated nervous system allows you to navigate life’s challenges with more resiliency and less reactivity.



Resources Mentioned


Connect with Amy


Connect with the Show

Do you have a story about your family that you would like to share? We want to hear from you!

  • Website: justlikenana.com
  • Share Your Story: If you have a family story or ancestral trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.



Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.

A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.

Theme music by Carter Penny.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Welcome to Just like Nana, so excited to have you here and thrilled to have Amy keretsky with me today as an honored guest. Amy is a licensed acupuncturist Dao of trauma practitioner and breath work facilitator. She specializes in trauma informed East Asian medicine. She integrates acupuncture, cupping, breath work, sound healing and herbal medicine to support people navigating trauma, gut brain imbalances, hormonal changes, chronic stress and nervous system dysregulation. She is a co founder and co owner of constellation acupuncture and healing arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She brings over a decade of experience working at the intersection of personal healing and creative entrepreneurship. Her work centers breath, embodiment and shared humanity as paths to personal and collective transformation. I will also say I have worked with Amy. She is amazing. She offers community breath work sessions, which are incredibly powerful experiences. She offers breath work with writing afterwards, which is, I've utilized that to write some of the stories about my grandma's and Amy is just an all around badass and kind person, thrilled to have you here today.

Amy Kuretsky:

Amy, wow. What a what a glowing recommendation. It's Leo season right now, so I'm just like taking it all in. I'm just like welcoming it in. So thank you.

Amie Penny Sayler:

You are welcome, and I am all Leo. I am too.

Amy Kuretsky:

Did you not know I don't know that about you. I'm a triple Leo triple. I've got Sun, Moon and Venus. Okay, I don't

Amie Penny Sayler:

know what my planets are. I know that I'm sun and rising, and then I never remember my moon, because I don't care about it, because it's not Leo. But I'm gonna check out my planets. Y'all, we are

Amy Kuretsky:

filling this room. We were meant to be here at this time together.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yes, yes. Love this so much. So Amy, so excited to have you here. Thank you. I would like to start just by if you're willing to share kind of a favorite or a powerful story or memory that you have about your own grandma.

Amy Kuretsky:

Yeah, you know it's interesting, because unfortunately, I didn't know one of my grandma's at all. She passed away when I was like, six months old or something. And then my other grandma passed away when I was pretty young as well. So one of my actually, like most tender or connective stories or, I guess, memories. And if you want to use that term loosely, that I have of her actually came through breath work. So it was kind of perfect that you asked this in the context of this conversation, it was several years ago, like pre pandemic, and I was doing a one on one breathwork session as myself being the breather, the person holding space for me was a beloved friend and colleague, Helen, who also now works at the clinic that I own, and she offers breath work there as well, and she was leading me in breath work that day. And it just happened to be so I don't remember if it was a new moon in cancer or a full moon in cancer, but it was some lunation in the sign of cancer, which, for those of you who are familiar with astrology, is very maternal or grandmotherly. It's a very archetypal energy for mothers and grandmothers. And my grandmother Rose, who was my father's mother, who I never remember meeting, because she passed away when, when I was still a baby, very strongly came through in that session, and I just felt a very like, loving, supportive, protective, like, presence from her. After that, I remember I worked with, like, Rose medicine, whether it was through, like, you know, rose petals in tea and like, offering that up or like, it was just a very sweet way of, kind of honoring her life and her memory that I didn't actually, like, know all that much about and it made me feel connected to her, beyond space and time in this way that, like, I don't necessarily have memories of her holding me or anything like that, but it felt like a very it felt like she was holding me energetically in that moment. So it was really sweet.

Amie Penny Sayler:

That is beautiful. I have tears in my eyes, such a powerful moment, and my paternal grandmother is also my Grandma Rose. I love that Leos and roses theme. You know, you really hit on part of the purpose of my work in talking about my grandma's, which is, I didn't have access to my family for. Various reasons, and so sort of creating that relationship now, as you pointed out, beyond space and time, and connecting with those roots and just you know, not only them as people, but just as they're embodied in me as part of just my DNA and my makeup.

Amy Kuretsky:

Well, I love that we're like sitting here in your little office space, and I can tell here that there's a beautiful altar here to your Nana's. I can see they're beautiful pictures, and it reminds me of like, a similar altar that I've worked with at my own home, where I have photos of my two grandmothers in their youth or like, in ways that, like, I don't have memories of them whatsoever, but it would like it helped me kind of bring their energy and their presence and their wholeness of their like, you know, whole lives, because we have these relationships to these people that are very from our perspective. And so we like, see our grandmothers in these very specific lights, and it's like they were so much more than that. You know, they were women in a time where it was extraordinarily hard to be women. Like, it's hard to be a woman now, but like, imagine what it was like to be a woman back then. And so it was just important to me to have photos of them on my altar, in their like, youth, and they're, like vitality in this way that, like, I never got to see them in real life.

Amie Penny Sayler:

That's amazing. And yeah, that is part of the goal in the work too, is to just kind of see these women and give them a voice, in a way that they maybe they had. I don't know all of their stories, but it's most likely that they did not have that sort of power and voice, so to help them out with that now, yeah, is exciting. Let's talk about breath work. Yeah, because that's, that's your it's my jam. It is, it is solidly your bail, awake, yeah. So tell us about breath work. Tell us you know how it works, what it does for trauma in the body, just sort of very open ended. But I know you can run with this for probably hours, if

Amy Kuretsky:

I let you. Yeah. So like in really broad strokes, we like to think of, you know, the term breathwork as being this really umbrella term that you can use anytime you're bringing attention and intention to your breath. And I think that's something that maybe my friend Jenny told me a long time ago, and it's really stuck with me, or maybe I've heard it in various places, but it feels so true to me that breath work in and of itself. It's just a word that encompasses how we can use our breath to make change in our bodies, in our lives, in our collectives, and it can look like many different things. I promise you, each and every one of you listening has done some form of breath work in the past, whether it's like going to a yoga class and doing breath work as part of the asana, or moving your body and connecting your breath to your body. Or maybe you are a singer and you've done some like breath work to work with your diaphragm and work with projection, and I'm not a singer, so I wouldn't be able to use the correct terms for that. Or maybe you've given birth, and you are a parent yourself, and you did Lamaze breathing as part of the birthing process. Or maybe you're someone who deals with anxiety, and so you've used your breath in specific ways to calm your nervous system during times of acute stress, or your maybe your therapist has led you in some breathing exercises to calm your nervous system down. All of those things are breath work. You really can, you can really encompass any of those things through the lens of breath work. And so when we talk about breath work, it's a really like wide tent that we're we're talking about here. And so the work that I do has a more narrow path inside of that, but it still works amidst the whole network. So the style of breath work that I practice is a more active three part circular breath. You breathe in through the mouth into your belly. You breathe in through the mouth up into your chest, or like heart space, and then you exhale. And you do that over and over and over again. And it's really simple when you think about it in that way, but it has really profound effects on the physical, emotional and energetic body. And we use breath work for so many different reasons. We can use breath work just to shift our nervous system and like where our nervous system is in terms of activation or deactivation, if you think about when you're feeling a little bit overwhelmed or a little stressed out, or you're in more of a fight or flight mode in your body, and there's a lot of energy in there, we can use breath work to kind of crest that wave, to get over the hump, and then let our nervous system start to calm down again. We can use breath work to move stuck energy. Energy, like if we've been feeling kind of depressed, or if we're having writer's block, or if we're having any sort of stuck energy in the body, we can use this breath to vigorously move through those energetic blockages. Because of that, I feel like it's really helpful from a creative point of view. That's why I often pair it with writing to both let that writing be a creative outlet for the energy that moves with the breath. But it can also, like, let us move big emotions through the body. You know, in Chinese medicine, we often say like, where energy flows, emotions go, or where energy goes, emotions flow and and so, and that's true with the breath. You know, the breath is a vigorous movement of chi or of energy, and so there's often big emotional movement that goes along with that, and that also kind of goes back to trauma as well. You know, we hold trauma in our bodies. That's something that has been shown time and time again through different research articles and books. You can think about the Body Keeps the Score is a fantastic book about how the body stores trauma in our tissues. I really love Peter Levine's book waking the tiger that talks through more of a somatic experiencing sort of lens. And in that book, he talks about how any animal creature, including us as humans. You know, I often use my dog Juniper as an example. In this, dogs are the best examples, totally, so many things, totally. And she, she's a little trauma baby dog. She was a rescue dog, and she has a BB stuck in her shoulder like, under her shoulder blade there's a little nodule. And we're like, what is this? And that was like, I think that's a BB palette, like she got shot when she was a puppy. And so obviously she has a lot of trauma, and when we first got her, she was very reactive. She was dog reactive. She was reactive to everything. We did a lot of work with a dog trainer, and she is has a much more stable nervous system now, but anytime she has a activating or stressful situation with another dog, or just in general, you can see her like, kind of get a little activated, and then she kind of moves over to the side and shakes her body. Think of like how dogs shake it out. That is them releasing the pent up charge of energy that comes in our body with activation in the nervous system, and we're releasing that. And Peter Levine, in that book, like, talks about it way more eloquently in in much more depth. But I think of breath work as a way of like us, literally shaking it out of the body. Oftentimes, when people are doing breath work, they even start to, like, vibrate or shiver or actually shake a little bit. And it's not uncommon to hear stories from like EMTs or other emergency professionals that they'll be in the field, supporting people in an acute, traumatic experience, and the people they are supporting will just start shaking uncontrollably. And that is the body naturally, like the own inner physician that we all have inside of us that is incredibly wise doing what it needs to do to re regulate the nervous system in that moment.

Amie Penny Sayler:

I like to think of her as a medicine woman, but yes, yes, I have read waking the tiger, and it was fascinating. And this is my agree. You know, Peter says it best, so read the book. But my sort of takeaway was, it's fascinating how animals understand the complete cycle of trauma, and

Amy Kuretsky:

it's not even that they understand it. It's just innate

Amie Penny Sayler:

Exactly yeah, understand Yeah. Because what happens with humans is we try to understand it. We use our brains, and we interject our brains, and what we do is we cut off the completion of the trauma cycle, and then we're stuck, yes, 100%

Amy Kuretsky:

and this Dao of trauma, work that I've been really, really involved in for the last year and a half and have been that has shifted my work in so many different ways. It's really rooted in that work and the mentor that I've worked with who wrote the book Dao of trauma, Elaine Duncan. She is trained in somatic experiencing through Peter and all of that. But the whole premise of that is where we interject that cycle, where that gets interrupted, like you were just saying, that creates an imprint in the body, and that creates what they call one of the five survivor types. And based on where your body kind of cut off where that ended. That kind of shifts the entire entirety of how your body needs to heal from trauma. So someone who got interrupted in the mobilized stage, like in the stage where we were going to fight the attacker or run away from the bear or something like that, we tend to go into this like freeze. We're immobilized. We weren't able to actually move through that process, versus someone who maybe got cut off during the integration or digestion phase, where we maybe make meaning out of the cycle that we moved through, might get really stuck in a like a victimization mindset, as opposed to seeing their experience as something that they can then a. Grow and learn from and expands their worldview. It really ends up contracting their worldview. So it's been really interesting to, like, really go deeper into his work in that way. Yeah.

Amie Penny Sayler:

And then how does breath work intersect with that? Is breath work help you move completely through the cycle, yeah.

Amy Kuretsky:

And so I do think that breath work does so many different things. It is so moving and so invigorating that I think it's extraordinarily helpful for the people who do get stuck in that mobilization stage, which a lot of people really do, that is a really common experience. And so because it can be so moving, it really helps, like, remobilize us. We're like, moving, and also we can think of breath work as, like, completing the stress response in general. So maybe, you know, taking away the idea of like, big T or little T trauma and just more going into the micro of, like, our day to day nervous system activation that happens all the time, because we live in a world that is like over functioning and like always going and going, going, going, that we can be in a kind of hyper activated state all the time. There's a really great book by the nagoski sisters called burnout, where they talk about the science of this a little more. And I really recommend that one as well for people who are interested in it. But when we start to feel a little activated energy or emotion or stress, will kind of like rise up in the body, and then what a lot of us end up doing is pushing that down. We don't want to feel it. So maybe we open up our phones and we start scrolling Instagram. Maybe we light up a cigarette. Maybe we like eat some candy, or our preferred, you know, drug of choice, of whatever that is, that's the numb out. Yeah, totally. And that allows us to numb out. And so what that does is, like that activation starts to rise up, but we don't ever let it complete. We just, like, kind of numb it back down. And so then there's this cycle of it coming up and getting pushed down, coming up and getting pushed down. And what breath work does is it allows a little activation to come up, because, like I said, the breath is pretty active. It can be a little activating for the system, but we get to be in a supportive container by whoever is holding that space for us. Or we get to support ourselves during that because so often we're taught that we can't trust our own bodies, or we can't support ourselves in some ways, and we have to give away our power to someone else, and so we get to have this opportunity to tend and doula to ourselves and our emotions and our nervous system during this let that activation continue to rise up, meet it with like compassion and tenderness and honesty, and then let that crest, let That wave crest, and then let it come down naturally on its own. And what that does is actually releases those stress hormones. Instead of getting them trapped inside your body, where we're like, bringing them up and numbing them down, we're actually letting them crest. I think there's research out there that shows that we actually release stress hormones in our tears. That's why it feels so good to cry like when we're done crying, we usually feel so much better because we actually like release those stress hormones physically from our body. That's amazing.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Let's shift a little bit so we have a bit of a foundation about breath work. I mean, I recognize you've been working on it for decades, and we just talked about it for 10 minutes, but we'll call it a bit of foundation. And let's talk about ancestral trauma. And I'm just curious on your take about is there a differentiation in the body between ancestral trauma and trauma that a person personally experiences during their lifetime, is it stored the same just any thoughts you have around that

Amy Kuretsky:

I don't know if I would necessarily be able to speak to like personal trauma versus ancestral trauma, because the way that I tend to think about it in my Head is more like trauma that we experience and cognitively analyze versus trauma that we experience pre verbally So yeah, that could be something that we experience in this lifetime, that we have then been analyzing or working with with a therapist, or it could be something that we experienced before we had verbal skills. So whether that's developmental trauma, whether that is some sort of abuse before we had verbal words, or think about all of the children in Gaza that are starving right now. Think of all the kids that are grow up in war zones that like as babies, their nervous systems are just experiencing a completely different level of environment than something that we would have experienced growing up in a stable home. And I think that that sort of trauma, the kind that happens before we have words, affects our bodies in kind of that same way that ancestral trauma does, because if we think about epigenetics, which. Is a type of science that studies how trauma is passed down through the genes, like over generations. Basically what happens is, when a fetus is in the uterus and it's a fetus that has ovaries, those ovaries have all the eggs that they're ever going to have, or at least, like, all the follicles that they're ever gonna have. So you technically were in your grandmother, right? Which is just like, mind blowing when we think about it, like it's crazy, yeah, that we were actually in our grandmothers, because, like, we as follicles, our DNA, like, or at least the RNA, like, what is going to become of us, was in our mothers when they were gestating in our grandmothers, yeah, and so technically, that vibration because trauma is a vibrational impact and breath, work is a vibrational medicine. Acupuncture is a vibrational medicine. I think that's why these things are so beautiful for healing trauma, because it is all vibration. And those vibrations lived in your grandmother, they lived in your mother, and they live now in you, but they also then, because they live in you, they live in your children and then your grandchildren. So it just goes all the way down. And so I do believe that when we are healing our own trauma in this time, and now in our timelines, we are doing healing that goes both backwards and forwards. And I think that there are traditions in other cultures. I think that it is a common indigenous tradition or belief, and don't quote me on this necessarily, but that there's a lot to do with these, like seven or six generations back and forth. There's a lot to do with multi generations. And when we think about it from this more scientific epigenetic level, like that makes a lot of scientific sense. One study that I always found, like, super, super interesting. They have done studies with like rats or mice, where they sadly, like, traumatize them, basically. And by doing so, like future generations of those same mice or rats are then fearful of the stimulus, even if they're not getting shocked through that same stimulus. But like, their bodies have a memory that, like, oh, this specific stimuli gives me pain or gives me suffering in some way, even though they haven't exactly experienced it themselves. They're like, parents or their grandparents experienced it. But then also, with those same studies, they found that, through some intervention, I don't remember what it was, I think it's like, they give the next generation like, like more space in their cage, or like interactive toys, or like more treats, or like something where it makes the rats or mice, like feel safer, or like have more play, and like more ventral vagal like connection time, that can actually reverse that fear of stimuli in one generation, which is incredible, so cool to think about that, like the trauma can last for many, many, many generations, but then the healing happens immediately, right?

Amie Penny Sayler:

And it's so powerful to think about not just healing yourself, but helping out those who came before, who you know, you owe your own life to so it's just such a great way to give something back to them, which

Amy Kuretsky:

is like, kind of goes back to that initial story that I shared about my grandmother, of like, how sweet that I had this interaction with her. Because, you know, to be perfectly frank, I didn't know her really at all, like I said, she passed away when I was an infant, and I didn't know my grandfather at all. He passed away several years before I was born, but from everything I've heard, she was like, the warmest, sweetest, like, most, just wonderful human being, and he was kind of a dick, like, he was kind of an abusive asshole, and I've heard awful things about him through variety of family members. And so it's like, I don't know what her life was like, but I imagine it was really hard at different times. And so to like, offer that sort of tenderness and like healing back to her when she was offering it to me in that moment, felt really nice.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Oh, I love that. And then the kind of healing forward that you did through the rose petals. And, yeah, kind of that rose theme is just sort of in her honor. That's beautiful for other people. Okay, you talked about the vibrational is that the word you used? Yes, let's talk about that. We've talked about trauma stored in the body. It can be stored in the tissues. I mean, what does that mean? Is it? Is it a hormone? Is it a chemical? Is it an emotion?

Amy Kuretsky:

Great question. Amy and I am not a biophysiologist, so I don't know if I can totally answer that question in the way that our brains would be. Can. Gotten with. But I also am, like, curious about that at times, you know,

Amie Penny Sayler:

let me just say that I completely appreciate it's from your perspective. Yes, what? Because, I mean, you've seen a lot of healing, yeah, and so sort of what you've seen. And it is fascinating, because we tend to think of things in matter and through our senses, right? Like I'm seeing you, but there can be scientifically through your soul, all of it, no doubt that there is more than this matter that exists, and there's the energy of it and the vibration.

Amy Kuretsky:

And I really do see it as like a vibration, and like even when I was speaking to how EMTs will witness a survivor of trauma like shake uncontrollably, like that is actually a vibration. Like shaking is your whole body, like vibrating, you know, and so I really do see it as this charge, so an energetic charge that needs to get discharged. And so a charge, I mean, all energy is kind of like vibration knife. If you look at, like, at the Fermilab or whatever, like those big physical flags, like, like, you know, things are atoms are like moving. Like, atoms aren't actually very stationary, isn't it crazy to think about, like, This cup that I'm holding is actually, like, moving, you know, like, That's so weird, exactly.

Amie Penny Sayler:

It's not like the pictures we see in textbooks, like they're

Amy Kuretsky:

moving, they're vibrating. And so I think everything, in some way, is a vibration. And maybe that is a cop out for me to be like, well, everything just comes back to a vibration. But if I'm working in a vibration based medicine. It's like an easy way to meet the trauma with a healing system that feels congruent to it, if that makes sense. Yes, one of my mentors, Elaine Duncan, who wrote that book, Dao trauma, she often defines trauma as, like, too much, too fast, without adequate support. Ah, I love that, right? Isn't that beautiful way of just describing it, and so it's not defining what trauma is in the body or anything like that. But like, you know when we can say, well, is something big T trauma or little T trauma, or like, play the trauma Olympics or something of like, oh, well, I had it worse than you, or whatever it's like, well, anything that was too much, too fast without adequate support for you, like, leaves an imprint in the body of trauma, and that imprint is like that vibration,

Amie Penny Sayler:

obviously, you know you had mentioned before that children are starving in Gaza that is absolutely horrific. Nothing takes away from that. But to your point, it's not a competition. So because that is happening and it is awful, there's also room and space for the truth that we all as humans have situations to work through healing to do with ourselves, and that's what we're trying to address here, is individual healing, ancestral healing through us and How we effectuate that. The point is what you experienced during your lifetime and how that kind of stays with you, or the cycle doesn't complete. And I firmly believe, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the greater sort of social consciousness, or, you know, however you define that, when you heal yourself and bring more of that, whether it's a peaceful vibration or whatever that is into your own life, it ripples out,

Amy Kuretsky:

yeah, and I think, a bit a lot in terms of our regulated nervous system. So when we show up with regulated nervous systems, that vibration expands out and helps other people feel more regulated. And once again, there's like, cool science about this. I think if you look up, like Heart Math Institute, like they have all sorts of really cool science about how even, like, your heartbeat will then start to match the heart rate, or the rate like the Yeah, how many beats per minute will, like, start to match the people around you? And if your sleeping partner is dysregulated, but you are regulated, their nervous system will start to match yours, and they will start to feel more regulated to you. So like when we are treating our patients, whether that's through acupuncture or breath work or doubt of trauma, or like EMDR, or like any of the amazing modalities out there that help people's nervous system feel more regulated. That is not only treating that patient, but then it's treating their partners, it's treating their children. It's treating their. Coworkers, it's treating like their patients, or, you know, people that they support in their lives. And so that's where we can kind of have this more expansive view of like healing one person expand it ripples out to heal many. So like helping one person's nervous system feel more regulated is going to help more people's nest systems feel more regulated, and it's going to expand and expand. And if we can get like, a critical mass of that, then that, like, can change the world. You know, think of, I don't know. I just imagine that, like most wars in the world are like, created by people who are, like, extraordinarily traumatized themselves, or have incredibly dysregulated nervous systems and like it's fucked up, I agree, yeah, it's really about helping. I try not to speak to it too often as like, healing trauma or releasing trauma, because like that can have a lot of weightiness to it and a lot of expectation. And for better or worse, I feel like some people are really tethered to their idea of the trauma they've experienced, like it has defined different things for them, yes, in their life, and it can define their experience and become part of the like how they define themselves or their personhood. And so I never want to say I don't know. It just feels like a lot to be using those terms sometimes. And so I've really started shifting my language to talk more about, like, helping our nervous systems regulate. Because when we have more regulated nervous systems, then our window of tolerance, like what we can navigate in life expands and like, when we've experienced a lot of trauma, our window of tolerance tends to be really small and like, little things that go wrong in our life might feel really, really big or have, like, really outsized effects on our physical body. But when we can have a more regulated nervous system, when we can expand our window of tolerance, we're able to, like, tolerate, literally, a lot more and be more tolerant as well, you know, if we want to, like use language in that way, yeah. And so that's what I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Amie Penny Sayler:

So I have been working. It's actually a weight loss program, but it's widely applicable, and Aliza Kingsford is her name, and the program is called the shift and it is all about your nervous system. I mean, I won't get too much into the weight loss aspect of it, but the idea is, if your nervous system is dysregulated, it is incredibly difficult to quote diet, or be in some sort of calorie deficit, or do the things that you know a body needs to do to

Amy Kuretsky:

release weight. It all comes down to sense of safety. If our bodies aren't feeling safe, we're not going to let go of potential fuel sources that live inside of our bodies Exactly, yeah, I totally get

Amie Penny Sayler:

it, yeah. And just what I've come to appreciate is just how unbelievably powerful and strong our nervous systems are. I mean literally, Their function is to protect us and save our lives. Yeah, this notion of, you know, pushing through or just keep going or while ignoring what is actually happening with our nervous systems. There's a bit of a disconnect there. And then, the other thing that I found fascinating about her work is she talks about how humans are designed to, I mean, we are social creatures, and we need each other's nervous systems. Yeah, we are designed to connect with another person's nervous system, and it is fascinating,

Amy Kuretsky:

yeah, the whole, like, ventral vagal, that is our first, quote, unquote, like, break to the sympathetic nervous system. Like, when we have a fight or flight moment, the ventral vagal, it's like, oh, well, this scary thing's happening. But oh, here, I'm not alone in it. Yeah, here's my you know, if you're a kid or whatever, and you hear this, like scary movie or something, or you think there's like a monster under the bed, but it's like, oh, here my mom or my grandma is coming to comfort me. And like, there is this connective aspect to this ventral bagel. Like I am not alone in this. I am being held and supported. That then calms us. But if we don't have that, if we don't have those connections. That's when that first break doesn't work, and we go into like, you know, wild mode, where our whole nervous system goes out of control, and it can then drop into the second break, which is the dorsal vagal, which is like a freeze response. And that's when we get into, like, a system wide collapse in some ways, you know, think of the animals out there that are prey and they pretend to be dead is like, that's a response as well to threat. It kind of reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about lately, because I feel like collectively, our collective energy, and I guess I'm speaking more to like the US. Than anything else, or like my my portion of my community that I like live in here, but I feel like, you know, I first came to breath work around like 2016 is when I first discovered it, and I started practicing it and leading others in it in 2017 and it feels to me like at that moment, we were in a collective sympathetic response. We were in a bit of, like a fight or flight with doing more of the fighting. Think about 2016 you know, like, yeah, yeah. Like the Women's March, like all those things. Like there was big collective fight energy and breath work really met that moment in a beautiful way, because we had our systems were mobilized to act. They wanted to do something. Breath work felt really big, and it like met this collective kind of sympathetic nervous system moment, and it felt really good. But then we get to 2020, and where we thought we were in a sympathetic woof, we really got into a sympathetic mode. We were like, really in fight or flight. All of our nervous systems were just out of control and panicked for good reason, like we all didn't know what was going on at the start of the pandemic, like it was normal and reasonable to be panicked, and breath work really met that moment too. I mean, my breath work classes were never as popular as they were at the start of the pandemic. I had already been doing this work online, like I I've been doing it in person for a long time, but I'd also been doing it online. And then it just so happened, because the world works in funny ways, is that I had booked my first big group breath work to be on March 17, 2020, Oh, wow. Just because my normal group that would normally happen on Wednesdays, I was going to be in California, and I was like, well, let's just do it online. I'm going to be out of town, but we can still do but we can still do it. And then, boom, of course, that's the start of the pandemic. So we went from this in person class that would normally have 3035, 40 people there, to an online one where we maxed out my zoom and we had like 100 people there. And it was bonkers. And for every week at the start of the pandemic, I had like, close to 100 people online doing breath work with me, because we all needed that, like that nervous system, to match our moment. We needed the connection because we were all stuck at home. So we needed this, like ventral vagal response, even if it was through the screen, but it really met that moment, and it felt good. We did it for a long time, but then around 2022, I noticed my groups getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And now I generally will get like 10 people in person at my groups, like 10 to 15 people, which is like, fine, there's magic in every different group that comes together for different reasons. But I was kind of sitting with that for a while at the start of this year and being like, Okay, what is it like? Are people just not in the breath work anymore? Is it the economy? And it's like too expensive for people to join like, what's going on? And I've really come to this belief that for as big as we get, I'm going to talk kind of in polyvagal theory now, but for like, as big as our activations happened between 2016 to 2020 to 2021, and into 2022 that is how low we are dropping into a freeze response. Now, like for every action, there's an equal, equal and opposite reaction. For however high you get in that Yang cycle of activation, you drop into an equal depth of a yin cycle, like freeze response. And I feel like for the last year, year and a half, we have been deep in that response. Collectively, we are all burned out from the last five years. We were burned out from the last 10 years. You know, our nervous systems are wet. They don't have the resiliency that they once had. They don't have the drive, because we have just been giving, giving, giving, and now we are just tapped out. And think about how difficult it has been to create a resistance movement right now in 2025 compared to what it was like in 2016 right? And I feel like because breath work is so it can have such intensity that, like, people don't always want that intensity right now, so I and I don't either like, I haven't even been breathing as much as I used to in that sort of way. I've been doing more craniosacral I've been doing more sound baths. I've been doing much more of these, like Yin, calming, restorative sort of activities, right? And it really got me even just to start shifting how I practice breath work and how I've been leading it. So you know now, when I do breath work, I don't breathe nearly as fast, I don't go nearly as hard, I don't push nearly as much, and I really invite people to find the power in the softness, the depth, in the subtleness, like all of those things, because it's still incredibly healing. It's still incredibly potent and helpful for regulating the nervous system. And it doesn't have to be a big explosion, cathartic release. It can be sweet and it can be tender and it can be sad and soft and all of these things and to meet the collective moment where it's at right now. Now, and so it's really helped me, I think, become a better breathwork facilitator from like, being able to hold the nuance and like the highs and the lows and really meet people wherever they're at whenever they arrive.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Yeah, you know. And to that point about whether it's cathartic or restorative, or, you know, some combination of both. I mean, that gets back to that nervous system work too of a breath work session leaves you feeling nurtured, cared for, just deeply held and supported.

Amy Kuretsky:

Yes, that's like one of the most universal themes that I hear after a session is like, you know, maybe somebody's session is really creative, and another person's session is really angry, with a lot of rage being released, and another person's session is like, deeply grief filled, but almost always like, the thing that weaves everyone's individual experiences together into the group. Experience is this overwhelming feeling of like being unconditionally loved, whether it's by spirit or universe or an ancestor or themselves or the room or anything like that. But there's this like deep, connective feeling of being held exactly as you said.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Well, I mean, I could talk to you forever, but I'm sure you have patience to see today. So for someone who's interested in breath work, how do you suggest they start? What are resources? Just give us your download on, like, breath work.

Amy Kuretsky:

101, yeah. So, like, real, real, basic resource. I have an online, kind of like seven day intro to breath work, course that you can get through our website. It's like $7 for seven days of breath work. Wow, yeah. And it's a kind of like micro introduction to breath work, because we're only having people breathe for like five to seven minutes each session, which is not what a group or an individual session looks like. You know, you've been with me. We're in class for like, you know, an hour and a half together. And so this is really just like an introduction, but it's amazing how powerful just five to seven minutes of breathing can be. I can't tell you the number of people that have emailed me back after their first day of doing it, and they're like, I didn't know where those tears came from. Like the tears were already there, just like, five breaths in, and all of a sudden I was crying for I don't know what reason. It's a great real toe in the water introduction to breath work. But then I do generally recommend that if you want to go deeper into it and you want to do a full session, that it's really helpful to have a facilitator, whether it's coming to an in person class or doing an online class, there are still practitioners out there doing this work online or doing a one on one session with a facilitator, just to have someone holding the space for you. Because when we're going into breath work, when we're going into past trauma, we're really going into the unknown, and that can feel a little overwhelming for folks. So to have someone there creating a safe and like connected container for you can be really helpful as you start this practice. But then, like I said in the very beginning, it's a really simple breath pattern, like once you know how to do it and you you have experienced it for yourself. Like, the reason why I love breath work so much is like we have lungs. We can breathe anytime, anywhere. You don't have to spend a bunch of money, you don't have to go to a clinic, you don't have to, like, do anything, to have access to this medicine. It lives inside of you all the time.

Amie Penny Sayler:

Tell us your website. I mean, we'll obviously link it in the show notes too. But for those listening, how are all the ways we can find you?

Amy Kuretsky:

Our clinic is called constellation acupuncture and healing arts. We're over in Northeast Minneapolis. You can go to our website to find out about that seven day class that's online. It's just through email. It's really simple, really easy. If you want to come and do it in person, we offer one on one sessions. Both myself and Helen offer breath work one on one in person at the clinic. And then I also offer classes all around the Twin Cities. Usually I've got two to four public classes around the Twin Cities on any given month, we do that breath work and writing workshop that Amy spoke about a couple times, like one or two times a month on Sunday afternoons. But then I also do an astrology focused one over at yes yoga, like every few months, there is a group that I hold for other space holders, so specifically for therapists, other body workers, people that are holding space for other clients to do breath work with me as a way of releasing some of that energy of our patients that we might kind of attract and hold on to over time. So there's a variety of groups that I offer. And you can go to our calendar of events on the website at Constellation acu.com wonderful.

Amie Penny Sayler:

And do you have any social media if. Want to follow

Amy Kuretsky:

you so I'm not personally on social media anymore. That was one of my 2020 ways of like shifting my own life is I got off of Instagram, but the clinic itself does have a presence on Instagram, and we have amazing staff members that manage that account so that I don't have to deal with it.

Amie Penny Sayler:

That's wonderful. Good to know. Is there anything that we haven't talked about that feels like it needs to be heard?

Amy Kuretsky:

I just want to thank you for inviting me here. It was such a pleasure to have this conversation. And it's, it's always so fun to talk about breath work with someone who's actually experienced it and experienced it with me. You know, like, sometimes I get invited on to podcasts like this or stuff for people who because breath work is, like, in or like, exciting right now, but it's so different when someone has their own personal relationship with this practice, and so I really

Amie Penny Sayler:

appreciate it. Oh, well, I appreciate you, Amy, for everything you've done, not just today, but for all you do for our community and what you've done for me. So thank you so much. You're welcome. You.

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Amy Kuretsky

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