Dominique Ceara: Breath as Medicine

Ross Tayler: Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Dominique Ceara. Dominique helps women transform pain into freedom by identifying and shifting inner patterns through breathwork and somatic healing. Rooted in her own lived healing journey, her work guides women back to truth, love, and the felt sense of their wholeness. She supports women in moving beyond coping, because you're not here to cope with life, you're here to create it. Welcome, Dominique. So excited to have you here on Sacred Sundays and to have this conversation with you.

Dominique Ceara: Hi Ross, thank you so much for having me. I'm equally excited and really looking forward to our conversation.

Ross Tayler: Excellent. I just want to add that this is our first journey into international waters. Dominique is in Switzerland, and this is our first international guest.

Dominique Ceara: I'm so grateful for opening the doors.

Ross Tayler: Dominique is going to begin by guiding us through a short grounding breath exercise. So I'm going to hand it over to Dominique, and she'll guide us from here.

Dominique Ceara: Perfect, thank you, Ross. Alright, let's all take a moment here. Ideally you find a space where you're going to be by yourself for the next couple of moments, a space where you are uninterrupted and feel comfortable enough to settle. When you've found this space, I invite you to close your eyes and turn your attention inward.

Start by focusing on your breath. Inhale to the count of four through your nose. Inhaling: one, two, three, four. And exhaling through the mouth on six: five, four, three, two, one. Inhaling again: one, two, three, four. Exhaling through the mouth: six, five, four, three, two, one. Again, inhaling through the nose: one, two, three, four. Exhaling: six, five, four, three, two, one.

Two more times. Inhaling through the nose: one, two, three, four. Exhaling through the mouth: six, five, four, three, two, one. One last time. Inhaling through the nose: one, two, three, four. And exhaling, letting all the air out: six, five, four, three, two, one.

Keep staying with your breath here, focusing on the deep inhales through the nose and exhales through the mouth. Watch how your energy and attention are focusing inward, and how you are relaxing in this moment and starting to feel your body. You don't need to follow this four-to-six pattern, but just take your time inhaling deeply through the nose and exhaling softly and long through the mouth. While doing this, just focusing on the breath, you will find yourself getting more and more into a state of balance and regulation. Just continue going with the flow.

Our breath is the bridge between our mind and body. It's a crucial piece to help us connect and feel more alive, more at home in our own vessel. Keep your attention with your breath.

So, that was it. We're getting back into this beautiful conversation we are about to have, always reminding ourselves throughout this episode to come back to our breath, focusing on the deep inhales through the nose and out through the mouth.

Ross Tayler: Thank you, Dominique. I didn't realize how much I needed that until we were in it. I think it's always good to slow down and connect with ourselves. I really felt that connection down into my root center as we went through that breathing exercise. So thank you.

Dominique Ceara: Thank you.

Ross Tayler: One of the things I love about breath as a reminder is that it's the one thing we have that's always with us as a tool to access. We don't have to reach out for it, we don't have to plan for it, it's always right there. Would you agree?

Dominique Ceara: That's the beautiful thing, yes, because so many people look outside of themselves for tools to regulate, tools to bring them back to themselves, while it's actually just with us. We just need to turn inward and focus on our breath. When we do this, even two to three minutes goes a long way. The way I love to do it is to close my eyes, because when you literally close your eyes you're pacing the outside world out, and you're able to focus on the breath, not just by theory but by lived example, experiencing it through your own vessel. The breath is the one thing we can always come back to, and it helps us shift state in a matter of minutes.

Ross Tayler: In your bio, it said "rooted in your own lived healing journey," and I'm curious about that. It seems a very important piece of how you teach and how you show up, so I'd love to hear more about it.

Dominique Ceara: I'd love to. I was always very into psychology throughout my life, but I was also very disconnected from myself. Only when I got pregnant with my daughter did I really want to change and continue on my healing journey and make, quote unquote, real progress. I didn't want to pass this on to my daughter. I didn't want her to need to take care of me. I wanted her to experience life as a small kid, fully present, fully enjoying her childhood. That was the turning point for me to look deeper and look into other aspects of how you can work through your trauma. With this came breathwork, because one of the things I really wanted for my daughter was a trauma-free delivery into the world. We say that birth is the first big trauma we as humans experience, and I think it very much depends on how you deliver your kids into the world. Obviously, sometimes the circumstances require different measures. But birth is also the most natural thing. In Switzerland we have a very high cesarean rate. While I would do anything for my kid to be delivered safely, it wasn't my first option to rely on. I really wanted her to have a natural birth, and that's when I looked into hypnobirthing. For those who haven't stumbled across it, hypnobirthing is when you are consciously connecting to your breath and working with your baby in a flow of breathing your baby out. That doesn't mean you don't feel it. You do feel the birth experience, but it's a beautiful act of seeing how you can be such a great team with your baby. It was so interesting because we were moving so in flow. She was here in just a couple of hours. It was a very smooth experience. I think if you can give your kid an entry like this, you set a great ground for a nice beginning of life.

Ross Tayler: Something just hit me when you were talking: this is the first act of co-regulation. This is the way of co-regulating with this being inside of you. Did that start for you way before the birthing? Were you aware of that in that way? I never thought of that. I think about my own experience, and there was definitely no co-regulation intentionally happening when I was in utero.

Dominique Ceara: Yes and no. I carried a lot of trauma with me. One of the things was bulimia. I don't know if you're familiar. For the audience who may not know it, it's an eating disorder where you throw up the food you binge eat. I still had this when I got pregnant, and when I discovered I was pregnant I knew I wasn't going to pass this on. At least from where I come from, I believe that all the emotions a mom or a woman goes through while she's carrying a baby, she puts on the baby unfiltered. That's how I see it. I didn't want this ever to be a thing for her. So I did a lot of healing work, and I did a lot of shutting the outside world out and focusing on the baby growing inside me. To some degree I was also not very realistic at this point, because I just didn't let stuff bother me, so that I would keep the vessel safe, so to speak.

When I then gave birth, that changed everything for me. That changed how I saw our breath. I had never breathed consciously before. While giving birth, I really understood the power of breathwork, and that led me on a whole journey. In the first couple of years I put my hands on everything I could, getting all the knowledge and all the experiences, to get to the version of myself I could look back on and be proud of, for the sake of having a daughter who can look up to me and doesn't need to be looking over me. I needed to do my job as a mom and hold the space. It needed those nine months of pregnancy, and it also took a little longer after I gave birth to figure things out. I would say I'm still figuring things out. We are all on our healing journey, and this is going to continue through life, but I am now able to hold the space for my daughter to grow up safely and hopefully without bigger trauma issues.

Ross Tayler: In some way, that's the goal of most parents, to create a better experience than we had. For you, it sounds like you really did it. It's interesting listening to you speak, because we talked a little about your Human Design, so I have that in the back of my mind. You're the type who is going to investigate and dive deep into these topics and learn everything you can. It sounds like you did that in the name of your healing and also in support of your daughter coming into the world.

Dominique Ceara: Yes, she was my biggest motivator. I don't know if I would have gotten my bottom up to resolve things by the roots if it weren't for her, because I wasn't coming from a place of having a lot of self-love for myself. I really learned this through her.

Ross Tayler: That reflection, yeah. You said "the person I was becoming," and I'm curious about that, because I really have this belief that we already are that person, and we're lifting away all the conditioning that reveals that person. What would you say about becoming versus already being?

Dominique Ceara: I actually agree with how you put it. I would even say it's beyond this. I would say that we are everything and nothing. Everything you can imagine yourself being, the whole span of what you can imagine, you can be. I also believe that we all carry the best and the worst version of us inside. It's who we pick to show and nourish that will eventually come to the surface. There was just another layer that had to be revealed, and it needed those processes in order to be discovered and show up. But I agree that we carry it all inside of us, because at the end we are all one. We are everything and at the same time we are nothing, because in its whole, everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

Ross Tayler: I've done some psilocybin journeys over the years for my healing, and I always say there's this cosmic joke. We take everything so seriously, but there's a not-so-serious side of it as well. We try so hard to be a good human, and yet we're so much more than that. That's where the joke is.

Dominique Ceara: It's about this, yes, but it's also about giving the dark side of us space. One thing I've learned over the years is that everything you try to shuffle under the rug will eventually control you. The dark side sounds like something negative that you want to avoid at all costs, but it's just as much a part of us as the bright and light side. It's about embracing all parts of us, learning to have compassion for us in all our states, and finding the right channels to experience what we call our dark sides. The dark side is often what we see in creativity, the chaos. There are so many things that make you who you are that go way beyond our conscious level of understanding, and suppressing them, I believe, is not the answer. It's about finding the way to channel yourself and live who you truly are, staying authentic to yourself. That means embracing your favorable sides as much as the ones you may not like so much.

Ross Tayler: It feels like you're talking about what's often called shadow work, which is bringing those parts of ourselves that we've rejected, suppressed or denied back into the fold. From my journey, it's the number one thing we can do for ourselves, because everything in front of us is a reflection. When we point at someone and say, you're this, that judgment is actually a judgment about ourselves. There's something unfinished or unresolved in us that we're trying to work out. I came to this years ago, and also in the men's work that I do. We do a lot of shadow work and look at these relational pieces. It's the beauty of the design of this world, this hall of mirrors we're walking through. It can be very hard to look in that mirror and realize that we're seeing ourselves when we point that finger. But when we recognize that, the movie changes because we've changed. The wonderful part is that we can take responsibility for our side of the street.

Dominique Ceara: I think this is so beautiful. Everything that bothers us or triggers us in the outside world is an invitation to look inward and a request for us to heal certain parts.

Ross Tayler: I love that you brought this up, because it's the perfect segue into another part of your Human Design: you're a Reflector, and Reflectors represent a unique one percent of the population. The simple definition of a Reflector is that they're here to reflect back to us our shadows. Reflectors see through to the truth of whether we're showing up authentically or not. That's a very challenging role to hold. You move through the world feeling it intensely and seeing the truth intensely, but ultimately, if a Reflector is happy, it means the community they're in and the people they're surrounded by are also happy. It's an interesting dynamic of really feeling where people are at, which on one level can be a tremendous burden to hold. I would imagine that as you stepped into this journey with breathwork and your healing, you cleared out a lot of that energy, and now it's your greatest gift to see accurately what is going on for people and to support them in their healing. But the problem is, most people don't want to hear what you see. In that transaction you become the problem, even though you're just trying to reveal the thing in front of you. I hope that makes sense. What would you say about all of that?

Dominique Ceara: It's interesting, because I feel like I shattered a lot of skins in the last years. I started at a very different point, where I lived very much toward the outside world. With the pregnancy of my daughter, and the desire to fulfill the role of a mom to the best of my ability, that was such a huge urge for me, because we hold such a great responsibility. I really pushed toward looking into the inconvenient things, all the things I really didn't want to look into. It also made me pull back from the environment I was in, because my environment was still matching the old versions of myself. In order to heal, I first tried to take those people with me on the journey, but because of the frequency they were at, it was like having a really heavy stone on your foot while being in water. It was tearing me down, and I felt like I was drowning. There was a point where I said goodbye to almost everybody in my environment and started to walk alone and build what I felt had to be built.

There were many times I questioned whether I'd done the right thing, because loneliness is also something... Let me put it this way: if you have never learned to sit with yourself, then being alone is very uncomfortable. While on this journey alone, I questioned myself a couple of times, and I just pushed through. After a while, first you make room for new people but they don't arrive yet, and then after a while the right frequencies and the right people showed up. I met them in all the different places. It's so beautiful to now look back and see what the last couple of years have brought. Living my true authentic self, the kind of people I meet, it's also like the two of us. It's so beautiful how things start to fall into place. But for all the greatness and beauty, I think in order to appreciate it, you also have to see the other sides. See the loneliness, so you can appreciate being around the right kind of people.

Ross Tayler: It's a tremendous ask to be on that journey. I talk to so many people for whom the more they step into their authenticity, the more people in their circle fall away. Sometimes they don't even notice what's going on, but really it's that they've changed. There's an energetic piece: if the people stay, there actually becomes more friction, because they want you to be someone else than who you're becoming. There's that word again, becoming. They want you to be who you were, so they can still have the same relationship with you. If you change, it can't stay the same. And we're all wired for attachment and connection, so pushing away the connection that's there is hard. I think about addicts when I worked in treatment centers. They go back to communities where people are still using and drinking, and in most cases they have to stay away from those people because there's a misalignment in choices and behaviors. Ultimately they might go down that path again by choosing attachment over healthy choices. And yet there's a bond of understanding within those communities because of their shared experience. They have to step away from these people and find new friends and a new community. It's similar to what you were talking about, but it's a radical act, in my opinion, and you're articulating it so well. I'm imagining many people listening can relate to that as they're growing and shifting and becoming who they are, or who they were.

Dominique Ceara: For everyone who is currently on this path and can relate to what we're saying, I can only add that it's going to be worth it. That's something I would have wished people had told me when I was in it, when you don't see the end of the tunnel and it's like, I'm forever going to be alone, I'm never going to find my tribe, I'm never going to work through this. Just keep pushing through and staying authentic to who you are. In the end, it's always going to be worth it.

Ross Tayler: In your bio, you also said that we're not here to cope with life, and that you help others break through that and create a different life. I'm curious about the word coping and what comes up for you around it, because it really hit me. I can relate to times in my life when I was just coping and just getting by, and that's not how we're meant to live.

Dominique Ceara: One example is when I was 15 or 16 and went through an apprenticeship. I really didn't like it. My boss made my life really terrible, and I was so much looking forward to the weekends. I was living for Saturdays, and I was already getting sick on Sunday evenings. That was really painful, and I feel like that was a time when I coped with life. I also told myself to push through, and that when I was done with the apprenticeship I would create a life I looked forward to every single day, not needing to wish for weekends. That was a very powerful learning for me, because I still see in my environment that a lot of people are coping with life. They feel they just need to push through. I don't mean pushing through things you're actually passionate about, but pushing through because that's what people do and that's expected of them. I find this really sad, because the only thing we know is that we have this very moment we live in right now. We don't know what happens tomorrow. I believe we have more than one life, but I stand here in this life now, and that's all we've got. I feel it's our obligation to make the best of life. I feel that most people live as if they have a thousand years, while life is actually so short.

Really understanding that you are the creator doesn't mean you don't need to push through when life gets hard. It means understanding that at every given moment, you are deciding the turns your life is going to take, consciously or subconsciously, whether it's the way you want to go or not. Every decision you make, even not acting on something, not taking the leap of faith, you always get to decide. Understanding that you are the one who creates your life, and that everything could look very different a year from now. You can shift and create a whole different life, and it doesn't take long. Whatever you wish for, the biggest dreams you have, go after them. Move in that direction. Go! You don't know how much time you have. Go.

Ross Tayler: It's so simple and profound, what you just said, and at the same time I can identify all the resistance people have toward it. It makes me think of a conversation I had very recently, looking back in time at decisions I made about jobs I was in. In some ways I made a choice to step into less financial abundance in exchange for more passion, joy and fulfillment. When I recounted this, the feedback I got was, well, you were quite successful at that point. What was unspoken was that I was on the edge of a heart attack. I was on the edge of heading down a path of being unwell if I stayed in that career, and that was invisible to the person I was talking to. I knew I needed to take a different route, and it was a tremendous risk, but it was so worth it in the end. I wouldn't change it for anything. The year after I made that decision, I think I made twelve thousand dollars, but I was the happiest in that year. I don't even know how I got through that year, it's quite funny. Anyway.

Dominique Ceara: I think for people, to bring this closer, many lack the actual understanding that they get to make their own choices. I do understand that the older you get, the more responsibilities you have. It seems easy to say but difficult to do. But we are the creators of our lives, everybody is. Coming from the background I had, with other kinds of traumas when I was a bit younger, I had my fair share of experiences, and I still find that it doesn't matter what happened to you. It matters what you make out of it now. No matter how big the pain you've experienced in your life, you get to decide whether it's going to control you moving forward, or whether you're going to work through it, take ownership of your own well-being and health, and start to write a different story.

Ross Tayler: To bring a different perspective, we're set up to not believe that we are the creators. It starts right from childhood. The way I talk about it is that we have this orientation outside of ourselves. We need our parents to take care of us, and we want them to be a different way than perhaps they are. That becomes a lifelong outward perspective of: what does the world want me to be, who do my parents want me to be, what does my boss want me to be? It makes sense that we would do that, because it's a survival mechanism, but we're turning away from our inner authority, our inner knowing, our inner wisdom, our inner guidance, all of those things that are right there waiting to be returned to. I think this healing journey, as we call it, is really about a reorientation to the internal, which is again that metaphor of the breath, going back inside to reveal those parts of ourselves and connect with ourselves. And I think the breathwork you do is conscious, connected breathing.

Dominique Ceara: Yes. There are different forms of it. There's not just the balancing breath or relaxation breaths. There are also more energizing ones. There's so much you can do with breathwork. What I see in the world, and that's why we picked this grounding exercise at the beginning, is that everybody strives for enlightenment and all these special feelings and extravagance, but what we are missing now more than ever is being regulated, being in balance, being in charge of how we feel, and owning this again.

Ross Tayler: Over the years I've gone to breathwork ceremonies a few times, and I've done one-on-one breathwork from time to time. One thing I found interesting is that there's a created perception that you're meant to have some sort of experience, some sort of release, I guess, is the main thing. Some people do and have very profound releases. I'm guessing you have a different way of working with people because of the journey you've been on, and that you hold a space differently. Perhaps you'd like to speak to that.

Dominique Ceara: Breathwork by definition is connected breathing, which brings in a lot of different ways you can go at it. While I also hold breathwork sessions with big deep releases, being grounded and able to hold your own space comes first. When you are activated, and this can be through all sorts of experiences, and you don't know how to ground yourself and feel home again in your own vessel, it can be a very difficult journey. Ensuring that you are connected to yourself is the starting point with everything I do. If you can connect to yourself and know how to regulate yourself, and breathwork is a very powerful tool for this, because you take it anywhere you go, it doesn't take a lot of time. By doing this for two or three minutes, you are getting into a regulated state. This is where I want to get people before doing a lot of work with them, because they need to be able to hold their own space, even if they are walking out of a session afterward. That's what we teach before we go into anything else. This is the tool I need them to have, so that they are not depending on me or anybody else but on themselves for their own regulation.

Ross Tayler: Which in and of itself is such a beautiful reflection and gift to give someone, because so much of what we do is the opposite of that. Even at the beginning, when we stopped and did those few minutes of breathing, we were all receiving and giving ourselves the gift you just spoke of. That's the foundation for anything we do, is what you're saying. It's kind of opposite to the way some people teach, and I'm not trying to make those people wrong, but it's very different from what you're saying, and I think that's important to highlight.

Dominique Ceara: There are so many different aspects, and it's beautiful that everybody carries their own gifts into the world. There's just one thing I really want to send people off with from this part of our conversation: make your own judgment. Believe in yourself, believe in your intuition, that you know what is right for you. If something doesn't feel right, listen to your inner voice, whether it's with a teacher or in daily things you experience. Bringing the power back to ourselves is something I see as crucial, because as you mentioned before, we are so programmed to get everything from the outside world, our recognition, everything depends on the outside world. When you look at advertising, we are like push notifications. All the information we get from outside steers us. Getting the power back into ourselves, listening to our intuition, checking in with ourselves, because if you give yourself the space and take the time to listen to yourself, you will know what to do.

Ross Tayler: I love that you're working with women in this way, because my observation over the years of working with a lot of women has been that the very things you're pointing to, the healing and foundational pieces, are the things they didn't get or didn't feel they had access to, like saying yes to things that were actually nos, and all that comes after. Men need it too, just in a different way, because we've all lost ourselves in some way. But to heal with other women, just like I do men's groups, there's something really powerful about that. I love the way you're presenting yourself to do this work.

Dominique Ceara: Thank you. I think both need it, women and men, as you just said. For women, given the nature of being the one who carries the baby and takes care of the family in womanly ways, I think it's often more difficult to understand that they are the creators of their lives. They are more in the flow of giving, and of...

Ross Tayler: Nurturing.

Dominique Ceara: Thank you. Of nurturing. Understanding that you can still nurture but you can also be the creator of your life, and that the two go hand in hand and don't contradict each other, is something I see a lot of women struggle with. My big wish is for women to really start embodying and living that they are the creators of their lives.

Ross Tayler: That feels like the perfect spot to pause our conversation and let that sit, because what you said there is really powerful. I always like to close by asking my guests the same question: what is one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today?

Dominique Ceara: Carving out a little bit of time for yourself. Making it a priority to cater to your needs by taking a moment, closing your eyes, checking in with your breath, and holding yourself in this sacred space of your true self.

Ross Tayler: Thank you for that.

Dominique Ceara: Thank you.

Ross Tayler: For people who want to stay in touch with you or explore what you offer, where's the best place for them to do that?

Dominique Ceara: The website gives a good starting point. I'm sure you will blend it in, or people will find it. For the ones who are more mobile, Instagram is always a good opportunity to see what's going on on this side of the world on a daily basis.

Ross Tayler: Excellent, and we will put all of your links in the show notes for sure.

Dominique Ceara: Thank you.

Ross Tayler: Well, thank you, Dominique. This has been a beautiful conversation. I love where we went and all the things you shared, and thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me today.

Dominique Ceara: Ross, thank you so much for holding the space for our conversation and for us to meet. Thank you.

Ross Tayler: You're welcome.