A 7-part embodied breathwork practice for getting out of your head
and back into direct relationship with your body.
You try box breathing. You count your inhales and exhales. You follow the little expanding circle on an app. When you’re stressed, you remind yourself to “breathe into your belly.” It helps... until you stop thinking about your breath. Then, almost without noticing, you’re right back to holding it.
Your breath gets shallow. Your chest tightens. Your shoulders start creeping toward your ears. You don’t realize what’s happening until your body is already tense.
You know this pattern well. You could probably teach a class on it. You’ve read about the vagus nerve, you know a long exhale is supposed to calm you down, and you have three breathing apps on your phone, one of them with a streak you’re a little proud of. And still, your breath disappears in the moments that matter most.
A client’s email lands and you read it twice without breathing. You open your bank account and your chest locks before the page even loads. You’re in the middle of a hard conversation with someone you love when you notice your jaw has been clenched the whole time, and by then your words have already come out sharper than you meant them. At night you lie in bed running through tomorrow’s list, taking breaths that barely reach past your collarbones.
What really gets under your skin isn’t the stress. It’s that you know better. You’ve done the work. You’ve read the books, taken the classes, and walked out of a yoga class feeling like a new person, only to lose that feeling somewhere between the parking lot and your front door. Breathing has turned into one more thing you’re supposed to be good at. It’s one more way you manage yourself, and on the hard days it’s one more thing you feel like you’re failing at. So when someone tells you to “just breathe” in the middle of it, you want to throw something.
Something brought you to this page, and it wasn’t dramatic. You caught yourself holding your breath at a red light again this week. Or you got to the end of another long day and realized you hadn’t taken a full breath since morning. In that moment you saw it clearly: you’ve spent years trying to control your breath, and you still can’t feel it. And you realized that something has to change, like yesterday, because you genuinely can’t keep up with it anymore.
You’re done counting to four and performing calm on the outside while your body braces underneath. You want to feel a shift you don’t have to fake: to soften the tension you’re carrying, feel present in your body, and have a way to come back to yourself when life gets loud.
Breathe Like Water is for the self-aware overthinker, the recovering perfectionist, and the sensitive high achiever who’s tired of holding it all together while feeling anything but calm inside.
You’re used to being capable, dependable, and the person everyone turns to. You want a way to soften, feel supported in your own body, and breathe without making it another thing to get right.
This isn’t a space where you’re given another breathing pattern to memorize, another count to follow, or another technique you have to remember when you’re already overwhelmed.
It’s a space where you learn how to actually feel and understand the breath that’s already happening inside your body.
Because when you can actually feel your breath from the inside, it stops being another technique you have to remember to use.
It becomes something you can return to. The tool you reach for when you can feel the stress rising. The breath that you can come back to when you’ve left yourself.
Something that’s already here, waiting for you to notice it.
A 7-part video video practice rooted in breathwork from the Daoist Water Tradition.
I'll teach you how to bring your awareness inside the body and begin feeling your breath through the diaphragm, internal organs, and surrounding tissues. Then we'll bring that awareness into movement. Because the goal isn't to become really good at doing a breathing exercise.
I want you to know your breath well enough that you can feel when you're fighting against it, holding it, forcing it, or simply not letting it move. And then I want to show you another way.
You'll have seven practices you can move through on your own time and return to whenever you want to reconnect with your breath and body.
You catch yourself holding your breath while answering an email, waiting for a text back, or trying to get something exactly right. You don’t always notice it when it starts. You notice it later, when your shoulders are tight, your jaw hurts, and one more person asking for something feels like too much.
You’ve tried breathing exercises before. But counting seconds and remembering when to inhale, hold, and exhale feels like giving your brain another job to do. You wanted to feel grounded before bed or calmer after a stressful day. Instead, you’re wondering if you’re doing the practice “right.”
You know you’re supposed to “take a deep breath,” but when you try, it still feels stuck somewhere in your chest. You pull in more air, try to send it into your belly, or take an exaggerated inhale. Yet your body still feels tight, and breathing deeply feels like something you have to force.
You know you’re overwhelmed, but knowing that doesn’t stop the sharp reply from coming out. Someone asks one more question, a conversation hits a nerve, and suddenly you feel like you could blow up on the whole world. You want a moment to feel what’s happening and choose your words, but sometimes you’re already reacting before you realize how much has built up.
When life gets loud, it gets harder to hear yourself. You agree to something you don’t have room for, rush a decision to end the discomfort, or spend hours wondering what someone else’s response means. You want more than a few minutes of calm. You want to find your footing, know what you need, and trust yourself to take a next step that feels true to you.
Your breath was never meant to be managed.
It was meant to be felt.
You start catching the moment you hold your breath before your shoulders are at your ears and your jaw is aching. You notice when every little request starts feeling like too much, and use your breath to begin softening before tension has hours to build or spills out at someone you love.
You're not sitting there watching the clock, counting seconds, or trying to remember what comes next. You learn how to explore your breath without turning it into another performance. Slowing down becomes something you can enjoy, without needing to achieve a perfectly calm state.
Instead of pulling in more air and hoping it reaches your belly, you learn to recognize the movement of diaphragmatic breathing and notice how your belly, ribs, and back participate. Through Daoist whole-body breathing practices, you explore where you’re holding tension and work with your body to make room for a fuller, less forced breath.
When you’re overwhelmed and feel like you could blow up on the whole world, you have somewhere to bring your attention. Instead of repeatedly telling yourself to “just relax,” you return to your breath and body, notice where you’re bracing, and practice staying with what you feel. That pause can give you room to decide what you want to say, ask for what you need, or step away before responding.
Breathwork becomes a skill you carry into your life while lying awake, waiting for that text back, or facing a difficult conversation. Even when the world feels on fire around you, you have a practice for coming back to yourself. A moment to feel what’s happening, hear your own needs, and choose your next step with your boundaries and values in mind.
The goal isn't to breathe perfectly.
It's to become familiar enough with your own breath that you can find it again when you need it.
Two threads, practiced together.
You learn to feel your breath from the inside instead of controlling it from the outside. We move slowly through the diaphragm, abdomen, sides, and back of the body, giving your breath more room to move without forcing it.
Then the breath starts to lead. The movements are simple on purpose: no choreography or flexibility required. You’re learning what it feels like when breath and movement stop fighting each other.
Each practice builds on what comes before it, so I recommend moving through them in order the first time.
Start by locating your diaphragm and becoming familiar with the movement of the breath there.
Bring the breath into the sides of the body and begin pairing it with simple movement.
Work with the position of the body so your structure gives the breath room to move.
Explore breathing through the sides of the abdomen and into the low back.
Bring your awareness into the back body and begin working with the kidney area through breath and movement.
Put the pieces together in a longer guided breathing practice.
Bring everything you've practiced into movement and let the breath lead.
This isn't breath as a metric.
It's breath as a practice you can actually feel yourself inside of.
Inside Breathe Like Water you'll receive:
One-time payment: $47
I've done plenty of breathing practices where the main instruction is essentially: inhale for this many seconds, hold, exhale for this many seconds, repeat. Those practices can absolutely be useful. But this course is teaching something different.
There are no complicated breathing ratios to memorize. Most of the work is about developing your ability to actually feel what's happening inside your body while you breathe.
Breathe Like Water is rooted in the Daoist Water Tradition and the way I've been taught to work with breath, softness, internal awareness, and the body.
You'll explore how the diaphragm, abdomen, sides, back body, and organs participate in breathing.
Some things are easier to understand once the body starts moving. That's why breath-led movement is woven throughout the course rather than treated as a separate exercise.
One of the principles I've learned through this work is practicing at around 70%. You don't need to strain to make something happen. In fact, straining often makes it harder to feel anything subtle. So throughout these practices, you're encouraged to do less than your maximum and pay closer attention.
Once you've learned the sequence, you don't always need to pull up an entire class. Sometimes you might spend five minutes feeling your diaphragm. Sometimes you'll work with your low back. Sometimes you'll move for a few minutes because you've been sitting at your desk all day and realize you've barely been breathing. That's how I use this work too.
"I feel a much better connection to my diaphragm than I ever have with other breathwork."
"I can actually feel my breath and my pulse in my hands."
"It feels like I've gotten a shoulder massage, and my whole body relaxes with it."
This course found me at such a crucial point in my life where I needed as much peace and relaxation as possible. I had been wanting to deepen my breathwork practice and connect more deeply to my own breath, but the way most people teach the art of breathwork is overly aggressive and unnecessary harsh. My nervous system needs peace, stillness, and softness, which is why I enjoyed this course so much.
Payge’s voice feels like being hugged by the ocean, and her energy is so grounding, uplifting, and simultaneously centering, which makes paying attention to the course and the teachings within it such a positively powerful experience.
I truly recommend this course to anyone who breathes and likes to do so with ease. Especially in times like these, where there’s so many things to be stressed about and we need things to keep us wanting to be in our bodies.
5 stars, full marks, and 11/10 would recommend to a friend. Thank you so much for this gift.
Six years ago, I found the Daoist Water Tradition thinking I already understood breath pretty well. I’d spent years practicing yoga, and a lot of what I’d learned about the body was built around effort. How deeply could I get into the posture? How long could I hold it? Could I breathe through more intensity? This training turned a lot of that upside down for me.
One of the first things I had to learn was how much I was trying, even with my breath. I was constantly attempting to make it deeper, slower, better. The Water Tradition taught me to become more interested in what happens when I stop forcing it.
Can I soften enough to feel the diaphragm move? Can I notice where the breath stops? Can I let the inhale arrive without pulling it in? Can I stay with a smaller, easier breath instead of always trying to make it bigger? Those questions changed the way I practice, and eventually they changed the way I move through everyday life too.
I’ve been practicing this work for years now, and these are still things I come back to regularly. When I’m irritated. When I’ve been working for too long and realize my whole body is tense. When I’m hungry and getting weird about it. When someone cuts me off in traffic. When I feel disconnected from my body.
And also when something beautiful is happening and I realize I’m moving too quickly to actually feel it. A sunset. Being near the water. A really good moment with someone I love. This practice helps me become more available for all of it.
That’s why I teach it. Not because I think everyone needs another breathwork technique, but because learning to feel my breath gives me a very simple way to find my body again.
You already know what it feels like to hold your breath and call it fine. What you haven't felt yet is what happens when you stop holding it, when breath and body finally move together instead of against each other. That shift doesn't happen by reading about it. It happens by practicing it. This is where you start.
Join Breathe Like WaterBreathe Like Water is for you if you're curious about breathwork but don't want another highly technical breathing protocol to memorize.
It's for you if you've done plenty of thinking about yourself and want a practice that gets you into direct physical experience.
It's for you if you tend to hold your breath, brace, tighten, or disconnect from your body without realizing you're doing it.
And it's for you if you want something simple enough to actually return to.
You don't need experience with breathwork, yoga, qigong, or movement.
You just need enough space to lie down and a willingness to pay attention.
Instant access for $47Not at all. I teach everything from the beginning, and the movement is intentionally simple. You don't need to be flexible, athletic, or familiar with breathwork.
It's completely self-paced. You'll get access to all seven videos when you join and can move through them whenever you want.
Seven guided video practices covering Daoist Water Tradition breathwork and breath-led movement. You'll have lifetime access, so you can come back to them whenever you want.
No. You'll just want enough room to lie down comfortably and move a little. A yoga mat, rug, or carpeted floor works perfectly.
I create this for people who already understand a lot about themselves but want to feel more connected to what's happening in their body. You've done therapy. You've journaled for years. You can name every pattern you have. This isn't another place to analyze yourself. It's somewhere to practice feeling.
Each video runs between 15 and 30 minutes, so you can move through the series at whatever pace fits your week.
You don't have to become good at breathwork. You don't have to memorize another technique. You can start by learning what your own breath feels like.
Join Breathe Like Water for $47