SOMA Breath came into my life at a point when I needed something I couldn’t name. The breath-hold sequences, the pranayama foundations, the deliberate movement through activation and release. I felt things in those sessions I hadn’t felt before. My body registered shifts that made clear how far below capacity I’d been running.
I trained for months. I went deep into the practice.
Then I started asking questions the training didn’t answer.
What SOMA Gave Me — and What I Still Wanted
I’m not writing this to criticize a practice that moved me. SOMA is serious work, and my training there is the foundation of everything I teach.
I noticed something in myself, and later in the people I began working with: the sessions were profound. The integration afterward was left to the breather.
The clarity that arrived during a breath-hold had nowhere to go when Monday morning came. You’d access something in the practice, then return to the same desk, the same patterns, the same gap between who you were in the session and who you were in the rest of your life. The technique opened a door. Nobody told you what was on the other side, or how to walk through it in ordinary circumstances.
Maybe that’s by design. Maybe discovering integration is part of the teaching, something you find once the technique has cracked you open. I’ve made peace with that possibility. But many people I’ve worked with were never going to find it on their own, not from lack of capability, but because nobody built the bridge.
That gap is what the RISE Method addresses.
What I Brought In from Kundalini Yoga
Alongside SOMA, I was practicing Kundalini yoga. I kept returning to one technique: Breath of Fire.
Breath of Fire is a rapid nasal breathing practice driven by the navel pump: sharp, rhythmic exhales through the nose with passive inhales between them. It generates heat. It activates the body fast.
The rapid, forceful exhales expel CO2 at a rate higher than normal breathing. This produces a temporary shift in blood chemistry, a reduction in CO2 levels, that the body registers in specific ways: increased alertness, warmth spreading from the core outward, tingling at the extremities, a sharpened sense of presence. The long-term effect is counterintuitive: consistent Breath of Fire practice raises CO2 tolerance, because the body adapts to the repeated chemical fluctuations by building resilience to them.
CO2 tolerance, not oxygen, governs how long and comfortably you hold your breath. The urge to breathe during a retention comes from rising CO2, not falling oxygen. A practitioner with high CO2 tolerance settles deeper into the hold, stays longer, and reaches the surrender state with less friction. Low tolerance and you fight the hold, get anxious at the edges, and rarely reach the depth the practice offers.
SOMA and most breath-hold methods work with the hold itself. I kept returning to a different question: what if you prepared the nervous system for the hold before entering it? Use Breath of Fire in the phase before surrender, as targeted preparation. Raise the internal temperature. Train the body’s relationship with CO2 fluctuation. Then, from that primed state, move into the hold.
The Surrender phase changes completely. You’ve already met the edges of your capacity. You’ve practiced staying present inside activation. The void arrives as spacious rather than alarming.
That placement, Breath of Fire before the surrender void, is the Ignite phase. I haven’t found it in any other breathwork sequence.
The Hero’s Journey: Adding the Layer of Story
The second gap was narrative.
People change through story. You need to know where you are in the arc, to locate yourself on the map, to recognize that the discomfort you’re feeling marks the part of the journey that is supposed to be hard, not a sign you’re failing.
Looking at the breath sequence, the settling of Root, the fire of Ignite, the void of Surrender, the arrival of Emerge, I recognized the hero’s journey. Not a metaphor imposed on the practice. A structure the practice was already following. Every culture in human history tells the same story: ordinary world, the call, the ordeal, the descent, the return. The breath follows that arc in a single session.
Naming it changed how people moved through the practice. A breather in the fire of Ignite stopped reading that discomfort as failure and started reading it as the test the arc requires. A breather in the discomfort of the hold stopped interpreting it as struggle and started recognizing it as the descent that precedes transformation. That recognition is the difference between quitting the practice and committing to it.
The hero’s journey also ties the practice to life outside the session. The same arc runs through a week of training, through the full 22 days, and through the larger story of your own becoming. Breathwork becomes a training ground for the version of yourself who shows up differently after.
What I Teach Inside RISE That I Found Missing
Building the RISE Method, I committed to going deeper on integration than anything I’d encountered in my own training.
The program covers what to do in the session, why it works in the body, and what the nervous system is doing throughout. Beyond that, it covers how to read your own states: how to catch dysregulation before it costs you, how to use the breath tools in ordinary moments. The regulated state you access in practice can become your baseline over time. That shift changes your creativity, your relationships, your capacity to stay present under pressure.
I spent years finding applications through practice and experimentation: how CO2 training and breath-hold work apply to focus, to creative work, to emotional regulation, not in ceremony or a special set, but at a desk, before a difficult conversation, in the middle of a creative block, at two in the morning when the anxiety won’t quiet. I teach those applications in the program so you don’t have to find them the hard way.
Who RISE Is For
The program is not a certification. It won’t train you to teach breathwork or facilitate others. SOMA offers that, and offers it well.
RISE is for the person who wants to use this work to live differently. The creative who can’t access full capacity. The entrepreneur hitting the same ceiling. The explorer who has tried the apps, the retreats, and the therapy, and suspects the missing piece is something more fundamental. The person in their thirties or forties who has built a life that looks right from the outside and knows something is still locked up inside it.
You don’t need to become a breathwork teacher. You need a nervous system trained to support the life you’re building. The 22 days is designed around that, and nothing else.
Why 22 Days
I’ve had powerful single sessions, and I know how fast the ordinary world reasserts itself when the nervous system underneath hasn’t changed. Peak experiences are real. They don’t hold.
Nervous system adaptation happens in accumulated, progressive practice, over enough time for the body to consolidate what it’s learning. Twenty-two days crosses that threshold: long enough to create real pattern change, short enough to finish.
The program is sequential. Each phase builds the nervous system condition the next phase requires. Skip Root and Ignite loses its foundation. Skip Ignite and Surrender loses its depth. The progression is the mechanism, not the packaging.
Why I Built This
I built the RISE Method because I needed it. I had done the work, held the tools, and still showed up below my own capacity in too many areas of my life. The gap wasn’t effort or discipline or knowledge. My nervous system had never been trained to support the version of myself I was trying to become.
I found something at the intersection of SOMA’s breath architecture, Kundalini’s Breath of Fire, and the hero’s journey that felt complete in a way each alone didn’t. Then I needed to know whether other people would find what I found on the other side of it.
They did.
Ready to Find Out for Yourself?
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A note on practice. The breathing techniques and physiological information in this article are educational and not a substitute for medical advice. Breathwork includes intense breathing patterns and breath holds that are not appropriate for everyone. If you are pregnant or have a cardiovascular, respiratory, or psychiatric condition, consult a qualified healthcare provider before practicing. Read our full Medical Disclaimer.