You Don’t Need Understanding - You Need to Breathe

David Maginley
Dec 10, 2025
3 min read

People often come to me wanting answers to big questions.

Why am I anxious? Why does my body feel like it’s betraying me? Why does everything feel like it’s falling apart? Why am I afraid of dying? Why does this still hurt after all these years?

All excellent questions. Also, all slightly premature.

Because before we go looking for meaning, we need to find our way back to experience.

And there is a very important difference between the two.

Step One: Come Back to the Body (Even If You’d Rather Not)

When someone sits down with me, I don’t usually start with: “So what do you think this all means?” I’m much more likely to ask:

Where do you feel that in your body?
What does the tightness feel like?
Is your breath fast or slow?
Is there warmth, heaviness, buzzing, numbness?

This is phenomenology—although no one needs that word to do it. It simply means we are paying attention to what is actually happening, without jumping immediately into story, analysis, or diagnosis. At this stage:

There is no trauma narrative yet.
No spiritual interpretation yet.
No meaning-making yet.

Just experience. Which, oddly enough, most of us are very skilled at avoiding.

Why This Matters (More Than People Think)

When you stay with direct experience long enough, something remarkable happens:

Breathing slows
Muscles soften
The nervous system begins to settle
Emotions become clearer instead of louder
Thought loses its monopoly on reality

This is true whether you call it somatic awareness, mindfulness, prayer, meditation, or simply “finally feeling what you’ve been stuffing for 20 years.” And only after this settling does something deeper start to emerge on its own. Which brings us to…

Step Two: When Meaning Shows Up Uninvited

Once someone is grounded in experience, they often say things like:

“I think this tightness is fear… I just didn’t want to admit it.”
“This grief feels older than this situation.”
“I don’t know who I am anymore.”
“I’m suddenly aware that I’m terrified of dying.”
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to stay in control.”

Now we’re no longer just in the body. Now we’re in existence. This is the existential layer:

Identity
Freedom
Loss
Meaning
Love
Suffering
Mortality
Purpose
Regret
Hope

These questions don’t need to be forced. They arise organically once the nervous system feels safe enough to let them surface. Trying to do this work too early is like opening the deep end of the pool before people know they can float. Spoiler alert: they panic.

Why This Shapes My Approach

This is why my work often looks quiet on the surface. We pause. We breathe. We notice. We let the body speak before the mind hijacks the microphone. Only then do we explore:

Who you are becoming
What is dissolving
What still matters
What you’re afraid to lose
What you’re being asked to surrender
What love might look like now

This approach protects people from:

Intellectualizing their healing
Spiritually bypassing their pain
Overwhelming themselves with insight before they have stability

It also honors the reality that meaning is not manufactured. It emerges.

Presence Before Enlightenment (Sorry, That’s the Order)

Most of us arrive in spiritual care wanting answers. What we usually need first is presence.

We think we’re coming for enlightenment. We discover we’re actually coming for our nervous system.

Which, it turns out, is the front door to everything else.

Resources:

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