Respiratory System Unwinding: A Personal Reflection 

This is another personal story I wanted to share following the completion of my blog series on nervous system unwinding across various systems of the body In this entry, I’m focusing on the respiratory system through the lens of my own experience.

Warning: This is Gross

I want to share something that happened to me one night related to mucus and histamine reactions. It’s gross. Sorry. But that’s life for me these days. Healing isn’t always clean.

It was November 2023, and I had just finished my second session with a therapeutic chronic illness coach I found after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole. One of her videos was recommended to me. In this video, she was talking about the Havening technique. I tried it on my own for a few weeks. Eventually, I decided to reach out and book a session with her.

When I first started going to her, it took me a few sessions to finally get to a point where I could start having releases. I think it was after 4th session that something felt different. I don’t remember the details of what we talked about, but I do remember thinking when I got off the phone, that something was going to happen.

It’s also worth mentioning that the entire week leading up to this, I had been dealing with what felt like sinus pressure in the center of my head. It seemed to get worse the more I practiced havening. Sinus pressure wasn’t new for me, so I brushed it off. It could have been anything; allergies or maybe just stress.

The Release

That night, the tears came. It was a deep, full-bodied deep cry, a release. I even wrote in a journal that it felt like something from when I was two years old. As the tears were coming out, unfortunately, so did the mucus. A lot of it. The pressure in my head, behind my nose and eyes, started to feel like too much. With this histamine response, it seemed like something physical was going on, like a physical release.

Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to blow my nose and what came out completely shocked me. It wasn’t the typical clear stuff. It was thick, opaque, white mucus. So much of it. I sat there in disbelief. It was like my body had been storing it, and the emotional release opened the floodgates. I read somewhere that white mucus is typically a sign of mild inflammation and congestion in the sinuses. It’s not like a full-blown sinus infection. It seems that inflammation is a big theme for those of us that have a dysregulated nervous system. For me personally, it seems to show up in all kinds of different ways.

It might be worth noting that I honestly haven’t had anything like that ever happen to me again. I do have histamine type things happen, but nothing at all like that.

It was gross, but it also felt strangely meaningful. Looking back, I think this was a kind of somatic discharge. The release didn’t just come through my tears. Since then, I’ve learned that this kind of experience isn’t as strange as it sounds. People going through deep emotional healing often have physical discharges. Yawning, shaking, vomiting, maybe even mucus? Are signs of release and regulation. The body finds its own way to let go. Sometimes it doesn’t just cry; it clears.

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