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Pat Chirico

@patchirico

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Somatic Practitioner & Educator
Build capacity to feel deeply & live fully
Through Breathwork & Spinal Energetics
Founder: @insightbreathwork

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Hi. I’m Pat. I teach breathwork, I make memes about nervous system regulation and I used to be so dysregulated I thought anxiety was a personality type…

…luckily my nervous system eventually filed a formal complaint and that changed everything.

Now I run two things - @insightbreathwork for the depth and @barely.regulated for the humour.

Same guy. Same mission. Different doors into the same house.

Welcome to it all. by @patchirico

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5 months ago

I’ve struggled with this more than almost anything else.

For a long time, slowing down didn’t feel peaceful to my nervous system. It felt dangerous.

Because somewhere along the way, my body learnt that my worth was tied to what I could produce, achieve, fix, carry, or survive.

So rest didn’t feel like safety, it felt like guilt, like falling behind, likeI was wasting time, like I should be doing more.

Even when I was exhausted, my system still struggled to stop.

And I know a lot of people live there too.

A nervous system that’s spent years in survival mode often mistakes stillness for danger because busyness became the thing that created certainty, control, validation, or even love.

Healing has been learning that my worth doesn’t disappear the moment I slow down.

That rest is not laziness, that softness is not weakness.
And that I don’t have to earn safety through constant productivity anymore. by @patchirico

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4 months ago

Your diaphragm holds every moment you held your breath through stress, pain or uncertainty.

Helping it slowly release and soften allows the past move through you instead of living inside you.

This is the moment your body stops bracing and you finally breathe freely again.

When life feels overwhelming, the diaphragm is often the first place to lock down.

It can tighten, freezes and shifts your breath high into the chest.

This isn’t because you’re breathing wrong in any way, it’s simply your system is trying to protect you.

A tight diaphragm becomes emotional armour restricting breath, holding tension, and trapping the feelings you never had the safety to feel.

This bracing pattern sends a constant message to your brain, we are not safe, stay on guard.

When you begin to unlock it everything changes: the breath deepens, the emotional pressure unwinds and your body finally receives a new signal, I’m safe now.

Restoring true diaphragmatic movement isn’t just better breathing, it’s nervous system healing and it’s the moment your body stops reliving the past and begins to return home to itself. by @patchirico

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10 months ago

Fun fact: while you sleep, your brain filters sensory information so you don’t wake up for every little sound or movement.

And sometimes, apparently, the entire house shaking doesn’t make the cut. 🫠

Did you feel it? by @patchirico

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3 days ago

It’s very easy to turn healing into a full-time sport.

I’ve been there.

Session after session, trying to understand every single part of me, to the point where every emotion, every thought, every trigger required a full investigation.

It became exhausting.

It’s so easy turn ourselves into full-time projects.

Now this isn’t me saying don’t work on yourself.

Understanding your patterns matters, building the capacity to regulate matters, healing matters.

It’s about finding the balance between doing the work and living your life.

Between going into the depths and coming back up for air.

Because that’s what the work is meant to give us: the capacity to go out and actually live.

It’s something we talk about a lot with our breathwork students. The deep work in the session matters, but it’s only half the picture.

The other half is taking the insight, the space, the newfound sense of freedom and actually enjoying your life with it, not always jumping straight into the next thing to heal.

There’ll always be more to unpack, the healing journey is never really over and maybe that’s exactly why you don’t have to wait until it is to start living. by @patchirico

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5 days ago

We can become so good at functioning through what we feel that we stop noticing how much effort it takes to keep it together.

But I’ve found in my life that being able to function doesn’t always mean I’m okay.

Sometimes I’ve just become incredibly good at carrying things alone, putting on a mask, forcing a smile.

I’ve learned that strength isn’t measured by how little of yourself other people have to carry. And being able to handle something alone doesn’t mean you should have to.

For me and for many of the people I’ve worked with, some of the deepest healing hasn’t come from becoming better at holding everything together.

It’s come from finally allowing ourselves to fall apart without pretending we’re fine and discovering that someone can stay.

So ask yourself…

When was the last time you let someone see you before you’d already put yourself back together? by @patchirico

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6 days ago

Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for someone is stay, not try to fix them, not analyse them, not try to make it better, just stay.

And that’s what Ted does here.

He doesn’t rush her through the emotion or make her crying something that needs to stop. He lets her be exactly where she is, without leaving her there alone.

And there’s a reason something so simple can be so powerful.

Long before we could soothe ourselves, understand what we were feeling or tell ourselves we were going to be okay, we relied heavily on other people to help us regulate.

A steady voice, a familiar face, someone who remained present when the world felt like too much.

And that need for connection doesn’t suddenly disappear because we grow up.

We can develop an incredible capacity to regulate ourselves, but our nervous system is still influenced by the people around us.

That’s co-regulation.

And when we repeatedly experience someone remaining connected to us through fear, grief, anger or overwhelm, we can begin to have a different experience of those emotions.

I can feel this without losing connection.

I can struggle without being abandoned.

I don’t have to hide what I’m feeling to keep someone close.

And that’s why this scene feels so powerful.

We spend so much time learning how to hold ourselves together but sometimes what we really need is to experience what it feels like to not have to. by @patchirico

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8 days ago

Life can change in ways infinitely bigger and more painful than a night going sideways in New York.

There are moments where the ground actually moves beneath us, where no amount of planning could have prepared us for what came next.

But maybe that’s exactly why this tiny, almost ridiculous example stayed with me.

The stakes ended up being low enough that I could laugh at what happened. And once I did, I could see something I’d struggled to see in the bigger moments.

For the first time, I didn’t just understand that I wasn’t in control. I could see the absurdity of how hard I’d been trying to be.

All the planning, predicting, planning, trying to stay ten steps ahead of a life that could change direction in five minutes.

And I think that’s partly why we crave control so much because the certainty it brings can feel like safety.

If I know what’s coming, I can prepare for it.
If I can prepare for it, maybe I can protect myself from it.

So we rehearse conversations, run through every possible outcome a million times and try to solve problems that haven’t even happened yet.

Our nervous system likes predictability. But there was something strangely relaxing about finally seeing the limit of all that planning.

We can prepare, we can make good decisions, we can do everything right.

And life can still rewrite the whole fucking story in five minutes.

We don’t get to know what happens next.

And I’ve started to slowly feel that accepting that doesn’t make you feel powerless.

It actually feels like freedom. by @patchirico

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13 days ago

Breathwork can take you beyond the story, beneath the layers of protection, and into the feelings you’ve worked so hard to keep at a distance.

And with enough safety and support, you may discover that what you’ve been trying to fix needed space to be felt.

Space to grieve without explaining why, to cry without apologising, and to simply stop holding it all together for a moment.

Breath by breath, you’re presented with the chance to let yourself feel and to discover that you don’t have to hold everything back to hold yourself together.

And that doesn’t stay on the mat. It walks out the door with you.

Because when we’re less afraid of what we feel, we have more freedom in how we live.

That’s the power of breathwork. by @patchirico

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16 days ago

A lot of us learned that we had to explain exactly what was wrong before anyone could meet us in it.

And when we couldn’t find the words, we said “I’m fine” and hoped someone would notice anyway.

So when someone catches the small change in our voice, the smile that takes a little more effort, or the moment we go quiet and gives us space without demanding an explanation, it can feel deeply healing.

Whether you’re a facilitator or the friend who notices these things, that sensitivity is a gift. You help people feel that they don’t have to reach breaking point to be seen.

And I hope someone notices the quiet changes in you, too. by @patchirico

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20 days ago

NFL hits Melbourne 🏈

A fun day at the live site throwing, punting and slowly convincing myself that 36 probably isn’t too late to make an NFL roster.

Just waiting for the call now. by @patchirico

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25 days ago

The diaphragm should descend as we inhale, with movement and expansion through the lower ribs.

But what happens when that movement becomes restricted?

When the ribs barely expand.

When the breath stays high in the chest.

When breathing feels tight, shallow, or like something you have to consciously control.

And why does the body begin breathing like this in the first place?

Because the way we breathe doesn’t develop in isolation from the way we live.

When we’re stressed, we brace. When we’re frightened, we hold our breath. When we’re overwhelmed, we tighten.

Do that repeatedly and what was once a temporary response can become a pattern.l

Wilhelm Reich described this through what he called muscular armouring, patterns of habitual tension and holding that he believed developed as part of the way we protect ourselves.

One of the areas he described sits around the diaphragm and lower rib cage.

Which is what we’re working with here.

Creating more movement through an area that has become restricted. More expansion through the lower ribs. More freedom for the diaphragm to move.

Because sometimes we’re trying to heal while the body is still rehearsing patterns of protection it learned long ago.

Restoring the breath gives us a way of working with those patterns through the body. Not forcing anything open but slowly creating more space where there has been holding, more movement where there has been armour and a breath that no longer has to work around it. by @patchirico

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