Dealing with grief during the joyful ambiance of the holidays is one of the hardest and overwhelming feelings to handle. Helping you get through this season is Addie Green, a sensual movement teacher, who presents the benefits of grief-informed breathwork. She breaks down practical and conscious ways to tap into yourself and focus on your own breath, hopes, and dreams as you go through your journey with grief. Addie also explains how astrology, journaling, body scans, and sensual movement can also ground and prepare oneself for the holiday season.

I am sharing my experience of loving the same man for 32 years, a mother to two adult children, a retired military officer, a breast cancer survivor, and my connections with others.  

Anyone experiencing suicidal thoughts should reach out to a suicide hotline or local emergency number in their country: Psychology Today Suicide Hotlines and Prevention Resources Around the World.

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The Breath You Require For Navigating The Holidays With Addie Green

Hello, Widowhood. Our conversation with Addie Green is going to be the first of this mini-series that we are doing called Voices of Widowhood: Healing Through the Holidays. The holidays bring a different jam to grief. I want you to know that we’re thinking about you. This conversation with Addie is going to be a great foundation going into the holidays, giving you the opportunity to think about tapping into yourself and focusing on your own breath, hopes, and dreams that you will have for your life as you go through this transition. Let’s get into this conversation now.

Hello, Addie. Welcome to the Widowhood.

Hi, Tina.

Thank you for not saying, “Thank you,” because so many people will go, “Thank you.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” When you hear me saying, “Welcome to the Widowhood,” what does that mean to you and why?

I’m not sure that that’s a warm welcome. It means welcome to the club that nobody wants to be a part of, so just hi. Welcome to you as well.

Thank you for that, because being a widow, hearing, “Welcome to the Widowhood,” to me, would just go over everything you’ve experienced in life to now. I know she’s saying, “Welcome to the show,” but when you hear, “Welcome to the Widowhood,” it’s like, “No. Please take that back,” maybe.

It’s definitely a reminder of the fact that I am here in this.

I want to say thank you for being the first conversation in this mini series that we’re having, Voices of Widowhood: Healing Through the Holidays. I invited you to have this first conversation intentionally. One, this is a role that you are familiar with. Two, your professional experience and knowledge that you have are something that can be leveraged and support the community. It may not have been the first thing you could think of when you’re having your own experience.

Where you’re at now in this journey, supporting people, between the breathwork, between the knowledge you have with astrology, being able to draw people into their body and movement, and also to the ability to journal, are all of the things that I thought would be an extremely good foundation to have going into the crappy holiday season to try to ground yourself and prepare yourself. Hopefully, we get to cover all of those. Those are things that I want the readers in this conversation to go, “Addie is a great resource and has so much knowledge.” How can they contact you? How can they reach out to you? How can they schedule time to learn from you?

I am available on all social media platforms. My handle is @SlowFlo.Ologist. That’s simply because I was and am a sensual movement teacher first. This widowhood slapped me in the face and changed the trajectory of my life, what I was doing, and how that was going. Also, I have a virtual studio online. It’s Patreon at Sensual Movement. You’re welcome to find me over there. It is a growing and budding community of women interested in sensual movement and breathwork outside of my offerings on YouTube. I’m on YouTube as well, @SensualMovementLab. It’s all the same.

If anybody is interested in contacting me for astrology consultations, I am able to dig into your birth chart. What I like to do is a personality analysis. I like to validate a person’s experience in life, as well as let people know that they’re on the right path, that they’re tracking in life, and that their lives have been shaped by hands that are bigger than their own. If you’re interested in something like that or finding out more about that, it’s AddieGreenAstrology@GMail.com.

How Astrology Helps Widows With Their Grief Journey

Thank you. I’m going to go with astrology. The reason why I’m going to pick that is that a lot of times, people go, “That’s a lot of woo-woo.” There’s a lot of “My faith and what that looks like, there’s some contradiction with that.” This is not a thing where you’re going to take your palm and read this. The chair is going to start levitating. The table and things are going to start moving. You’re going to start giving you stuff. That’s not what this is. It took me a while to go, “Okay.”

In layman’s terms, you wanted to know when I was born and where I was born. You took those facts based on where the stars, the moons, and the planets were located, and then gave me information based on that particular time. I was not aware. We didn’t talk a lot about my childhood and other different things, and some of my formative years, but the information that you gave was aligned with that.

This is not to say, “This is what you are.” When your spouse has died, everything feels off-center. You wonder who you are as a person. I found it very insightful what you did with the birth chart and to be able to share that information. When you look at the Bible and other different faiths, there are things that they’re using the stars and moons to guide them with and do. You’re not heavily leaning on that. There’s nothing particularly wrong. It’s just something that has been woo-wooed out. People are just apprehensive. What would you say to the woo-woos and help them out with this?

I’ve always been interested in unconventional and non-traditional things. I was a pole dance teacher. That’s a very non-traditional form of fitness. However, I am deeply interested in human psychology. I am deeply interested in why people do the things that they do and how they operate. On top of that, how I operate. I have always been the type of person to journal. Tapping into my own feelings and what’s going on in my inner landscape has always been just something that I do. It’s the way that I process.

We have psychology that has personality profiles. We know if somebody says, “That’s an alpha person,” or “You’re a type A personality.” These things have their labels. When I tapped into astrology, it started because of a relationship. What I was unaware of was that you can take two people’s charts, put them together, and get a picture of how these two individuals would relate to one another. I thought that was so profound because marriages have their ups and downs. Mine was in a downward spiral. You tap into anything.

Whatever is going on, you’re like, “I’ve got to figure this out.” My first introduction to this was doing a compatibility thing. What I found about myself after looking up information in regards to my own natal chart and then having it read by a professional was that everything about me, things that I have never shared with anyone else and only I know that I experienced, this person was able to validate those things, not like a psychic. They don’t know me. I don’t know you like that.

Astrology is a science. There’s a lot of discourse around religious context. I stay away from that. I come to astrology through a psychological lens. I like to validate a person’s experience and their being. If you were sitting down with someone to explain your personality, you would go through a list of questions that would end up giving you a profile of what your personality is like. It takes a special type of person who is able to read that through the signs and symbols in the sky. Also, a lot of the things and the ways that our earth operates are based on astronomy. Astronomy and astrology went hand in hand a long time ago.

Medical doctors used to have a very depth of knowledge about astrology a long time ago because these were things that were really important for the whole being. Yes, people say, “I’m a Capricorn. I’m a Scorpio. I’m a Libra.” We’ve had pop astrology is what it would be called, a more modern-day astrology where you go look for your horoscope in the back of the magazine. Maybe it matches. Maybe it doesn’t. This isn’t that. This is, as you said, a detailed and full layout of exactly where planetary placements were.

That’s really important because, in ancient times, they did rely on the positions and placements of the stars, of the sun, and of the moon. We get our calendar year based on how the Earth orbits the sun. We get a month based on the moon’s progression around the Earth. All of these things line up. I don’t come through astrology from a lens of predictive astrology. There is predictive astrology. I potentially am able to see some things that may be coming up for you, but I don’t necessarily dig into predictive astrology.

I like for people to be able to understand themselves, have a validated experience of why and how they are the way that they are, and know that things that have happened in their lives, no matter how awful they might be, are all leading toward the purpose and destiny of a person’s life. We all have a very unique destiny to fulfill. Most people know that. No two people’s destinies are the same, which is why two people can be born on the same day. If you’re born at different times in different locations on Earth, it changes the aspects that the planets made for one another. It essentially gives you a completely different life from someone else.

For the widows that you’ve worked with, how has this helped impact their grief journey?

It puts into perspective a little bit the fact that maybe there is a destiny, or maybe things are supposed to happen the way that they are. The biggest thing is timing. Astrology is like a clock. There’s a timing. There’s a time and place under the sun for everything. We know mentally in our minds that people die. People are going to die. We are all going to die. I’m going to have my day. You’re going to have your day. When we’re able to scale back and see from a bird’s eye view or from a bigger picture, it gives and brings a little bit of comfort. It’s brought comfort to the fact that this is the timing and the season of my life that I am in. In this season, I had a significant loss. We’re able to see how we get back on track from here. Where does it go from here?

The Breath Initiative: Where Breath And Healing Collide

Thank you. In the idea of where do we go from here, I would like to go into your book. Do you want to tell us about this, how this came about, and why this would be important in this journey?

The book that you have in your hands is The Breath Initiative: Where Breath and Healing Collide. The inspiration behind that was that people are stressed, people are sick, people are suffering from anxiety, and people are suffering from depression, especially myself, being a Black woman. Black women are especially at a higher rate than anyone else. People think that breathwork, maybe yoga, and these things, along with astrology, come off as woo-woo. Leave it to me to always be the one who’s into something else. I do believe, and per my birth chart, I am here to introduce people to things.

It is the same with sensual movement and pole dance. A lot of times, a person’s first experience of an alternative experience has been through me, the people that I’ve worked with. The book came about because I wanted to be able to create something that put these breathwork sessions that I do on Patreon, that I do in the community, or that I would do on TikTok, and bring it into a tangible format. It is something that someone can have with them, take with them at any time, flip to any page, and have a personal breathwork teacher and session right there in front of them whenever they need it. The way that it’s laid out is that it has twelve different breathwork techniques in it. Each of them is made so that you do it over a twelve-week course of time.

You can also just open it up and flip to whatever technique it opens on. Use it like that as well. They’re not progressive. It isn’t one that follows the other or anything like that. They’re all different techniques. The thing is, there are so many different forms of breathwork. Breathwork is an umbrella term for a lot of different types of breathing techniques and styles. In here, I just introduce you to a bunch of different techniques, explain a bit about them, and teach you how to check in, do a body scan, and learn how to sit with yourself and sit with your breath. It’s instructional on how to do the breath. There are blank pages for you to go in and do your reflections and your journals in the back of those.

Thank you. I have a couple of questions I want to ask you. Somebody may be saying, “I’m breathing all the time. I’m alive. I’m sitting here. I’m breathing. Why is breathwork important? What does that give me that just breathing regularly does not provide?”

Breathing is one of the only functions in the body that is automatic and that we can also control. Yes, we are breathing all the time, but our breath is the essential life force that flows through our bodies. It’s the first thing we do when we enter the world that animates us, brings us to life, and makes us alive. It’s the last thing that we do and exhale before it’s over, and not one inhale comes back through. Breath is life. The average person is not breathing at full capacity.

No one’s really breathing at full capacity, but our breath is an indicator of what’s going on in the body. What happens is things like stress, anxiety, trauma, grief, and all of these external experiences that cause these feelings and emotional states within us, shift and change our breath. For example, if you stood up and you did ten jumping jacks right now, when you sat back down, what’s your breath going to do?

Try to catch yourself. Girl, I’m in perfect shape. It’s not going to be any different.

Try to catch yourself. When you’re crying, what is your breath doing?

It is shallow and hyperventilating.

When you’re sleeping, what is your breath doing? When we’re sleeping, we are in a state of restoration. When we’re sleeping, that’s when the body is able to go to work. Our cells do what they do. Our tissues are able to be restored. It is this recharging moment for the body. In that most natural space, your breath is slow. It’s steady. It’s even. It’s regulated. Someone on life support is connected to a machine. That machine is giving rhythmic, steady intervals of breath to keep them alive.

The average person is probably breathing about 15 to 20 breaths a minute. When you get over 22 breaths a minute, you are actually in a state of mild hyperventilation. We know that hyperventilating is not good for the body. When we are breathing too quickly, too rapidly, and too shallow, it sends the message to our brain and to our body that we are in a state of distress. What happens when you get scared? You get that feeling. All of a sudden, your breath is piqued. That’s an emergency state for the body. It’s sending the signal that you are stressed. Your body releases cortisol and stress hormones. It puts you in fight or flight. Trauma puts you in fight or flight.

Yes, we breathe every day. Yes, we probably take 60,000 breaths per day or 20,000 breaths a day. How many of those breaths are conscious? Conscious intentional breathing has the ability to restore the nervous system, to restore the body. It sends larger amounts of fresh, clean oxygen into the body. In a fully oxygenated body, disease cannot thrive. They’re new as far as technology is, but it really is taking ancient things and modernizing them. I believe they’re hyperbaric chambers. People who have different health issues to include cancer, can sit in these chambers and breathe 100% oxygen for X amount of time. It’s healing the body. They’re breathing oxygen.

Your breath that you have access to is probably one of the biggest and number one healing tools that you have at your disposal all the time, which is available and accessible to you all the time. For the most part, most people are breathing shallow. If you’re stressed, you’re already not taking full breaths. Take a deep breath with me, Tina. I’m going to have you breathe in. Sit up straight. I’m going to have you breathe in really deeply. Just hold it for a moment and then let it go. There’s something in the inhale, and then there’s also this feeling in the exhale that feels good. It feels relaxing.

It feels restorative. You’re not doing that like that all day, every day. That’s what makes the breath one of the most potent things that we can do for ourselves because it balances the nervous system. Deep breathing activates the parasympathetic nervous system. When we’re constantly up here in stress, struggling, tired, frustrated, or in these feelings that shallow our breath, we can balance that out and create homeostasis in the body. In doing that, it would keep us at a healthier place.

Thank you. Going into the holidays and dealing with profound grief, this is very important to consider how you’re going to make it through the holidays. Breathwork sounds like you can do that anywhere. It doesn’t have to just be in a studio doing yoga. I’m having a triggering grief moment. I can implement breathwork to help me. Is that true?

Absolutely. The funny thing is, we see so many things. If you go online and look up breathwork, you’re going to see a bunch of different stuff across the board. I feel like the internet is beautiful for information. It’s also beautiful for disinformation. Yes, you don’t have to be in a studio. Yoga has introduced breathwork into communities and to a lot of people because of pranayama. Pranayama is one of the eight limbs of yoga. It is a practice all in its own. When you are doing yoga, even Pilates, or really any fitness, for that matter, there are proper ways to breathe.

We should be inhaling when we are opening up and expanding the body as we let breath in. We should be exhaling as we constrict the body or as we close the body in. We learn how to do this intentionally through yoga. You don’t need to be in a studio. You can wake up first thing in the morning and sit right on your bed. You can be in your car. You can be out on a walk. In fact, there are walking meditations that you can do where you’re breathing with the steps that you’re taking in rhythm. You do not have to have any type of formal setup to do your breathwork. It can be done anywhere, anytime, any place.

Using The Feeling Wheel To Identify Core Emotions

I just wanted to touch on a few things in The Breath Initiative book. People hear about the five stages of grief. They feel like those are the only things that they’re going to experience or feel. In your book here, you talk about the feeling wheel. Can you discuss how that is more expansive and more relevant to the things that one may feel when dealing with profound grief?

When we think about emotions and feelings, we have our core emotions. These core emotions will have us feeling a certain way. Grief, just like breathwork, is almost an umbrella term. It’s the bigger picture. It could be the core of some of the feelings that we experience. The wheel will have anger and sadness. It’s got those core ones in there. Sometimes, we’re frustrated. Sometimes, we’re pissed. Sometimes, we’re depressed. Sometimes, we are just down. All of these feelings fall back into one of those categories of core emotions. It’s important to be able to identify those things.

As a wellness person, and holistic wellness at that, I genuinely believe that when you can name a thing, then you can heal the thing. Sometimes, it’s hard to name the thing. The feelings wheel gives us this opportunity to be able to name the thing, to take a feeling that we’re having and really pull it into the core emotion of what that is, so that we can begin to dissect what it is and why it is. Even then, from there, why that’s important in the breath initiative is because now we can take that and see maybe what style of breathwork we want to do to tend to that emotional feeling.

Seeing The Truth Through A Self-Tracker

Thank you. In your explanation of that, I can see there’s a self-tracker here. This self-tracker I found can be a very powerful tool because when you’re dealing with profound grief, you feel like time is standing still. You haven’t made any improvements. You haven’t done anything. Things six months after are exactly the way that they were the year or moment that your spouse or your loved one passed. Having a self-tracker helps you see the truth. What would you say to that?

The whole reason I put that in there is for exactly what you just said. Sometimes, not everybody is ready to take healing into their own hands because the breath initiative is a self-paced thing. There’s a willingness there. I did my part. I made the journal. I put everything in it. I gave you all the tools. There also has to be this willingness from you or from the reader to do the thing. I used to bullet journal. There are lots of different layouts on Pinterest for bullet journals and different types of spreads that you can put into your bullet journal.

One of the spreads that I used to enjoy was the habit tracker. You can make a habit tracker for anything. I would make my habit tracker for making my bed in the morning. I would make my habit tracker for drinking water, at least eight cups of water a day. There is a habit tracker for taking a daily walk. What you find about the habit tracker is how much effort you are actually putting into things. Those trackers give us a very deep insight into the patterns of how we move through things.

For me, and full moment of transparency here, there are times you get really excited when you start something new. You start something new. You go full steam ahead. You’re doing good. You’re filling in your tracker. It’s looking great, and then you go back. You’re like, “I fell off,” which is fine. You can get right back on. The tracker is there to be an aid and a guide. How often are you participating in your healing?

Body Scan: One Of The Most Important Self-Check-Ins

That is good. You mentioned the body scan. Can you elaborate a little bit more? I know there are a lot of pages dedicated to that, but the benefit is for the reader.

A body scan, in my opinion, is one of the most important things that you can learn when it comes to any type of breathing or even movement modality, for that matter. A body scan is where we stop, take an intentional pause, and check in with the body. We’re checking in with the self. This is both the outer, the physical body, and the inside man, or the inward body. Doing that does two things. One, we can identify potentially where we have aches and pains. We can identify where stress, sorrow, or anxiety exists in our body because it exists in certain places. When you stop to check in, you start to recognize where these places are.

Some people have great natural intuition. Body scans help you to build that bodily intuition. We sit. We close our eyes. Closing the eyes or blocking out one of the senses makes it a little bit easier to tune into the task at hand. We focus. We’re honing in. With a body scan, you can start anywhere, but traditionally, I start at the top of the head with a body scan. We’re checking in with the head. We’re checking in with our thoughts. We’re checking in this space right here that anytime something happens, we get that little furrow wrinkle in the middle of our forehead. I’m infamous for that.

I was telling my kids I have a permanent line in the middle of my forehead. We want to check that space. A lot of times, we are moving through the day. Instead of our tongue gently resting at the roof of the mouth, our jaws are clenched. We’re tight-jawed. Sometimes, you don’t notice that you’re sitting with your shoulders actually up, as opposed to, if I say take a deep breath and relax your shoulders. I guarantee they’re able to drop down some. It’s like, “My shoulders were way up in my ears.” We’re checking in. We don’t have to change things with a body scan.

It’s not about necessarily changing anything in the moment, but rather taking the moment to get present with what is happening and with where you are. We scan. We do that all the way down. We check in with the heart. We check in with the gut. We have energy centers in the body, also called chakras. You want to check in with those. We come into the sacral. We check in with our hips. Maybe you’ve been sitting all day and not paying attention to the fact that “My booty over here is hurting a little bit.” It’s important because a lot of times, and especially when we’re stressed or when we’re going through things, we neglect what the body is trying to say.

A body scan helps you tap in and find out what is going on in there. As we already said, when you can name a thing, you can heal a thing. “I’m having some stiffness in my back.” You can stretch. “My heart really hurts.” We can do some heart-opening, we can put on some positive songs, or we can do something that feels better to uplift the heart. Yes, body scan is one of the most important check-ins that you can essentially know how to do for yourself.

When you are dealing with profound grief, you’re just moving. You’re trying to survive. You’re doing all this. There are so many statistics, and you are a statistics queen, about people who have lost a loved one and how that impacts their body and the disease that they deal with. Some of these are preventative measures that you can do by yourself to make yourself well. I know a lot of people are struggling financially with insurance and other things like that. Having a tool, a resource, this book shows you how you can utilize the things your body was meant to do to make it better.

Writing A Letter To Your Late Partner

Doing that body scan is checking in. I find that people may be afraid to check in the silence, the reflective part of life, but there’s power in that. In the Interactive Healing Workbook, I love the artwork here, the flower, the idea that it’s important to take that time to sit still for a moment. I want to go over a few of the journal entries that you have here, and if you would share what comes to mind for you in this version of your life compared to when it was written. “Write a letter to your partner expressing all the things you wish you could still share with them, your hopes, your fears, and everything in between.”

I would have so much to say now. Before, that letter would have come from a place of deep sadness. I don’t know that I would have had many positive things to say because there was no clarity. I can’t even say that there’s still a lot of clarity. If I were to write that, I’ve learned to take time to see what I have done, what has happened, and what positive things have changed. It would be different. I would have a lot to say. Years later, there’s a lot to say.

Breathing As A Sensual Movement Teacher

Thank you. “Week Fourteen. Reflect on the most challenging aspects of widowhood so far. What coping strategies have you found helpful during difficult moments?”

Before, the most difficult part was trying to actively grieve, be in my feelings, still be a parent, and live life. Now, the most challenging part of widowhood is trying to get back on my feet because I am one of the widows who was pretty dependent on my spouse. I was a stay-at-home mom. There has been a difference in trying to develop this new life, at the same time, maintaining being at home and being a mom, because there’s no other parent in the house.

Solo parenting is definitely a challenge. What I do is try to take time for myself, whether that is getting up early in the morning. I have been walking for a little over a year. I try to make sure that I carve out time to do that at least Monday through Saturday. That little hour and 30 minutes of time, while it’s not a lot on a daily basis, is enough to at least help me get my head right or be in a good space to be able to tackle the day, and of course, breathing.

What’s interesting about the breathing is that, as a sensual movement teacher, I definitely use breath and movement. They go hand in hand. With sensual movement, because it is about tapping into the senses, being present, and having this awareness of the things that are going on in the body, the breath is usually the catalyst that moves the body in that particular type of dance and movement. I don’t remember what it was that hit me one day. I think I was in the middle of having some type of anxiety situation.

I had never experienced anxiety before my husband passed away. I had never known what an anxiety attack was. I would get these weird, almost like heart palpitations. My breath would hitch. It was almost like I was afraid of something, but nothing was happening to make me get like that. I remember feeling like, “No. I don’t like this.” I also know that, “Wait, let me just calm down.” I would say to myself, “No, just calm down. You’re okay. Just calm down.”

I would do these little breaths with myself. That made me start to dig deeper into the idea of breath. When we change our breath, it is the fastest way to change our emotional state. I breathe often. I breathe all day. You breathe all day, too. I take intentional time to breathe all day. I’ll just tap into that. Breathing and walking are big things that I do for myself, too.

Creating A Vision Board Of Your Hopes And Dreams

Walking is good for me. It takes you outside of the environment where the stress may be happening. It allows you to connect with nature, go that extra step, take off your shoes, and be in that grass. Sometimes, I’ll walk by a tree that has been there longer than I have, and it will be in the perspective of life and all the other pieces. It’s insightful to me. “Week 51. Create a collage, a vision board, or an artistic representation of your hopes, dreams, and aspirations for the next chapter of your life as you see it now.”

Before, that looked like tragedy over triumph. Triumph over tragedy. It looked like my Bloom flower. The biggest thing was, I did it. It says surviving after the biggest end, purpose found, restore, replenish, and refresh. There’s other stuff on there. The biggest thing was getting through it. Yes, grief doesn’t necessarily leave us. It will sway in and out, probably forever. It was important to get through that first initial moment. If I had to vision board or write down things for now, it’s about seeking happiness. Honestly, the big thing for me is mastering peace.

Loss can disrupt so many things. As a snowball effect, it’s my peace that has taken the bait. I don’t care about anything else. This happened, all the things. I know that loss also puts things into a different perspective for a lot of people. It shifts how we think about things. It shifts our desires, what we want. Some people have completely gotten rid of all of their things. Some people move out of the country. Things happen. For me, I want peace. My peace is one of the most important things that I can have and that I can hold. That’s really important. If you don’t have peace, it doesn’t matter. Everything else you’re doing, what are you doing it for?

Why You Need Sensual Movement In Your Life

Thank you, Addie. You have given this community a good foundation and a start to deal with the holidays and things that are coming on. I do want to ask one other question because you mentioned the word or term a couple of times. When somebody’s like, “My spouse is dead, and you’re talking about sensual movement. Do tell.” You knew that’s where I was coming, didn’t you? They’re like, “Why would I want to have sensual movement? How is that going to help me? They’re not here, the person I would give that to. Why?”

One of the things that has always been a foundational part of pole dance, sensual movement, and any type of sultry dance, and dance in general, is that dance is a healing agent. It is a movement from ballet to tap dance to hip hop to contemporary dance to salsa. Dance moves energy. Dance lifts your vibrations. You don’t get done dancing and feel depleted. You might feel tired and out of breath, but it’s not a depletion. In class, we don’t do anything for the male gaze. I don’t care if you have a boyfriend, if you have a husband, if you have a wife, or if you have a girlfriend. I don’t care.

It’s not about the gaze of another person. For someone else to witness you in your sensual dance, that’s a privilege. What we learn is what we enjoy. Sensual movement is about what is going on in your own body, which is why no two people’s dance ever really looks the same. We pull different modalities. There’s a lot of mat work involved. We take that from traditional mat Pilates. We take that from yoga. We take that from traditional fitness. These are all of the things that we do to make the body strong.

When it comes to tapping into that sensual side or the feminine side, it’s really more about shutting out what’s going on out here and finding out what it is in here. How do my fingertips feel underneath the skin of my arm, versus what does my arm feel like to my fingertips? It’s about the self. It’s not about anyone else. It feels good. It feels fun. It feels nice to learn how to move and have this fun, flirty, sensual side. Most of it is just about body awareness and tapping into your own self. That’s important in a healing journey in general because we restore parts of ourselves that have been lost through this movement.

We restore the parts of ourselves that may have been hidden or that have been dormant. They come up. It creates a new confidence in a person. That’s important, especially for women specifically who have lost a spouse. You lose that sense of confidence. You lose that sense of body awareness. You stop wearing things that look good and feel good on you. You cover yourself up. You stop feeling good about yourself. There are so many layers. If I had to say it for grief specifically and how a widow could benefit from a sensual movement, it would simply be that you get to learn yourself again through a fun way that will help to keep you fit.

I will say the goddess movement in the morning to wake up makes you feel very powerful. It’s like doing the superwoman thing when you do that in the morning. It has that same type of feel. Addie, thank you so much for this conversation. I’m going to say something to our readers, and then I would like you to wrap it up. Maybe there’s something we didn’t cover that you feel like we should have shared, how they can connect with you again, and anything else.

Thank you for trusting me to hold a safe space for you. This mini series of Voices of Widowhood: Healing Through the Holidays is especially for you. The holidays bring a different feel to grief. I want you to be equipped. Connecting with the mental health, the grief advocates, and people who are in this healing space is what you’ll find during this series. I am so honored to be able to start it with Addie and give you some foundational things to help you during this process. Thank you. I am sorry for the person that you have that is no longer here, but I’m grateful for you finding us. Please reach out.

The Breath Initiative: An Invitation to Breathe Through Grief

I will close us with a couple of things. You mentioned The Breath Initiative book. I do want to share that for those who are grieving through the holidays, there is another book. It is The Breath Initiative: An Invitation to Breathe Through Grief. This one is very specifically geared towards grief. It is a journal as well as a book. It’s got six different exercises in it. These are all for the different types of emotions that grief can evoke. I tell a little bit of my own personal story in the pages of this one. If you are interested in that, both of these items are available on Amazon.

I want to say as well, breathing is not going to stop grief. It’s not going to stop the pain. One of the things that is important to mention and for you to keep in mind is just that a widow’s health declines rapidly, especially within the first year after losing their partner. It’s not fair that we already have the loss, and then our own health gets to start tanking with it. If anything, your breath is a free resource to at least begin to help keep your own wellness intact.

It’s not going to end anything. Breathing is proven to significantly increase our health and reduce stress and anxiety. It’s free. Definitely give it a try. We will right now before we leave. We’ll sit up nice, tall, and straight. You can lie down and do this. The only thing that you want to keep in mind is that you don’t want to be hunched over. We have something called a diaphragm underneath our lungs. It moves up and down with every breath that we take. When we are slouching or when we’re hunched over, we’re actually crunching the diaphragm. A part of the reason why most people are not breathing to the fullness of their capacity is that we don’t have good posture. We want to sit up nice, tall, and straight.

We’re just going to go ahead and take three deep breaths. One of my favorite breath techniques is coherence breathing. This is not about trying to do a bunch of counts and things like that. As beginners, it’s important to get as comfortable as possible with simply being conscious and aware of the breath. We’re going to deep breathe. We’re going to take three of those breaths. We’re going to take them in through the nose. We’re going to take them out also through the nose. We want to keep the inhale and the exhale even. You don’t have to count.

If you are a counter and if you can handle that, we want to pull that breath in on a count of four and exhale it out on a count of four. There will be no holding of the breath in between. It’s just a nice flow. You can close your eyes if you’d like or lower your gaze. Make sure your shoulders are down away from your ears. We’ll slowly pull that breath in. You can take it slow. We’re not in a hurry to breathe it in. Breathe out. Fully exhale. Breathe in. Breathe out. One last breath. We’ll consider this a cleansing breath. Pull it in, in, in. We exhale anything that does not feel good in this moment. Thank you for having me.

Important Links

• • Addie Green on TikTok
  • Addie Green on YouTube
  • Sensual Movement Lab on Patreon
  • Sensual Movement Lab on YouTube
  • The Breath Initiative: Where Breath and Healing Collide
  • Bloom: An Interactive Healing Workbook
  • The Breath Initiative: An Invitation to Breathe Through Grief
  • MOVING through GRIEF: A Healing Journal
  • Smart Girl Manifesting: Simple Rules For Doing The Work
  • Sensual Movement Lab on Linktree
  • Addie Green’s Email

About Addie Green

I am embarking on a new chapter that reflects the journey of my life as I enter my Fierce 40s. As life pivots ,so must this channel pivot with my life. Here I share how I’m navigating life in my forties as a homeschooling mother, solo parent, and widowed woman, learning through life’s twists and turns. While we may be entering a new phase, the essence of “growing with the greens” will always remain. As this channel undergoes a heartfelt rebrand, it’s bittersweet to say goodbye to an era that has been filled with beautiful memories, but with every ending comes a new beginning. Expect heartfelt conversations, fun family moments, how I’m finding joy and the candid realities of life in my 40s. As we move forward together in a new adventure, we will forever be “Growing with the Green’s”