Year over year the reports of lawyers, clerks and judges suffering mental health issues seem to multiply. See: ‘Our law students need help.’ Study finds higher rates of mental health problems. Sloan, Karen. Reuters 13 July, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/our-law-students-need-help-study-finds-higher-rates-mental-health-problems-2022-07-13/. And, Ontario Chief Justice says ideal of the ‘gladiator’ courtroom lawyer destructive to mental health. Fine, Sean The Globe and Mail 18 July, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-mental-health-canada-legal-community/.
And I know from personal experience, it’s not just media hype. Mental health issues are rampant in the legal profession. What’s worse, are the commonplace strategies for handling them: drinking, prescription medication, and talk therapy. The last thing that lawyers need to balance their mental health is more conversation.
On the contrary, lawyers need ways to get into their bodies – and not just their physical bodies. While exercise including intense exercise is key for overall health and indeed mental health, the stair-master alone is not going to revolutionize the bad vibe situation pervading the legal profession and office spaces in general, throughout our modern world. We professionals, and lawyers in particular, need to access and clear our emotional bodies, on a regular and then after a thorough clearing, semi-regular basis.
Breathwork is an easy, accessible, and wildly effective way to access the nervous system. Somatic breathwork is a modality that takes it a step further and uses natural language processing, or “NLP” cueing to fully engage the emotional body through the combination of breathwork and breath holds, along with the cues. This triggers any old, stuck, and troublesome energy to rise to the surface so it can be felt or experienced, and so expressed, by which process it is naturally cleared.
What do I mean by old, stuck, or troublesome energy, you might ask? It’s the energy that accumulates from having to “take it in stride” throughout the day while behaving as a professional. Given that lawyers and judges have to operate almost exclusively in the analytical mind, this energy is rarely moving. Even more important is the energy of emotions that are embedded within so many of the materials lawyers receive, or the clients with which they work. Criminal lawyers especially, but family lawyers too and most lawyers in general are dealing with the pieces of a puzzling life situation where people feel wronged, or perhaps were seriously victimized, and no matter how detached these energies still interact with and impact lawyers’ emotional bodies.
Breathwork is the most effective solution for the bulk of the mental health situation going on in the legal profession because it allows for a safe and contained space to trigger, experience, and clear the repressed emotions which are not, (for good reason) allowed to be expressed by lawyers while working in their professional capacity. Lawyers need a place where they don’t have to hold it all together, and where the root causes, repressed emotions, can surface quickly – my breathwork sessions are just that.