Meet this beautiful rebirthing practitioner helping people relive their first breath on earth.
A powerful practice that’ll reconnect you with your soul.
Sophia, my beautiful friend. I’m so excited. Give me a little background on yourself.
Thank you. I’m excited too.
My name is Sofia and I’m originally from Medellin in Colombia. I’m naturally always very curious about exploring different ways to gain greater consciousness of myself and my environment. For me, it’s very important to find a balance between being a being and being human, the balance between our energy and our body, the feminine and the masculine. I’m constantly searching for ways of doing that.
Through my journey I have done different things, I have studied international business with a focus on international relations.
I started meditating with a doctor when I was a child, I call him my initiator in the spiritual path. I used to assist him with meditations and healing sessions when he, later on, had cancer. I was very lucky to get invited to these things where I can experience this very special space, and myself.
The parts that I like the most are sacred geometry, everything that is related to shapes, colors, numbers, and breathwork practices. I’ve done a little bit of Wim Hof, I have studied rebirthing and yoga breathwork, and I’m a lot into movement. For me, dance is a very beautiful and special way of communicating with, let’s call it something superior, or just energy and your body, like bringing in the energy down to the body and being able to move it and transmute it with your movement.
You were hosting ecstatic dances, right?
Yes, I was.
Last year I hosted a couple of ecstatic dance events with a friend here in Medellin. I found out about this practice when I was living in Israel, in an artistic community. We used to have ecstatic dances every week, and I just fell in love with it. I felt so vibrant, released so much energy and I could connect very well with my body.
I wanted to bring that to Medellin, I just started doing it and people started coming, it is very fulfilling for me.
And you’re also an entrepreneur, right? You have your own clothing line?
Yes, I have my own clothing brand. The name is Maktub. It’s an Arabic word that means destiny, what is written. For example, if something happens to you, either positive or negative, it’s written that it will happen. What’s important is your interpretation of the events, your attitude towards what happened. So, it’s written, but now it’s your turn to do something about it. Maktub, I like that word. And that’s the word that I used to name my brand because it’s a brand that focuses on sustainability. And for me, what is written is also like the shapes that we find around us.
I work a lot with zero waste pattern making, the shape of the clothes are very important. I also work with natural fibers, just like cotton and linen or a combination of cotton and linen. They are very comfortable clothes. I would call them adaptable as well, you can use it in many different contexts, depending on how you combine it. But most importantly, the brand is a process with myself, a process through which I get to explore different aspects of me being creative, for example through sales and marketing. And it’s also very interesting, so I like it.
Let’s talk about rebirthing breathwork. How did you first encounter this practice?
I encountered it through personal practice. I was having some back issues and my doctor suggested that the recurrent pain I was having in my back could be due to unprocessed emotions and situations that were like accumulating themselves in that part of my body.
He suggested taking a couple of rebirthing sessions, which is like a type of breathwork in a bathtub. So, for me at that point, I was healing myself.
I remember that after my fifth or sixth session with him, I had a blessing moment. A blessing moment is when you connect so much with yourself, you bring down the energy into your body, you’re fully present and your breath connects so much with your energy. You get clear images, clear thoughts, and clear affirmations about the things you want to do.
In one of these blessing moments, I had this very clear intuition of going deeper into rebirthing and studying myself to give sessions to people. I talked about it with my doctor and he gave me his full support in terms of researching what would be the best institute and getting more information about the best practices.
Can you get us through a rebirthing session, what it looks like?
The whole concept of rebirthing is based on the idea that breath is what connects us to life. Because basically, your life begins in this world when you take your first breath, even inside your mother’s womb. But the first one after you are born is very important because it’s the first nasal breath that you take. So, in this first breath there are a lot of memories that get installed in your body. And as you go through life because you’re always breathing, all the information that is accumulated (what you think, what you feel, what you see and do) throughout your life gets imprinted as information in your body.
Normally, we’re not aware of that. Normally, we don’t know what information we have. So, a rebirthing session is simply a breathing session. The purpose is to breathe circularly and continuously through the nose. So you bring a different type of oxygenation to the body that awakens this cellular memory and it becomes present. You can see more clearly, you can be aware of traumas that you had, or situations that you have not processed, emotions that are deeply rooted.
So, what we do is that for 45 minutes (minimum of 45 minutes, it could take up to two hours) you breathe in this circular, continuous way. You embrace and accept whatever happens. That’s why a rebirther is there with you holding the space for you so you can just breathe and release. As long as you keep breathing, you will get to a blessing state in which you get clarity and peace.
You reach a state where you look at everything from a different and empowering perspective, it is very powerful.
And you do this in a bathtub, using water?
There are different ways of doing it. There are two main, let’s say, branches for rebirthing. One is nasal breathwork, which is through the nose, and the other is through the mouth. The two of them are good, it depends on what you have, what you want to do, and what you want to work on.
Mouth breathing is more for the lower chakra, from the first to the third. Nasal breathing is more for the upper chakras, let’s say from the fifth to the seventh. The fourth one is always involved because the heart is the connection. So, it depends on what type of traumas or things you are trying to process. Maybe you’re very attached to something or you have a lot of anger or a lot of fear, you can try mouth breathwork. But maybe if you’re just trying to transcend something and you’re already on that path, then you should try nasal breathing so you can take it to another level.
Whichever method you choose, you can do it in a bathtub with hot or cold water. And it’s a different experience because water brings different information depending on the temperature. You can also do it just lying on the floor on a yoga mat or mattress, this is called a dry session.
You can also combine both, it depends. If during a session you start processing a lot of more dense things or more deeply rooted things, you might sometimes need the mouth. You have to release it, let it out and be aware of it. But if you’re already on the path and you’re already processing things and it’s not very heavy, you can just do nasal breathing throughout the entire session.
And how is this different from other types of breathwork?
I think the key point of rebirthing is three words that I like, truth, simplicity, and love. So, the simpler it is, with no distractions at all, no music, no singing, the better. Just you and your breath, this is what is best for rebirthing. Because what rebirthing tries to teach and to do is take you back to what is simple, the basis of it all. And the basis is just your breath. You don’t need anything else, you don’t need a different type of music, you don’t need me to do anything on your body, you don’t really need any of that. You just need to be with yourself and your breath.
We’re used to having a strong stimulus for a lot of things, so we feel like we need more all the time. We feel like we need music, someone to do something for us, or someone to sing, we always feel like we need more. It’s good to have some space and just remember that your breath is powerful, it alone can take you somewhere else, it alone can show you so much about yourself and make you remember so much about what you have inside.
Your breath is enough, you don’t need anything else. Your breath is more than enough. This is what makes rebirthing powerful compared to other breathwork. The simpler it is the better. You don’t need any stimulus from outside, everything is from within you.
What would be the benefits of this practice on my day to day activities and in the long term?
I will talk about my experience, and I’ll talk from what I’ve seen in people that have been in sessions with me.
From my experience, the first benefit is that it creates this space in my mind. So with every breath you take, you feel there is a space between your thoughts.
That space is very important because that’s where the creative source is found. That’s where you find a source for you to create whatever you want because it’s emptiness is blank, there’s no thought, no emotion, there’s nothing. So you can create your new thoughts. That’s very powerful.
Imagine we can all connect with that source and that silence in that source, and from there create our next thought. Thoughts are basically what becomes reality, right? So for you to be able to create your next thought, it’s like you become a real creator of your life, you embody creation in you.
Secondly, nasal breathing offers a lot of physical and health benefits. Through nasal breathing you take a breath, you take in oxygen through your lungs and it’s processed such that it goes through your blood and is transported throughout the whole body through the blood. There is something called the breathing deviations, which is when people, because of the information that they have accumulated, have deviations with their breath. So some people will take a deep inhalation but exhale poorly. Some people will take very small amounts of air and be very aggressive in releasing.
There’s a lot of information in the way we breathe. Maybe you feel there’s not enough air, enough of you, enough of other people, enough of money, or whatever. So you’re afraid of that, so you take very little because you feel you don’t deserve it. Take a deep breath. By correcting the way you breathe you’re bringing a lot of health benefits into your body.
So, there are lots of health benefits to it. Some people have healed not only emotional and mental traumas, but also physical problems because they started breathing healthily. So the oxygen that you’re bringing into your body is making you healthier.
The third benefit has to do with trusting yourself. I think it’s very important that you trust yourself because after a couple of sessions you can start doing sessions for yourself without the help or presence of anyone else. You can still take sessions with someone, I love it. When I do it with someone I can go deep, like much deeper than I would on my own. The other person will be there supporting you and holding your space.
But it’s about regaining your power and your trust that you can do it yourself, and you don’t need anything else but yourself and your breath. Being aware of it and taking it circularly and continuously is very powerful. Because sometimes we become so dependent on things, we think we need to take this medicine or we need to take that pill, or we need to go to this person, or like we don’t know what to do.
There’s a lot of power in our breath.
Yes, so sad they don’t teach us this. I saw in India, for example, they’re taught to meditate very young. Those are the kind of teachings that we should have for the next generation that will be beautiful.
Yes, definitely. And children from a very young age can do rebirth, which is something powerful. And even us, this is something that I’m currently reading about and studying because I’ve noticed myself that when I live, that’s how I breathe, in a circle. So our subconscious mind knows about it. And it’s very powerful. Because if we become aware in our dream time, but also in our awakened time that they are like the daytime then we could create more consciousness in our lives, daily.
So we do this the natural way with just the stress of everyday life. We just hold our breath and we forget how to do it. But once the body is relaxed, it knows how to do it, it knows what to do. It just knows it needs to breathe in a circular connected way and that’s it.
Can you share with us a story from one of your clients, or a story of yourself experiencing rebirthing?
I will share this very powerful one. I’m the key element that I want to outline here. It’s about simplicity and love.
I was in one of the training that I did. And so in this training this day, we were in an open session with people who’d never done rebirth before. The session is done in such a way that they could come that day, learn, and have sessions.
So, someone with more experience will be with someone that has never done it before, or maybe just a couple of times, but has never given a session to anyone. I was with this man, his name’s Chris, he has never given a session to anyone before. And I have just given a session to him. Simplicity and love are very important here. Because that is all I needed, and all he had to do was to be present, watch my breath, and just be there for me if I needed someone to hold me or if I needed tissue paper or something.
He was so present in simplicity and love, there was so much simplicity there that I connected as I have never connected with my breath before. It was so powerful. First I felt a little headache on the side of my forefront. And I just kept breathing, because I knew that feeling was temporary. It later dissolved into chills, like energy goosebumps.
I kept on breathing, and that then dissolved into energy. And I felt like a big current of energy starting to come down my body. It started from my forefront, my face, my neck, my chest, my belly, my legs, everything, I started to be in that energy. And as I kept breathing, I had this feeling of not breathing, but being breathed by something else, like I was part of the breath of life.
It was a powerful experience because I felt nothingness for the first time in my life, and feeling nothingness, feeling darkness, just like an empty space is very powerful. You realize you’re really just creating your life all the time and life is aligned with you, you are breathing with life as life breathes with you. It was a very powerful experience. I’m very sure my cells remember quite well, it was just simple and full of love and truth.
Is there something you would like to share about this practice, any personal advice?
Sometimes in our daily lives we get very lost in the complicated structures of things, we tend to think and feel life is very complicated and it needs to be understood and lived in complicated ways. We create a lot of structures. I also use structures, we need structures for things.
The structure must give you freedom. However, if you make the structure so complicated, or so full of smaller structures, it doesn’t give you freedom, it kind of attaches you to another structure and does not allow energy to just flow freely.
So, my advice would be to reconnect with yourself with the smallest simplest detail of life by just taking a deep breath, closing your eyes and feeling yourself.
Take a deep breath, look at the person in front of you, feel his presence or her breath. Take another deep breath and realize the space around you.
Take more deep breaths that make you more present in you and everything around you. As simple as that, just simple structure. This alone could bring a lot of very powerful transformations into your life.
My advice again is to live in simplicity, love, and truth. And whatever path you need to walk or you feel like walking to find the truth, do it in simplicity and love. Just remember, life is not so complicated.
I wish everyone could truly feel and experience this in their lives. Whatever type of breathwork discipline you use, it doesn’t matter. Connect with your breath, that is my advice. It doesn’t matter if it’s Wim Hof, pranayama, yoga, Kundalini, whatever type of breathwork structure you’re trying to use, it doesn’t matter, just take a deep breath.
Do it consciously and feel the power of your breath
Follow Sofia’s brand on IG here: https://www.instagram.com/maktub.col/ and https://www.instagram.com/humano.breathwork/
