“There is always a reason for us to find ourselves in certain spaces,” Ela says as she reflects on her career and how she became a doctor bringing mindfulness back into medicine. Ela’s passion is using breath to facilitate healing, to restore our optimal wellbeing and using the body’s natural wisdom.
Ela started out as a conventional medical doctor and started expanding her offering to support sustainable wellness. Many patients who arrived at her practice were activists, artists, and people who did community work – people who wanted to change the world. “These people were more prone to burnout.” She was dedicated to finding ways to support them, using integrative medicine. She began asking herself how we could start to make the principle of holistic medicine accessible to people. The art of breathwork became a clear pathway, and how it can facilitate transformation.
Ela relates the principles of nature and the principles of healing. “My role as a medical doctor was not to treat symptoms but to support the body’s natural healing process. And nature provides that insight.” The body’s natural responses and processes can be better facilitated and enhanced through breathwork, which is Ela’s focus. She cautions, however, that “once we start to take responsibility for our healing, the more responsibility we have to hold that space for others.”
“Medicine makes a diagnosis and treats symptoms, and it’s the same process we take in dealing with societal issues. Is that sustainable if we do not understand the why?” Ela believes that before we apply a solution, we can simply allow space to listen, allow innate wisdom of communities and enable them to rise up.
“The breath is a universal language and means to communicate. Every thought, emotion has a corresponding pattern of breathing. Our unconscious breath tells a story. We can transform this unconscious function for self-awareness and transformation.”
Ela facilitated a conscious breathing experience for attendees. The sessions demonstrated the power of conscious breathing for healing, especially when facilitated as a collective practice.
