On the night of 28th January a Category 3 cyclone hit Portugal, bringing disruption and devastation beyond anything previously recorded here. Thousands of us lost power, water, and internet. The lights went out for many days. Usual routines disappeared. The land became saturated and softened, revealing what was unstable. What remained was practical clean-up and deep uncertainty as extreme winds and heavy rain continued for nearly three weeks — fifteen storms in seventeen days!! It was relentless.
In moments like that, the body responds quickly. My jaw tightened. My breath shortened. My system prepared for flight. This response is natural. Yet when it continues for weeks, it becomes exhausting. Attention narrows. Focus scatters. With no power, no water, no signal, the body shifts toward instinct. Adaptation becomes a full-time job.
What mattered for me was not resisting that response, but noticing where I placed my focus within it. I found myself returning to breathwork. Not big dramatic breaths. Not performance. Simply widening my inhale. Softening my exhalation. Letting the external noise move through me rather than bracing against it. Bringing my attention back to something rhythmic and reliable.
Outside, the wind was forceful and unpredictable. Inside, my breath could become the same – shallow, erratic or held for too long, but it didn’t. I chose differently. During those weeks the relationship between wind and my breath felt very close. One powerful element moving across the landscape. One moving through my body. Both capable of disruption. Both capable of settling.
And it wasn’t just the wind. The rain and flooding were constant. Water pooled and pressed against everything. Inside, emotion felt similar. Grief. Shock. Helplessness. A saturation of feelings.
My own self-regulation did not mean avoiding any of it. It meant increasing my capacity to stay present while it raged on.
This is where courage entered.
Not dramatic courage. Not heroic gestures. The quieter kind. The courage to remain steady when I could not control the outcome. The courage to soften when everything in me wanted to brace. The courage to keep my focus when the environment felt fractured and unsteady.
During this time, the Introduction to Breathwork course paused for three weeks while electricity and internet services were restored. That pause became part of the practice. Self-regulation was not pushing through. It was responding to what was here.
At the height of it, I sent a simple message into my breathwork community, Breathing Space with Eve. It was not long or heavy. Just a reminder:
“Breath exists inside and all around you. When your environment tightens, your breathing contracts. Courage is the decision not to brace against that resistence, but to create space for you to let the breath widen again.”
Across our community many of us were processing the collective grief of witnessing our environment torn apart. Trees uprooted. Coastlines reshaped. Homes gone forever. There was a quiet moment of reckoning — engage or freeze. The familiar had shifted, for some permanently… but I ask you this.
When the lights go out, what remains?
For me, its a choice.
The breath I can lengthen to remain calm.
The courage to stay present.
The creativity to engage with what was in front of me.
The ground beneath my feet, even as it shifted.
Every day that passed, with as much gratitude as I could muster, my decision was to continue to move with it, choosing breath as my companion, every step of the way.
Our retreats and courses are not escapes from life, but spaces to build the steadiness that life sometimes demands.
Courage Retreat, 28 May – 1 June in Goladinha, Portugal with Hamaima Love and Jewels Norburn.