Elena Vance

My graduate thesis was on interoception — the brain's capacity to register signals from inside the body. I spent the better part of two years reading neuroimaging studies on visceral perception, wrote extensively on how the insula processes physiological state, and for the entirety of that period I was, by any reasonable measure, almost entirely out of contact with my own nervous system.

I don't say that as irony. I say it because it's the most honest place to start.

After Cornell, I moved to Shanghai for a role at a digital health consultancy. The work suited me. The hours were the kind you normalize quickly. Somewhere in the second year, I started waking before dawn with my chest already running — no clear trigger, no obvious explanation. I blamed it on poor sleep. Then coffee. Then the city. None of those explanations held.

A colleague mentioned resonance breathing — casually, the way people mention things they've half-read. I found the Lehrer and Gevirtz paper that same evening, tried five minutes at 5.5 breaths per minute, and noticed my heart rate slow down in a way I could actually feel. I stayed on the floor afterward for longer than I expected. It had worked more straightforwardly than I was prepared for.

I kept the job for another eighteen months. But the center of gravity had shifted. I went back into the primary literature — Porges on polyvagal theory, Feldman Barrett on predictive processing, older pranayama texts that turned out to be describing the same mechanisms in an entirely different register. I also started noticing that almost everything written for a general audience on breathwork was either too clinical to be actionable or too vague to be credible.

In 2022 I went to Bali with a loose plan to stay for a month. I stayed for four, completed a pranayama teacher training, and spent a significant amount of time in a small room before sunrise learning what it actually felt like to regulate.

Soft Breathe exists because I wanted to read something that didn't make a choice between rigor and usefulness. Every technique on this site has been tested by me personally and is grounded in peer-reviewed research, documented traditional practice, or both. When I cite a study, I've read it in full. When I describe a mechanism, I can point to the underlying literature. When I'm uncertain, I say so.

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