Kathryn McDonald IPHM Insured

The Giving Breath: Breathwork & Grief-Coaching for Real Life

Supporting growth, change, grief, and loss through the wisdom of the body and breath

About Kathy

I'm Kathy McDonald, founder of The Giving Breath, where I offer conscious connected breathwork and grief coaching to support emotional well-being, self-discovery, and personal transformation.

After a 35-year career in medical operations, my own journey through anxiety, grief, and unresolved emotional pain led me to explore a more embodied approach to healing. Breathwork became a turning point in my life. It helped me access emotions that words alone couldn't reach, soften long-held patterns, develop greater capacity for inner work, and experience a deeper sense of connection with myself and the world around me.

That experience transformed not only how I understood healing, but how I wanted to support others.

I am a certified breathwork facilitator through Josh Connolly's Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB) Program and a longtime student of the Enneagram and the Diamond Heart approach to inner work. My practice is informed by my own ongoing exploration of the relationship between the body, emotions, personality, and our capacity for presence and transformation.

Breathwork: A Pathway to Connection and Transformation

At The Giving Breath, I offer breathwork as an opportunity to reconnect with the body, explore our inner landscape, and create space for greater awareness, emotional expression, and release.

Breathwork can support many different intentions. You might be seeking relief from everyday stress, a greater sense of connection with yourself, space to process difficult emotions, or an opportunity to deepen your personal growth. You don't need to be experiencing grief or working through a particular difficulty to benefit from exploring the breath.

My approach emphasizes choice, individual pacing, and respect for each person's experience. Sessions may be gentle and grounding or offer opportunities for deeper emotional exploration. There is no expectation to achieve a particular outcome or have a particular experience.

Rather than forcing change, I aim to create a supportive environment in which you can listen more deeply to yourself and discover what becomes possible when you have greater space to feel, breathe, and be present.

Grief Coaching: Making Space for What Has Been Lost

Grief has been a lifelong teacher for me. I lost my mother to breast cancer when I was six years old, my first love to cystic fibrosis, my best friend to AIDS, and my newborn son after three days in the neonatal intensive care unit.

These losses have profoundly shaped my understanding of grief, not as something to overcome or a problem to solve, but as a deeply personal experience that deserves to be witnessed and honored.

My grief coaching offers compassionate support for people navigating bereavement and the many other forms of loss that can profoundly affect our lives.

Understanding Different Forms of Grief

This includes non-death grief, disenfranchised grief, ambiguous loss, relationship changes, shifts in identity, unmet expectations, and life transitions that leave us feeling disconnected from the lives we once knew.

I believe there is no single right way to grieve and no universal timeline for healing. My intention is to offer a space where you don't have to minimize your pain, explain it away, or pretend to be further along than you are.

Together, we can make room for what you're experiencing, explore the ways grief affects your body and emotional life, and find ways to navigate your circumstances with greater self-understanding and compassion.

An Integrated Approach

Although breathwork and grief coaching are distinct offerings, they share a common foundation: the understanding that meaningful change begins when we can meet our experience with greater presence, curiosity, and compassion.

The Underworld Journey

I am particularly drawn to the metaphor of the Underworld Journey—the descent we sometimes experience during grief, emotional upheaval, or profound life transitions. These periods can unsettle our familiar ways of being and bring us into contact with parts of ourselves we may have struggled to acknowledge. While such experiences can feel disorienting, they can also become opportunities for deeper understanding, integration, and transformation.

My work honors this process without rushing it. I don't believe we need to force ourselves into becoming someone new or search for a silver lining in every difficult experience. Instead, I seek to support people in meeting what is true, developing a deeper relationship with themselves, and discovering their own way forward.

Whether you come to me for breathwork, grief coaching, or a combination of the two where appropriate, you will be met with warmth, respect, and an appreciation for your unique experience.

The Giving Breath

The name The Giving Breath reflects my belief that breath accompanies us throughout our lives. It connects us to our bodies, to the natural world, and to one another. Through the simple yet profound act of breathing, we can create space to release what we have been holding, reconnect with ourselves, and make room for new possibilities.My hope is to offer a space where people can meet themselves with honesty and compassion—through grief, through change, and through the ongoing journey of becoming more fully present to their lives.

Book a FREE Discovery Call at https://thegivingbreath.cohere.live/.