The Breathwork Healer: Melissa Losito Braithwaite on Sisterhood, Trauma, and Learning to Breathe Again
For most of her life, Melissa Losito Braithwaite was afraid to breathe. Now she has built a practice — and a community — around helping other women do exactly that.
40 YEARS FROM TRAUMA TO PURPOSE · 4 SESSIONS TO END FLASHBACKS · 1 SESSION TO UNBLOCK YEARS OF TRAUMA · 11: AGE WHEN SHE RECEIVED HER SACRED ASSIGNMENT
A Life Shaped by Breath
There was a moment that shaped everything. At age four, Melissa Losito Braithwaite was found blue at the bottom of a pool, requiring CPR from her father to bring her back to life. That near-drowning left her with a profound awareness that death could happen at any moment — and a family too traumatized to help her process what had happened.
"From that day forward, I was always afraid to breathe incorrectly," she recalls. "Any kind of exercise or activity that changed my breathing from normal scared me very much." That fear would manifest as debilitating panic attacks that began during her college years at Immaculata University and continued throughout her career as a beloved third-grade teacher.
But trauma wasn't the end of Braithwaite's story — it was the beginning of her calling. Seven years after the near-drowning, at age eleven, something would set her on a path that would take 40 years to fully understand.
A Sacred Assignment
During a family bingo night at her Catholic school, something drew eleven-year-old Braithwaite to the empty church next door. Kneeling in the front pew, she experienced what she describes as "the most encompassing, loving feeling I ever felt in my life." In that moment of stillness, she heard words that would stay with her for decades:
“Melissa, you have something important to do in this lifetime with me.”
— The message Melissa Losito Braithwaite heard at age eleven
That sense of a divine mission followed Braithwaite through everything: her degree in elementary education from Immaculata University in 1992, her years as a teacher, her marriage in August 1997, and her journey into motherhood with daughter Grace — born in 2002 after six years of trying — and her son, born in 2007. Through postpartum depression, through persistent panic attacks that no medication could touch, through years of searching for her true purpose, that sense of calling remained constant.
The Long Journey Home
Braithwaite’s spiritual seeking led her on an extraordinary journey of discovery — solo retreats to Tahiti and Costa Rica, certifications in Reiki healing and crystal therapy, Kundalini yoga teacher training in Norway. Each experience expanded her understanding of healing, but none quite fulfilled the calling she had felt since childhood.
Conventional medical approaches had, by her account, largely failed her. Psychiatrists prescribed medications that didn't work. Specialists at Jefferson Headache Center couldn't resolve her migraines. Therapists offered little in the way of lasting relief. "There was a therapist who said, 'Oh, there's a book you should read. It's called the Panic Attack Disorder book,' and that was the end of that," she remembers.
In 2021, after a stage 0 breast cancer diagnosis and lumpectomy, Braithwaite's search intensified. She had already begun volunteering with Pennies in Action, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting the DC1 immunotherapy breast cancer research of Dr. Brian Czerniecki, but something was still missing. At a retreat in Costa Rica, she experienced her first breathwork session — and despite her long-held terror of altered breathing, felt something shift.
Learning to Breathe Again
Months after that first session, and despite her fear, Braithwaite reached out to breathwork teacher and trainer David Elliott. At his 2022 training at the Omega Institute in New York, she was so frightened she couldn't lie down. With tears streaming down her face, she told him she didn't think she could do it.
Elliott, a farmer from Kentucky, was matter-of-fact: "Oh, you'll be fine. Just lay down and start the breathwork." That calm reassurance changed the direction of what followed. By the fourth day of training, Braithwaite says, something shifted in how she understood the drowning incident. After that session, she reports, she never had another flashback.
“I realized: I need to do this. This is what people need to learn about. This is what I need to share with other people.”
— Melissa Losito Braithwaite
Healing Through Sisterhood
Today, Braithwaite facilitates breathwork sessions that combine personal healing with community — what she calls gathering women together in sisterhood. In her practice, breathwork works with what she describes as stored emotional tension in the body, but she is equally focused on what happens in the room after the breathing ends: the conversations, the recognition, the sense of not being alone.
"We don't have that anymore, and it is so needed," she says. "A lot of the healing happens when we release through breath, but healing also happens when you connect with other women."
The responses she witnesses in her sessions are varied. A poet laureate who hadn't written in years created a poem after a single session. Participants describe releasing emotions they had carried for decades. Women reconnect with creativity and a sense of self they thought they had lost.
"Our job in life is to be authentic and express ourselves authentically, to be creative and be in flow," Braithwaite says. "When we can do that, we're living joyfully. Breathwork helps us connect back to our true self, our essence, our spirit. It's a shortcut to healing, a shortcut to your inner child."
Training & Certifications
Immaculata University, Elementary Education (1992)
Certified Breathwork Healer, David Elliott Training
Reiki Healing Certification
Crystal Healing Certification
Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training (Norway)
ICE Works Homeschool Education (1998–2001)
Pennies in Action Volunteer (Supporting DC1 Immunotherapy Research)
Third Grade Teacher (1992–1997)
Where Her Work Meets Ours: Breath as Health Infrastructure
The State of Women Institute works across three health equity pillars: Mental Health & Wellness, Maternal Health Equity, and Preventive Wellness. What draws us to Braithwaite's work is its focus on the whole person — not as a substitute for clinical care, but as a complement to it, and as an approach to the emotional and communal dimensions of wellness that conventional systems often leave unaddressed.
Her breathwork practice works with trauma, anxiety, and panic — the very conditions she navigated for decades herself — and her approach is grounded in the understanding that healing is rarely a solitary process. Having lived through postpartum depression, Braithwaite brings firsthand knowledge to the isolation many new mothers face, and her sisterhood model offers something that clinical settings rarely can: sustained community.
Her advocacy and volunteerism with cancer research organizations reflects the same conviction that whole-person wellness and evidence-based medicine are not in opposition. For Melissa, they are part of the same continuum.
Pillars: Mental Health & Wellness · Maternal Health Support · Preventive Wellness · Trauma Healing
Building the Future of Healing
Melissa's vision extends beyond individual sessions. She is working toward regular gatherings where women can come together to breathe, release, and reconnect — and her partnership with The State of Women Institute's upcoming wellness network is aimed at making these experiences accessible to women across a broader range of communities.
"Whatever stage of life in which women find themselves, we are all holding onto energy and emotions that no longer serve us," she says. "This takes up space in our bodies that we don't need to hold on to anymore. When we release it, we make space for our innate creative spark. When women gather and experience this together, something magical happens. Women become sisters almost immediately, as we are able to see ourselves and each other as we truly are."
From the four-year-old who nearly drowned to the healer now teaching women to breathe freely again — Melissa's path has been shaped at every turn by the very experiences she once feared most. What she found on the other side of that fear became her life's work.
“Melissa’s work demonstrates that true preventive wellness isn’t just about avoiding illness, it's about helping women reconnect with their essential selves, their breath, and each other. In a world where women often hold their trauma in silence, Melissa creates a sacred space where healing happens through both breath and sisterhood.”
— Dr. Odessa Lacsina, Executive Director, The State of Women Institute
Connect with Melissa Learn more about Melissa's breathwork practice and upcoming gatherings.
www.melissalosito.com · @melissaslosito
The State of Women Institute · thestateofwomen.org · @thestateofwomen