Unsung Hero Spotlight: Black Girls Breathing

As 2021 set in, and the world felt the continued impact of COVID-19 and political unrest, one silver lining came to the forefront: a focus on mental health. 

According to a survey conducted in January 2021 by the Harris Poll on behalf of the American Psychological Association, stress in the United States was the highest during this period than it had been since early in the pandemic.

For the Black community, the pandemic has added an even greater amount of stress as Black or African American people are twice as likely to die from COVID than White people.

To recognize those making a difference in people’s lives this year, Verywell Mind is highlighting unsung heroes who played a crucial role in mental well-being.

Meet Jasmine Marie

Jasmine Marie, founder of the social impact organization black girls breathing, a safe space for Black women to manage their mental and emotional health through breathwork, is one such hero.

After graduating college in 2013, Jasmine Marie landed a demanding job for a brand management company in New York City.

“I remember experiencing the effects of being highly stressed all the time,” Marie tells Verywell. “I would go to my doctor, and she’d say, ‘This is simply stress. I don’t know any other way to tell you. You need to find a way to manage stress.”

At the time, she was volunteering in the communications department of the Baptist church she belonged to in Harlem.

“They were opening a community center for Harlem residents and offering free services of all kinds. Breathwork ended up being one of the classes, and that’s how I got introduced to it,” she says. 

When Marie left the brand management company to start her own marketing firm, she turned to breathwork as a way to cope during stressful times.

In 2018, she felt compelled to get trained as a trauma- and grief-informed breathwork practitioner. However, all of her trainers were non-Black people, and the lack of diversity inspired her to make a change. 

“I knew how powerful breathwork is and what it could do for my community, and I really wanted Black women to be able to access breathwork in a personalized, customized way that is specific to their experience,” says Marie. 

So, in 2019, she started black girls breathing.

Making the Connection

“Our community is highly stressed and sometimes there is a lack of addressing mental health issues and how that affects our physical health,” says Marie.

The connection between chronic stress in the Black community and how it links to breast cancer, heart disease, and high blood pressure, as well as the below prevalence of each, drove Marie to connect with as many Black women as possible.

Initially, she offered in-person sessions in Atlanta, where she is currently based, but also toured Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington DC to provide sessions.

“Our tour sold out, and that gave me more validation that people really needed this. We also had virtual sessions going on at the same time,” says Marie.

Pandemic Proves More Need

When the pandemic hit, black girls breathing stopped all in-person sessions. Since June 2020, it has provided two virtual breathwork circles per month, with the incorporation of a licensed therapist into its sessions monthly.

The black girls breathing community consists of more than 16,000 Black women of all ages and mainly from North America, Canada, United Kingdom, and Africa.

Each session, Marie leads between 350 to 450 women through breathwork.

She describes breathwork as an active meditation and tool used to retrain the nervous system’s response to trauma and triggers, explaining that breathwork focuses on the duration of breath, repetition, and frequency with hopes of activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps to recover from stress.

“In our Western culture, especially for marginalized communities, there’s a norm of chronic stress, so that parasympathetic nervous system isn’t really responding in the way it used to because your body is overtaxed and [producing] high cortisol levels,” says Marie. “We use breathwork as a tool to strengthen that aspect of the nervous system and its automatic response.”

The first part of each session taps into a breathwork pattern, and then the second part focuses on control rest, which encourages participants to allow themselves to be comfortable doing nothing.

“[This] is hard for a lot of people. For Black women, it’s extremely hard, they can’t sit still,” says Marie.

Up to 150 of the women who attend each of Marie’s sessions are able to participate for free, and the rest have access to the sessions on a sliding scale: $0 to $15 is reserved for those who are financially strained and $20 to $25 for others.

“If we look at resources now, even the ones that are tailored for Black women, a lot of the mental health resources require you to apply for free therapy, but you have to wait six months to hear if you qualify, and that’s not really addressing the issue or being a real-time resource when people are experiencing extreme trauma,” says Marie. “Then the financial strains of COVID exacerbated the gaps.”

Additionally, as the world became more aware of the social injustices that the Black community faces, Marie says it drove a sense of hope for the Black community that others are listening. Yet, she says, it’s important to remember that Black women have felt the effects of social injustices their entire lives.

“As this opened up more [conversations] last year, and we saw more support for resources like ours, it was a sigh of relief, but there is more to be done,” says Marie.

Healing Conversation in Addition to Breathing

Marie begins each session with dialogue based on themes related to Black women and mental health. For instance, some topics she initiates include stigma around mental health, breaking generational connections to shame and taking care of one’s mental health, religion’s role in mental health, and more.

Additionally, many conversations about feeling alone in their struggles with mental health arise.

“Sharing and creating and fostering an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their challenges can affirm for others going through the same challenges that they are not alone. That’s really soothing and medicine in itself. Also, it shows it’s OK to take care of our mental health,” says Marie.

Advocating Beyond Breath

In addition to providing breathwork sessions to her community, Marie also partners with corporations to hold breathwork sessions for their employees, though she is careful about who she partners with.

“[We choose] only those who support our work in a way it makes a difference and is not just a surface-level slap-on solution, where they’re trying to be [perceived] a certain way,” notes Marie.

She also hopes to utilize the black girls breathing community to help break health disparities.

For instance, Marie says a common misconception is that access to health insurance is the reason Black women are not getting their needs met, yet when asked, 89% of the black girls breathing community stated they have health insurance of some kind, whether it is through the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, or another form provided by their employer.

“However, only 28 percent say they have consistent access to mental health care resources outside of black girls breathing,” Marie explains.

She aims to partner with leading research institutions to help them collect data about Black women.

“There is a lot of stigma toward providing data. If people don’t feel comfortable participating in trials or research, then that impacts the solutions we can create for the community,” she says.

“[This] is an issue because it impacts the lens in which that information is reported and the dissemination of that information,” says Marie. 

Based on data collected from the black girls breathing community, she has presented information to healthcare providers and insurance companies. She is set to present information at the National Alliance on Mental Illness’s California state headquarters at the end of the year.

Marie established an advisory board composed of Black researchers, psychologists, and other practitioners to back her advocacy endeavors.

As black girls breathing continues to grow, she hopes to foster a training program centered on providing trauma-informed and grief-informed somatic care.

“We then plan to hire black girls breathing breathwork facilitators to work virtually and in our key markets,” she says.

An overarching goal for black girls breathing is its pledge to impact 1 million Black women and girls by 2025.

“We hope to have in-person sessions again, but with COVID-19, we have to be responsible in how we open up,” says Marie.

In the meantime, she says her community is growing fiercely in ways she didn’t anticipate.

“We’ve been able to grow our global community because of the pandemic, and we plan to keep going.”