This page is divided into two parts, the first section addressing my personal awakening to Breath, the second with breathwork in one on one sessions.
My Awakening to Breath
The emphasis in Transcendental Meditation (TM) is to transcend activity and experience non-activity or pure consciousness. This process refined my breathing until it became a stillness. After several years of intense experiences with TM, I noticed two things. One, I was completely dependent on my TM meditation to achieve a feeling of ecstatic well being which at the same time exhausted me and two, I was a shallow breather, not in touch with my body, it's sensations and feelings.
In the late 80's, I discontinued the practice of TM and began to explore breath meditations and breathing processes. Initially, I practiced breath meditations learned from external sources such as Reichian breath work, the Continuum Work, rebirthing, belly breathing and Vipassana. Overall, except for the rebirthing breath, this process was not as overtly dramatic in terms of the spiritual experiences that came with the light. Yet, except for the rebirthing process, it was profoundly grounding.
Conscious breathing brought me into feeling and sensing, into my body, into the present moment. Working with the breath allowed me to see how I went unconscious thereby revealing emotional patterns and tensions that the practice of TM avoided dealing with. My own unconscious material began to emerge with all the injuries and insults to my emerging selfhood that I had suffered from parents, childhood, etc. I had to look at my own graveyard of buried trauma existing within my body in order to deal with this healing process in my clients that was evoked by working with the breath.
As the old, painful, unconscious material was processed, my breathing opened, deepened and broadened. My body's ability to breathe fully, completely and naturally was restored. Spontaneous, continous waves of expansion and contraction swept through my entire body. My breath arose from an awareness of a deepening silence, opening the belly, the chest, and the head regions of my body. My body relaxed to the point where everything disappeared including the light. Only the breath remained uncovering the process of working with sound and the body which I will explore in the upcoming pages.
Breathwork
Let's continue this discussion from where we left off in the previous section on lightwork.
The more I explored working with light energy in session and bringing it into the body, I noticed that once the body had freed itself of tensions and anxiety, the presence of breath made itself known. Curiously, a defense mechanism rooted in early life, of repressing the breath in order to suppress unpleasant or unwanted memories, feelings and sensations eventually kicked in, with the client often falling into a sleep of avoidance. The more a client or I would suppress or ignore the movement of our breath, the more heavy and dull our bodies would become. At times, I'd stop the session and lay down on the floor and wait until the unconscious material passed out of my system.
I soon realized that my breathing and that of the client would naturally become entrained with one another during the session. I found that I could understand, intuit and anticipate their breathing patterns, be they shallow or deep, restful or active, arising from one area of the body or from the entire body, entering or exiting either by way of the nostrils or the mouth and then breathe that way myself, with their breath soon following. By communicating primarily through the flow of breath, a process began of uncovering and working through the wounds and traumas to our developing selfhood. Once these issues were resolved and the breath was no longer arrested, profound psychodynamic processes were activated, resolving long standing personal issues.
Just as the body has several major energy centers, the physical body is naturally arranged into three major somatic areas, namely the head and neck, the upper torso and arms and the belly and legs. Since a lot of us are habitual shallow and weak breathers these centers remain hidden. Yet our body is an organism designed to thrive on full and complete breathing and such a breath activates these centers, releasing any unconscious material, allowing for the full conscious development of these centers. Each of these regions contains resources, capacities and virtues that are necessary to our full expression of ourselves. Self arising qualities such as courage in the heart or clarity in the mind and more were now capable of being consciously contacted and integrated during session work.
Whereas the processes of light are inherently transcendental, bringing us into union with our spiritual source, the processes of breath are innately transformative, bringing substantial and lasting changes to our inner sense of identity and well being in the world. Breath itself became another teacher and I was becoming increasingly adept at speaking its language. Through the working with forms of light and breath, eventually working with sound especially in the form of toning found it's way into the session which will be addressed in the section of Soundwork on the next page.
Light | Color ~ Breath | Energy ~ Sound | Voice ~ Touch | Movement
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