30 November 1999
Posted in BreathWork

The medium we are choosing to explore that through is the breath. That is what we are focusing on. Breath is the carrier of spirit into embodiment. No breath, no independent embodied life. There is embodied life in the foetal experience but it is not independent. So it is the breath which marks us out as incarnated three dimensional beings.
 
The element of the breath - air - is the most mysterious of the elements on this planet. Whether we use the four element Western system or the five element Chinese system. Air is the most extraordinary because we never see it - we only see its effects. Just like spirit.
 
But from the effect of air we develop our understanding. From the effect of spirit, and also from the observation of how it moves through us, we come to understand the nature of spirit in the body.
 
In the ancient languages they understood that. In Latin for instance, the in breath is called 'inspiration' and the word that it came from is 'in spiritus' which meant God in us, the spirit in us. So it was there in the words - inspiration, inspired, filled with inspiration. So that each breath is bringing in spirit in you. And the first breath is the substantial connection between consciousness and matter in our life. The last breath is the dissolution of the connection with consciousness and matter. And in the space of in between is our life.

The First Breath

So we will be exploring what happened around the first breath. Because the first breath sets up a matrix of energies. It set up an impact into the nervous system, that each subsequent in breath has echoes of - until we clear that matrix of intersecting energies.
For instance if your first breath was very panicky and forced and a struggle. That is the imprint into the nervous system. That was how the nervous system came to learn about breath, consciousness, matter, three dimensionality, what embodied life is about. That goes into the memory of the body. The unconscious for us is the conglomerate intelligence of the cells, the organs the tissue of the body. That is where these deep memories live. They don't live just somewhere in the brain, they live right through, the tissue, the nervous system, the blood, the organs - the memories are there.

The last breath

Each out breath is in a way the preparation for the final breath. So we will be exploring the out breath as well. Looking at what is already attached to that in terms of fear of letting go, of our readiness to melt back into spirit.
These are like two polarities - in breath and out breath, first breath and last breath. As you come to watch your breath, if you watch the inhale, and you watch the exhale. At the top of the inhale there is a small infinitesimal pause, where no breath is happening, before you go into the exhale. At the bottom of the exhale, there is a small slight pause before you come back into the inhale. Notice that in your breathing for a few moments.

All that we teach we believe can be validated in your own experience. We share it with you because we have validated it in ours. So we are not teaching you a set of belief structures, we are teaching you a set of experimental hypotheses that can be validated in your own experience. You will find that it is either valid or it is not.

In certain areas of physics, there are some very interesting theories. One of those for instance is the example of the pendulum when it swings from one point to another point. When it reaches the fullness of its movement it actually stops, just like the breath. That is not all that difficult as a notion. But some physicists actually argue that if we broke up the movement of the pendulum into its absolute finest detail, it doesn't actually move from one place to another. What happens is that it is here, then it goes out of existence and it reappears here, then it goes out of existence and reappears here, then it goes out of existence and reappears here, in and out of existence, just simply appearing at different places very, very quickly.

Now one of the things you might ponder about as to whether at that particular point, when the breath is not moving, whether you go in and out of existence at that point. What we have found, is that if you pay attention to those two places in your breath, they can become like doorways into eternity. And we will be exploring that - on the top of the inhale and the bottom of the exhale. And how attention to those places sometimes gives you access into timelessness.

So maybe you go out of embodiment, but so quickly that you don't notice. Just like a movie reel. You know how a movie is actually still images moving very, very quickly, with the shutter coming down in between each one so you don't see the blur, at thirty-two frames a second.

The birth experience

We will be looking at what happened with your birth. Sometimes we don't realize that that is what happened at the beginning of our incarnation. Seen from that perspective it is a little bit different from just talking about birth. We might three dimensionalize our birth and not understand those deeper flows of spirit.

You can think of this as an hourglass and this point here as the point of our birth. From here we move through life. Behind here, we have our intra-uterine life and our conception. You will find for yourself what it is we have prior to conception. We have these two streams of energy coming in - one of which is genetics which influences the body's information, the psychological and emotional information as well, and the other which is past lives.

After this point of course we have our infantile processes, our childhood, our adolescence, our adulthood - but basically the patterns which emerge in here are built upon our prior experiences. In some cases we are involved in the process of redesign. Of redesigning some of these energies, of healing them of releasing them. Of getting more light into them, of re-organizing the fundamental basic matrix patterning that our emotionality and our intellectuality and our belief systems are then built upon.

As part of the exploration of the birth process, we will be looking in some detail at your birth memory, we will go back into your intra-uterine life, we will be working underwater for that using snorkels and particular ways of breathing in warm water that will take you back towards the womb memories. And then back to your conception and the memory of that, and then the repatterning of that. Each time you visit back into there is very rich, very rewarding - moving and shifting around of things.

You will most likely have a visit down along a past life stream of events and also you will be dealing with some of what your ancestors have left as karma for you to clean up, Family consciousness, family karma.

Then of course there will be various times when you will move out of your individualized story into the larger pattern within this takes place. So you will move into things like race memory - the memory of the whole race of humans of which you are part of. Anglo Saxon dreaming or whatever. You may well move back into spaces beyond that. We will spend quite a bit of time mapping those sorts of experiences you can have. This will be done so that you can understand them in yourself and in your friends, relatives and so on.

We will also be doing quite a number of activities and processes. These are all designed to help the exploration, the healing and the movement of energy. Every profound inner discipline knows that the breath is the key. Whether it is the martial arts, the yogas, meditation, shamanic practice, tantra. If you look at the movement in sports psychology it is now often about how to use your breath - for increasing energy, for calming themselves, for bringing into focus. Traditionally in some of the yogas the breath would have been all that was taught. Vipassna - sit and watch the breath, sit and watch the breath, sit and watch the breath. With the teaching that if you could go for forty nine minutes without a thought you became enlightened. Just imagine the bloke who got to forty eight minutes and thought - just one minute to go.

Yoga for the West

It is much more challenging for us as Westerners than it was traditionally. Vipassna arose in the traditions where no-one moved faster than the speed of a bullock. Where the only information which came to you was the natural sounds, the sounds of human voices or a few other sounds of human beings banging things together. Where there were no electrical field systems in your house and surrounding the planet. Things were much, much slower. The traditional body yogas, hatha yoga, were based upon the understanding that the body and the mind were so intertwined that if you put the body into a certain posture, the mind would follow and have certain experiences. So if you just kept doing it, one day you would be in a certain posture, and you would suddenly get it. The mind would have a totally experience which would come from the shape that the body was holding. Western bodies have such karma in them now, that process can't work as easily as it used to. That is the reason the West has developed the new yogas. Rebirthing is basically a new pranayama. Bodywork is a modern hatha yoga. Psychoacoustics is the modern form of chanting. What we had are yogis in the West exploring Western minds. What we have done her in this Centre is to bring them together. To raid the 5000 years of yoga traditions, to connnect in with the timeless shamanic traditions and to keep abreast of what the West is doing. Wherever we found something of value to train in it, to have people bring it.

This doesn't mean that if something isn't here it is valueless, but what it does mean is that what is here we consider to be of immense value. Things which have been of immense value to us in our journey.

One of the interesting things which will happen is that quite often the body will assume the asanas. People who have never done yoga will assume positions which when they come out of the sessions they can't reproduce. It is often the case that the body will often call the position on to expand into. It would often take a lot of training to get to but which can occur as easily as that. To see the connection the body makes. In that situation you enter the altered state of consciousness and the body follows that, whereas in the other, you put the body into a position to induce the state. Here we induce the altered state by using the breath, special music and it often works the other way.

Breath, energy and feelings

Often when we begin to work with the breath, energies which have been held in the body will start to be mobilized. Feelings that have been held in the body will start to come up. All sorts of feelings - the whole range of feelings. From absolutely extraordinary over the top laughter to absolutely profound depths of sadness and everything in between - delight, rage, desire, ecstasy, anger, resentment, jealousy - the whole lot. And sometimes when those things start to move your consciousness gets stuck with them and you will want to treat them seriously. We won't support you in that.. We have spent too many times with people going in and out of those states; too many times ourselves going in and out of those states to believe that they are real when we are not in them.
We will support you on your journey but not in your neuroses. Those things have to come up they're just moving through you. The deeper they are in the matrix of your energetic system, the deeper you will experience them as real. You will experience them as real because you will be looking out at the world and everyone else through the filter of those things. Just imagine having a slide of an ocean, then superimposing another slide of an ocean liner. So when you are looking at it you see the ocean liner on the ocean. We know that neither of those are ultimately real, but when you are seeing that and you don't know you will believe what it is, and no-one will be able to convince you that it isn't. This is because it is the contents of your own nervous system that is giving you the experience.

One of the great opportunities of our time together is living in a community with a group of people committed to that awareness that it is not real. It is a wonderful opportunity to unhitch yourself. Those around will not support you in your neuroses. You will have thirty days to change old habits and establish a clearer way of being.

There was once a Zen student who was involved in the process of watchfulness. During that time very, very deep feelings of anger and resentment were moving through him. And so he went to his master. It was a woman who said - just keep watching. And he got through that and sometime later he got to the stage where he was starting to burn up karma. His whole body was being consumed by flames. When he was having internal visions being consumed by what seemed like these fires of hell. Again he went to the master and said 'what's happening, I am very distressed', and she said 'just keep watching.' And he got through that and sometime later the Goddesses and Dakinis came and visited and they were dancing dances of great Tantric delight, and they came into his nervous system and filling him with ecstatic visions and movements and glorious yummy things, internal experiences. And he had a big smile on his face. And the master came along with a stick and hit him and said ' just keep watching.'

The work with the breath will teach you a lot about process, you will be working with each other in that. You will sit with each other, you will learn a lot by watching what people go through. Sometime there will be seven people lying on the mattresses spread between ecstasy and hell, between birth and death, between this dimension and the tenth dimension, between the first chakra and the twelfth, spread everywhere. And you will see some things that you have never seen before, and you will hear some things that you have never heard before and you will experience some things that you have never experienced before. So the breath is powerful, intense, it is confronting, its joyful, itÙs ecstatic, itÙs delightful it is all of those things. If we just work with the breath alone, amazing things would happen. But it is possible to move even faster than just using the breath.

What will happen is that sometimes you will hit holdings and limitations. Some of those will be in the body. We will be doing movement work with the body; we will be doing active meditations to free up karmas out of your body. We will be doing psycho physical work, directed movement, repatterning, releasing things previously hidden in the body, bringing them into awareness. Sometimes they will come out as feelings, sometimes as pain; sometimes they will come out as symptoms. We won't take much of that seriously(either. Even though it will hurt or it will be this or that. We know that it is simply frozen feelings moving. You won't experience them as frozen feelings; you will experience them as the pain or the symptoms. Your learningÙs will be to learn that the pain and the symptoms as the feelings releasing.

Sometime the holding will be below the level of awareness; in those areas you call the unconscious. It won't manifest as a body system, it will just be there as a thought that you are not aware of. You will just presume that the nature of reality is structured in a certain way, and you won't have ever had the chance to really examine , one by one by one all of those tiny interlocking belief systems about the nature of reality that give you that sense of things are.

If you keep awareness with your breath the feeling will move much more easily through you. If you are upright and watching you will start to get that distance between that feeling and you and your experience. There will be times when we are talking when some of you will be happy, and some of you will be sad and others will just have stuff moving through and we will just keep on going. Sometimes we will pay very specific attention to it.

If someone is going through some feeling process or karma that is also part of your pattern, you will start to feel what they are feeling; you will start to resonate with them. That's great, because it helps it all to move. But don't get stuck in feeling for the other person. You feel what is happening for you not feel what is happening for them - so don't get caught into sympathy, don't get caught into judgement for these will take you away from awareness from your own process and what is moving through your own nervous system

(From an unpublished manuscript)
(c) copyright Centre For Human Transformation

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