Breathwork

Looking around, I see hazy pinkish white air surrounding me, and I feel that my body, energy, and soul is submerged in a field of unconditional love. Sometimes I see flashes of visuals before my inner eye, a giant female angel smiling to me with her wings spread, who morphs into a giant beautifully incandescent moth who wraps me in her wingspan and teaches me just by touching me, about working in the shadows.

I float in this space, suspended in and surrounded by love, and it is healing to every cell, every spark of electricity, every neuron and bone and tissue of my body. It’s healing to my psyche, to my emotional body, and to all of the parts of myself that have ever been wounded or traumatized in the past. I have an inner knowing that sometimes, just BEING with and in beauty and love is my medicine journey, in order to bring that vibration back to my 3D reality with me when I’m done.

I am somewhat suddenly brought out of this overwhelming beauty and back into my 3D reality by the sweet sound of  Koshi chimes tinkling near my head.

Damn.

It’s the same every time I come back to reality. This feeling of sadness at leaving what I have been calling “The Oneness.” This desire to stay submerged in that warmth and comfort forever and not have to exist in this real 3D world that includes pain and suffering and hurt and sadness, and for me: responsibility, caring for OTHERS.

I guess I will talk more specifically about something that has changed my life recently.

Now that I’m thinking about it, lots of changes have been happening in my life. Every day there is some new awareness, some awakening, some healing, some activation, some excavation and integration of past trauma.

It really is quite exhausting at times, and feels like work, and I never knew that being on the healing path would be like this.

When do cruising altitude vibes get activated? When does it slow down? Will it be like this, this feeling of constantly cracking open under the weight of the beauty of the universe and the pain of human existence, for the rest of my life?

I remember back closer to when I first started having spiritual experiences, after what I will call my Tantric Awakening, I reached out to as many spiritual people as I could find at the time, and one woman responded with a somewhat dark and cryptic message about how this path that I was opening up to was not easy and not fun. I didn’t really believe her at the time, or have a concept of what she was talking about…. But now I think I do.

If I were to let myself go there, I could be very disillusioned all the time, with this healing journey.

Then again, I do know that I agreed to all of this. My path is to be a healer, a wisdom-keeper someday, and one small thread in the multi-colored intricate tapestry that is my community. And to be that soul, that person, that energy, I must go through all the healing and excavating that is required to embody that frequency.

I don’t say that in a bragging way, because honestly it’s not something I ever anticipated or really tried to manifest…

It is just what is.

And I’m not saying that in a martyr way either. Because I have been tasting the greater sweetness, beauty, and pleasure of life as I also take more peeks at the shadows, and I know I am not a martyr if I seek that pleasure and beauty as the ends that justify the means. And sometimes the beauty is the means to the beautiful ends as well. That is The Beauty Way.

All of that rambling aside…

Back to: Breath.

Literally, breathing… it changed my life. And I’m pretty sure it will change all of our lives, if we all give it a shot.

There have been a lot of proponents of breathing and breathwork in our history. We have known for a long time, perhaps always, that there is a deep connection between our breath and our spirits and/or the Great Spirit… even the word “breath” in some languages is the same for the word “Spirit” or “God.”

Recently, Wim Hof has popularized breathwork as a way of altering our bodies’ biochemistry and encouraging physical healing.

But before Wim, there were Stanislav and Christina Grof, starting in the 1960s and 1970s. There were other folks in that time promoting breathwork, but none had as big of an audience as the Grofs.

Without going too deeply into a history lesson, I will just say quickly that Stan Grof worked in LSD research back before it was banned, and then once LSD was made illegal and research on it was banned, he set out to find another way of achieving the same types of altered states of consciousness and healing that LSD had helped his patients see.

He studied traditional cultures and found…

Breath. Breathing…

As a means with which to tap into an altered state in order to facilitate healing. With breathing in a specific way, he saw his patients and clients access memories and past traumas that had been previously hidden in their own subconscious, but that were keeping them from achieving their dreams or their highest paths/Truths in this lifetime.

Stan and his wife Christina, who also held (RIP) a PhD, added powerful music into their breathing ceremonies and the effects were literally life-changing.

Breath + music = healing.

It actually makes complete sense to me when I write it out like that!

So anyway, back in October, I attended a retreat called FIt for Service, and there was a three hour breathwork ceremony included in the itinerary which was released about a week before the start of the retreat.

As someone who had never experienced breathwork, I was slightly intimidated by the thought of this ceremony! Three hours felt like a long time to breathe, and the only other framework for altered breathing I had heard of prior to this was the Wim Hof method, which didn’t really feel aligned for me for some reason.

On the morning of the breathwork ceremony, lying on a mat on the floor of a giant tent with one hundred and twenty-ish other people, and being facilitated by a group of 20-ish of the top breathwork facilitators in the country, though, I felt safe. :)

We began breathing as instructed, and it didn’t take long for me to feel my body begin oxygenating in a way that it maybe never has before. My fingers, hands, and feet and legs all started tingling like they had been asleep my whole life and were just then starting to wake up.

Then, eventually, after doing deep breaths in and out through our mouths for some time, we did a “breath lock,” which is taking a deep breath in to fill the lungs and then holding the breath in for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, the folks around me in the tent were starting to cry, scream, cough, yell, orgasm, giggle, laugh, and vomit. The breath was bringing up all of our traumas, all of our pleasure, all of our memories and past life iterations that wanted light shone on them, in order to release, integrate, and heal.

As I held my breath during the breath lock, for what felt like forever now that my whole body was more oxygenated than it perhaps had ever been before, I could feel my body taking tiny sips of air from my lungs as needed. I felt no urgency to breathe normally again, and no worry. My body felt completely full to bursting with oxygen and my lungs weren’t struggling or straining at all.

And then suddenly, I noticed that I was starting to feel that same feeling I’ve felt countless times before as I left my body to go to other realms. Before, when I had felt my consciousness leaving my body like this, it was due to plant medicine or orgasm.

Something about the flooding of oxytocin and DMT and I’m sure countless other hormones in perfect symphony into my system, from BREATHING, was sending me off into The Oneness.

Um, AWESOME!

Once my brain had this realization I was able to release thought and just… BE.. and allow consciousness to go into that Love frequency.

The rest of my breathwork experience was spent in The Oneness, at one with the Beauty of All That Is, at one with the Divine, at one with Pure Love, in The Void. It was bliss really.

When I heard Aubrey begin calling us back into this present moment, back into our bodies, I had one final image of myself as a small adult human in the realm of giants.. That was not the first time I’ve had a vision or spiritual experience where I’ve seen myself in the realm of giants.. in a world where women who felt at least 10 times larger than myself, existed within the beauty of a marble hall filled with columns. And here at the end of breathwork, I found myself there again for a split second, watching a giant pair of legs walk away from my smallness.

And I again, did NOT want to come back to this 3D reality.

I felt somewhat begrudgingly grateful to have such a proficient and experienced facilitator such as Blu, as she started talking about all the amazing aspects of being a human in this gift of a body temple, and the gift of having a physical 3D body in which to serve our communities, and a bunch of other stuff that I can’t remember but that made coming back into my body and this reality much more appealing than it would have been otherwise. :)

Since that first breathwork experience, I’ve done a handful of other breathwork ceremonies. They have all held slightly different messages and offered slightly different healing, but they have all sent me into that space, that Oneness, as sort of a weigh station in which to receive and experience.

And the beauty that exists there makes it just fine to me, that that is what breathwork has meant for me thus far, even with the knowledge that my experience might shift and change over time as I continue to sit (lay down) in these ceremonies with my own breath.

I think there is a lot of medicine, in just BEING within Beauty and Oneness, especially while living in this 3D world that can be so challenging at times.

Other friends of mine who have experienced breathwork have had vastly different experiences from mine, from going back to their birth to heal birth trauma, to childhood wounds that had been subconsciously affecting their lives, to even spending the whole ceremony expressing all the rage - vocally and with literal purging/vomiting - they had been told to stuff down inside of themselves their whole lifetime. Other folks experience beauty and bliss, like I have, but their own unique version of it.

Whatever it looks like, is exactly how it should be.

I feel that breathing, in this way, in ceremony, with music, is such good medicine in all of the ways.

It not only helps us on a physical level, like Wim Hof says, but on an emotional, spiritual, and even a nervous system level.

And when we can heal our past trauma and past memories that have been affecting our lives without our knowing or choice in the matter, and we can regulate our nervous systems, we can bring through so much more positive change and love and abundance and healing into our lives, and the lives of those around us by proxy!

SO, now that I’ve experienced altered states of being just from breathing, I guess you can imagine that my life path has shifted a bit. I feel on a deep soul level (partially because of a realization/activation I had while IN a breathwork ceremony) that I am a healer.

I spent some of my time in this lifetime learning how to be with women, how to be a midwife, how to hold space for new souls to enter into this realm, surrounded by love and peace instead of fear… and then I realized that I was not meant to carry on as Midwife, within the box I had put myself into by taking on that title and identity in my community.

By releasing the identity of midwife, I was able to make space for something else to come through. Just as by BREATHING, we create more space in our bodies and nervous systems for greater healing and ascension to take place.

I am looking forward to facilitating breathwork ceremonies, holding space for the healing we can ALL take ourselves through, once I complete my facilitator training here in Sedona with Anahata Ananda, a woman who has been facilitating breathwork here and around the world for the last 20 years and has trained some of the country’s top breathwork facilitators.

(Also, I can share that I am EXTREMELY excited that Taylor, my beloved, has also been so changed and positively affected by the breathwork that he, too, will go through facilitator training with Anahata and we will be able to facilitate breathwork ceremonies TOGETHER! Ahhhh! Yay!)

I realize that I’m slowly gathering my tools, my medicine bag, in order to be able to step onto the path of Healer, someday, once I am ready and if/when my community calls me into service in that way.

All of my experiences as a mother, a midwife, a student, a wife, and a human have led me to this point and have added their own unique flavors to my realm of experience and the energetic signature that I carry, which will resonate with some and not with others.

I hope that by sharing my own journey with the medicine that is my own breath, I might be able to inspire you to try breathwork out for yourself as well, or whatever healing modality YOU are feeling called to try, in order to take your own path to your own Truth.

I will be embarking on another training journey this coming year too, related to my own path and my own Tantric awakening and visionary experiences, and I can’t wait to share more about that as well, when the time is right.

As this year comes to a close, arguably one of, if not THE, most challenging years of my life (while honestly also being one of the most beautiful years of my life at the same time, strangely but not so strangely), I am feeling deep DEEP feelings of gratitude for YOU, for my community, for my family.

Without this outlet, of being able to write out my process and share it with you, and receive such sweet responses and feedback and messages from some of you, I would not have fared as well this year.

So, thank you! Just for BEING. :) I love you.

And I’m sending you wishes for abundance, healing, wellness, freedom, and joy in this coming year!