BREATHE

It came as a surprise to me
That, after I'd been on life support,
I and my body had to be "told" to breathe again on my own;
It wasn't going to happen spontaneously.
That reminded me -
What we don't use, we may lose.

So this is my gift to you now --
A slap on the bum.
BREATHE!

How?
How do I breathe?
Are you kidding?!
Nope. We've been on the drip for so long
We've forgotten how to breathe.

And breathing is basic, don't you think?

When we mess with nature at that level,
(And we do).......
Expect problems down the track.

We live our lives according to certain operating programmes,
Principles based on conclusions that we formed un-consciously during our early years.
Some of these fundamental operating principles derive from a long way back --
Back at least as far as the way we experienced the womb,
Our passage along the birth canal,
(Or ripped out of the womb in the case of a caesarian),
And the way we took our first breath. 
All largely matters of pure chance
That have had effects so lasting and profound
that they have shaped our lives.


But we have no rational recollection of what these principles are, or how they came about
Because at the time we didn't have language with which to formulate what was happening,
Or what we'd concluded from those experiences.
Bur we do have sense-memory of them,
Which can be accessed via the same mechanism that was present at the core of the trauma we experienced --
Our breath.

The memories of our birth are almost universally traumatic,
Ensuring that they're vividly imprinted still in the amygdala,
The most primitive area of our brain,
Where it will likely remain so until the moment we die.
Whoever designed the process of being born,
Had obviously never tried it himself.
It was a total shock to the entire system,
The like of which we are never likely to experience again.
It is almost as if some cosmic joker decided
"If you can survive this, you'll survive anything."

The assumptions we unconsciously formed while Armageddon was going on
Were fundamental in shaping our approach to this life
And to everything and everyone that has been dealt to us post partem --
We jumped then to conclusions
About our self, about the sudden discovery of "otherness", and about life.
We typically have absolutely no idea what those conclusions were,
Nor do we have the foggiest notion of the distorting effect that they're having,
Shaping and continuing to affect all our ideas about how life is, what we are, how others are, and how we deal with change.
There's a very real sense that every thing and circumstance in our life since
Has proved the correctness of the conclusions we made then:
And most of us haven't a clue what they are.
But they can be accessed.
It you're finding life difficult,
It may be well worth your while
To find out what's causing it.

It is my own experience, and the experience of the hundreds I've seen go through rebirth,
When our particular "laws" are revealed,
The lights go on for us,
The shrouds are thrown off,
We remember past incidents
And spontaneous laughter and celebration breaks out.
It's a flowering of freedom
From the bondage of ignorance.
At last we're no longer stumbling around in the dark without a torch.
We might still be up Shit Creek,
But at least we now have a paddle.

Breath therapy and rebirthing can uncover the hidden operating principles;
They free us from the conclusions that have kept us nailed to the floor,
Racing around in circles, chasing our own tail since we were born.
We are released, too, from the hidden, pent-up emotions,
The ones we don't feel --
They feel us, and keep our stuff in place.

HOLDING PATTERNS


Outside of some other actors, most classically trained singers, and musicians who play wind instruments,
Very rarely do I come across anyone who knows how to breathe.
It never occurs to us that,
Like the difference between looking and really seeing,
Between hearing and really listening,
There's one helluva difference between respiration (which we can all do)
And Breathing (which most of us have forgotten about).

During birth,
And from time to time as we were growing up,
We became overwhelmed by, and fearful of, our experience.
The limbic (primitive fight/freeze/flight) area of our brain kicked in,
We instinctively modified all of our natural functioning in some way,
And then the crisis passed.
Now, although our breathing, metabolism and other behaviour in that moment had nothing to do with abatement of that crisis,
Our mind connected the two--
"If I hold my breath, speed up my heart, lock my jaw and act this way, the crisis will go away and I'll survive."
An un-conscious, not-thought-about pattern was set,
Which now kicks in whenever there is a possible crisis, or even an imagined threat of one.
Our mind cannot tell the difference between a real and an imagined threat.
On top of that,
The holding patterns create their own anxieties and disturbances,
Which add to the spiral.
The condition quite quickly becomes chronic,
And so familiar,
That our bodies and psyches reset and re-define what's "normal";
They now operate habitually at levels of between 6 to 8.5 on the Richter Scale;
We've completely forgotten what lower levels of stress feel like,
Or that more tranquil states even exist.
No wonder we wear out and burn out early
To obesity, diabetes, breathing disorders, allergies, stroke and cardiac problems!

There's another good reason why we continue breath patterns and lifestyles that depress and suppress us --
They limit the depth of unpleasantness to which we can sink.
Unfortunately in so doing, they also squash the "highs" like joy, happiness, satisfaction and prosperity-consciousness.
This is the law of balance in operation --
When you cut off the lows, you also lop off the highs.
While inside we remain emotionally churned up,
Life flattens out
And loses it's dynamic appeal.

In response to traumatic events
And growing levels of stress, anxiety, depression,
And chronic habits like withholding and suppressing our selves,
We've distorted the way we breathe.
Typically, we breathe in and out in a piston-like motion --
Sucking breath in, cutting it off, holding it while some threat passes, pushing it out, cutting off again, and so on.
The naturally smooth, even, connected flow of breath
Becomes jerky, uneven, obstructed and disconnected.
We raise the psychological centre of our breath from deep in the belly
Up into our chest, throat, and even up as far as the sinuses.
Our naturally resonant voices become throaty, croaky and raspy,
And, in some cases, nasal and shrill.
Young teenage girls, for example, find it fashionable to strangle their throats,
Constrict their jaws, tongue and lips,
Shove their voice up into their sinuses
And distort speech into a croaky smirk.
What is that about?
What could possibly be attractive about a young girl sounding like a 90-year-old hag with cerebral palsy?

A person under stress tends to breathe like an asthmatic,
Taking in deep gulps,
Tightening the belly,
Holding the diaphragm rigid,
And heaving the shoulders and upper chest
(Immobilising all but the upper, pointy ends of their lungs with the least area available for oxygenation)
And breathing out in tightly controlled squirts.
An angry person does the reverse;
He/she tightens up all over,
Sucks air in shallow bits,
And then exhales in blasts.

At every point along that scale,
We exhibit a unique, personal pattern of breath-holding.

Holding Patterns on both the in-breath and the out-breath,
And during speaking,
And during moments of high emotional arousal,
Not only reinforce the hidden programmes that cause them,
But in turn cause their own patterns of disease and illness --
Physical, emotional and psychological.
The way you breathe is both the result of,
And the further cause of
Illness and dysfunction.
The next time you feel uncomfortable, upset or angry,
Notice how you are breathing (if at all).
What you will be looking at is one of your favourite Holding Patterns.

LIVING TOTALLY


The moment we first adopted a Holding Pattern,
Nothing happened that anyone would notice.
A choice, and consequent decisions were made, but without the benefit of language to give them form,
And by a part of our being we had no knowledge of.
These first choices were the beginnings of what we would later come to recognise as our Ego,
And Ego plays its cards like a politician at a Senate hearing.

From the moment a Holding Pattern was put in place
Our facility to feel anything totally began ebbing away;
That was its unconsciously intended purpose -- to protect us from pain.
By "living totally" I mean to be so utterly absorbed in whatever is happening, while it is happening,
That no trace of unfinished business remains at the end of the experience.
We move on, without any left baggage.
When we experience something totally,
It is finished, done with;
No psychological stuff is carried over
To pollute the next moment.
But since the innocence of childhood
We have rarely been total in any experience,
So incomplete business hangs over into the next moment,
And the next.....
Accumulating exponentially.
It shows, in our faces and bodies as we get older
As "aging".
[I experienced a striking example of this  at a cardiac rehab. class yesterday. A new patient who's had heart surgery about 8 weeks ago made a comment that "My cardiologist said I'd be dead by now. He was wrong!" It seemed so odd that he would want to so bitterly want to make his doctor wrong -- so that he can be "right"; about what? It struck me, too, that his cardiologist probably had a lot to do with him being still alive, both by giving him a kick up the arse to get him to have the surgery, and by successfully performing whatever he's had done. But this guy has chosen to resent the man for the comment, rather than be grateful for the outcome. When this guy got up to the gym, however, I began to understand the dynamics. His face was permanently drawn down into a resentful scowl, and he walked stooped over, with his arms wrapped tightly around himself. I tried the same gait and face-mask for a few laps, just to find out what it felt like to live inside that body shape. I gave up after a couple of minutes -- I started to feel quite ill.]

Haven't you ever wondered
Why certain patterns of discomfort and misfortune
Seem to come around again and again?
Even though the circumstances and the dramatis personae may change,
Patterns recur,
And the common denominator between them is......
You and me.
We've seen it in other people, too. haven't we?
What is that?

A good place to start for yourself
Is to look to the holding patterns on your breath,
The patterns that prevent you from fully feeling your experiences.
It's not even necessary to do any post mortems on them;
They don't need to be analysed,
Just experienced,
Totally.

INTEGRATING BREATHING

We can do this through Breath --
Integrating our breath
Integrates our experiences.
The more often we consciously remember
To replace our jerky old breathing habits
With a smoothly flowing new practice,
The more integral our experiences will become
And the sooner and better our emotional and physical dis-eases will heal.

Re-breathing begins when, in a state of physical and emotional relaxation
We simply observe our breathing,
The way we normally do it.
Without analysing, we just become aware of how and where
Our breathing gets caught up, restricted and out of rhythm.
Then we start joining the ends of of each separate in/out motion.
Instead of a pumping action,
We begin to turn the breathing pattern into a figure "8",
Merging the ends of the in and the out breaths into each other
To create a smoother, more integrated flow.
Don't worry if you only have partial or fleeting success at first;
Every connected breath-end has a beneficial flow-on.

Let each in-breath fill your lungs and, towards the apex, let it turn in on itself
and become the out-breath, and let each out-breath empty itself (don't push, or hold back) and, towards the bottom, let it begin to turn in on itself and become an in-breath.... and so on........

If at any time you experience a transition from breathing to being-breathed,
Allow this to happen for as long as it lasts,
But do not strive for it.
Beyond experiencing the connecting of your formerly separating breaths,
Let there be no other goal to this meditation.
Let breathing be the Means
To which there is no End....
Allow what ever happens to happen
And continue connecting your breaths anyway.

Breath meditation is best done with experienced supervision,
But that does not preclude you from connecting your breathing
Right here, right now.
Take it gently. Take in no more breath than you need.
If you're not comfortable, you're pushing too hard. Back off.
Force nothing,
Or you run a slight risk of hyperventilating.
If that does happen, simply stop, relax, and allow your habitual breathing pattern to reassert itself until you are completely grounded once more.

This conscious and deliberate reconnecting
Of the natural flow of breath
Enables re-connection to happen
At all levels of your energy and awareness.
Blockages are released,
Space is created,
And aliveness is expanded.
All that we need to do for let-go and expansion to happen
Is to be present and aware of each moment of breath,
And to be present and transparent to what ever is going on
In body and mind
While you're here and now.

As the holding patterns release you,
You'll experience an expansion of qualities of life
Such as  aliveness, happiness, joy, abundance, prosperity and self-expression.

It is possible to get back to being total in what we do.
When we are total,
Bliss happens as a natural consequence.
Life becomes beautiful as it is,
In its suchness, it needs no improvement.

I don't know how or why re-breathing works,
And, to be honest, I don't care.
It does work --
At all levels of awareness at once,
And that's all that matters to me.
These days.....
I'm decreasingly obsessed with being right or wrong
And increasingly fascinated
By anything that works.