“We are not human beings seeking a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings living a human experience.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Breathwork is a powerful tool for personal transformation and liberation. With presence, conscious breath and awareness, we attend to the quality of our thoughts, releasing limiting beliefs and replacing them with more affirmative notions. Applying the principle of acceptance to ourselves, we discover the capacity to accept our endlessly changing emotional landscape.
We learn the value of letting go, of surrendering to what is. Conscious purification brings clarity to both mind and body, and we find ourselves more and more empowered in our daily lives – empowered to generate, to cultivate, and to create.
However, if we stay identified to the notion of ourselves as “human beings seeking a spiritual experience”, we will continue to encounter the limitations imposed by this position towards life; human experience as a never-ending toil of struggle and effort;emotional release followed by emotional accumulation, followed by more emotional release. Karma, drama and then more karma… The vicious circle of human experience.
The emotional merry-go-round of life “before Breathwork” is all too present for most of us “after breathwork” even though we may apply the five principles of the method (inhale, exhale, awareness, acceptance and perfection) as well as we can. And why is this?
Certainly, because we forget the notion of ‘verticality’. We forget that “we are spiritual beings living a human experience”. We forget our origins. We forget our original innocence, our Divine essence. And in choosing to forget the fundamental truth of who we really are, we condemn ourselves to living in a world of lack and need. In such a world, we seek externally that which we believe we lack within ourselves. We reach out, we search, we grab. Obsessed by lack, we become neurotic with need. Born into a barren world of spiritual poverty, we live and then die in the vicious circle of lack and need. Financial prosperity may help us to lead a more comfortable life of suffering, but it does not bring us abundance.
The concept of verticality offers us the means through which we can transform the vicious circle of human suffering into a life-affirming spiral of human liberation. Once we acknowledge ourselves as spiritual beings with divine origins, we naturally align ourselves with Spirit. Our posture improves and we assume our true carriage, expressing the dignity inherent in such a noble lineage. We breathe more freely. Using breath and intention in conjunction with the conviction of unlimited access to light, love and abundance, we nourish ourselves consciously with the qualities we need – and our needs become fulfilled. Fulfillment brings us to a state of gratefulness (great fullness); to gratitude. And once we incorporate gratitude into our daily life and cultivate it, we begin to live abundance as an everyday reality.
The concept of verticality becomes a reality through the regular practice of meditation, a discipline that develops our sense of divine origin and innocence. Through meditation we cultivate focus, presence and awareness. We become aware not only of our observing self, but also of the way we nourish ourselves through all our experiences, be they deemed ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ by our discriminating mind. The conscious integration of our myriad experiences brings us insight, understanding and wisdom; and this is true richness.
When we incorporate the concept of verticality into our practice of Breathwork we transform the method, activating a spiral dynamic which is ascending, inclusive and clarifying. Within this dynamic, liberating insights become a natural part of our daily existence and each new insight gives momentum to the movement of the spiral. We acknowledge our divine origins, and so we accept ourselves as creators of our own life experience. We choose thoughts that nourish us, thoughts that lead to the fulfillment of our needs. We choose abundance and therefore, abundance becomes our natural harvest.
Breathe magazine : August 1996