Our breathing is very sensitive to our inner state: it changes rapidly according to our emotions and what we experience on a daily basis. When we experience an emotional shock or trauma, our breathing stops momentarily in shock, our muscles contract, our heart rate accelerates, adrenaline is released into our system, and so on. The emotional charge and the energy released by our system in order to deal with the situation (either by fleeing or fighting) are ‘stored’ in our body and our subconscious until we can integrate them.
Even if the difficult, traumatic, events of our lives have been ‘erased’ from our mental memory, their emotional charges are still present within us. They can lead to chronic anxiety, panic attacks, depression, aggression, lethargy, a lack of meaning in our lives, a feeling of powerlessness, guilt, chronic fatigue, a lack of self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a feeling of not being legitimate, to name but a few.
There are many common ways of reacting to these inner influences, whether they are conscious or unconscious. They can include repressing them and pretending everything is fine, escaping into an addiction or dependency (alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food, sex, work, sports, television, social media, compulsive shopping, etc.), endlessly talking to others, withdrawing into ourselves, or blaming others and our life circumstances… All these reactive behaviours greatly increase our suffering and trap us in it. Often, the inability to embrace and integrate these emotional or traumatic charges leads to physical symptoms and/or illnesses of varying degrees of severity.
Transformational Breath® is a tool that not only enables us to safely ‘bring up’ these memories lodged in our body and subconscious, but also enables them to be integrated and completely resolved.
(The word ‘memory’ in this context refers to an emotional and energetic charge that is blocked in the body and the subconscious as a result of a past event, or a series of events, that has not been ‘digested’. These may be difficult events or traumas experienced recently, in childhood, at birth, during our intra-uterine life, or even coming from our family line. These ‘memories’ are not necessarily conscious at the mental level, and they do not need to be in order to be integrated).
Just as our mind and body influence our breathing, we can influence the mind and body through the conscious use of the breathing process. Transformational Breath® is not concerned with the endless stories of the thinking mind, which are most often a hindrance to our inner healing. It acts directly on the root cause of our various issues and not on their undesirable effects. Over the course of the sessions, this leads to a profound transformation in our lives at every level.
This technique, combined with The Presence Process by Michael Brown, enables us to become autonomous quite quickly in dealing with our current issues. For deeper traumas, my experience has taught me that we generally need a safe and more supportive context (without invasive interference) to be able to safely access and integrate our emotional charges.
