When I turned 7, I had my first experience of snow and the recognition of the mysterious pull that many come in search of in India. My mother initiated a family pilgrimage to the holy sites of Badrinath, Kedarnath and Haridwar. I remember waking up at 4am for the morning aarti and taking a dip in the cold-as-ice Ganga (Ganges). I have hated cold water almost all my life. And yet during those early mornings, with teeth uncontrollably chattering, I watched people light up diyas as the sun rose unceremoniously, I was moved by the fire in me. Something was awake, alert within me, and I became aware of that. Of course this was just a glimpse. When we trekked to the formidable Kedarnath, we were hit by a snow blizzard and we had to spend 2 nights quivering to the bone in a tent which felt extremely inadequate. That is when my maternal grandmother was with us. She was as diligent about her worship of Shiva as Shiva was with his practice! This is where I got to see her strength for she uttered not a word in complaint, inspite of her ripe age. Had we been hit, she would’ve perhaps been happier dying at his feet in that tent. Since a very young age I remember her beginning all the cooking of the day with the chant, “Om Namah Shivay”. Every day after a bath she would spend time worshipping Shiva. This was even when they had extremely little as a family.

I never really thought much of this connection until a few years ago when I stepped into Rebirthing Breathwork. This is an incidence I share rarely because I have personally felt too awed by it myself. During our Breathwork training, we had to undergo one session lying next to a huge fire. I was wary of fire ever since a childhood incident when, on the day of Diwali (the Hindu festival of lights) which happened to coincide with my birthday, I caught fire. Since I had another trainee who was taking my session, I was a little comforted. As I started breathing, my whole body started experiencing cool waves. This was quite contrary to what I had expected. It was a kind of pleasant healing coolness, like menthol running along in your veins, pumping into the heart. Just breathing into that experience, fully surrendered, I suddenly found myself being held by a blue hand on my left wrist. I turned to see Shiva standing there. I was suddenly in Kailash, a place that was in blue twilight, neither dawn nor dusk. I was a little girl who he led on top of the mountain and then I sat in his lap. I felt very alert, with a lot of energy moving through me. He then told me, telepathically, that I need to learn something from his disciple, Babaji. I didn’t know who that Babaji was. But I wasn’t in a place to ask questions. Like a rapidly flowing river, the vision was unfolding. Before I knew it, the vision ended. I was soaked in ten times more coolness than earlier and was soaked in deep joy and happiness. It was as if my heart chakra had broken loose. As I breathed more and more, I was inundated with only gratitude. The session ended. Later, the trainees sat in a circle and each of us shared about their experiences. The person sitting next to me started sharing and spoke about Mahavatar Babaji and I was a little stunned. He spoke about connecting with Babaji and also shared of having seen how Babaji is a disciple of Shiva. Without me even asking, I realised that the Babaji in my vision was no ordinary Babaji, which earlier I assumed to be some old, wise man walking along the street like a fakir.

After that session, I could not wear anything in my left wrist. Energetically I knew it wasn’t possible. While I was quite fond of Swiss watches prior to my Breathwork training, after this training when I put one on inspite of instinctively knowing that it wouldn’t work, it broke. I tried to get it repaired, but in vain. I tried to wear rudrakhsa and that too couldn’t be worn. Crystal bracelets, charms, sacred threads, nothing would last. I started feeling at home with a bare wrist and would smile as I could connect to Shiva’s touch on my wrist, every time I connected back to that vision.

I also had an incident when I was visiting a close friend of mine after that training. I was still unaware of Mahavatar Babaji and hadn’t researched. This friend had a roommate who believed a lot in Mahavatar Babaji, which I found out later. As this roommate was sharing some situation she was stuck in at that point in her life, I felt the light in the whole room change. I energetically felt a presence enter the room, fill it with a different kind of sunlight, and enter me. Before I knew it, I had a strange sense of observing my body rather than being the body. I started speaking words that were very high level truths, pertaining to her life situation. As I was speaking, I could see energetic switches turning on and off different lights within her body because of the words. She was energetically receiving something. Soon after the energy transmission got over. The sunlight in the room turned into “regular” sunlight. I felt back in my body and saw my roommate with folded hands and head bowed in front of me. I felt terribly awkward. What was supposed to be a regular chat had turned out to be something far beyond imagination. I thanked her for the experience. She exclaimed, “That was Babaji!” with the delight of a child who had found out that Santa Claus was real. I didn’t know what to say. I still had no idea about Babaji. So I told her that I don’t know what happened.

After my Breathwork training when I went back to my IT office that I used to work in to fund my spiritual quest, I had a very emotional breakdown with the realization that all my life I was averse to my body. I was averse to being on earth. I hated it here. I hated being born. I hated this whole damn cycle of birth and death. I also had a crashing sense of despair that no matter how beautiful, wonderful, powerful and elaborate my visions are, or how easily I can transport myself astrally (which I was doing a lot during that time), it would mean nothing if I hadn’t learn to live here on earth as an earth being, fully in tune with my body, fully living the wisdom I had gathered through the body. At that moment, I resolved internally to learn to be in the body instead of drifting off. I resolved to master pain, instead of being averse to it. I found a wonderful Yoga teacher in the most synchronistic way who helped me immensely to connect to the body and feel it with 100% attention. Since that point on, I knew clearly I was being guided by a higher force.

Much later I found out that 2 of the spiritual teachers who have been a very strong influence in my life were ardent Babaji devotees. Moreover, I was taken aback to see Leonard Orr, founder of Rebirthing Breathwork, pursuing the search for Babaji in physical form. I couldn’t connect to this quest of his and his team, for the wisdom was very direct and clear to me, that that was not my path. Breath soon became my one point focus, my devotion and my offering to Shiva.

Why I felt compelled to write this post was because last month, through Diwali, I felt the energy of Shiva come back into my life very strongly. I was spending my birthday in Auroville, Pondicherry. There I met an amazing lady who was a strong devotee of Yogananda. She was very well read and we seemed to have a strong connection. After speaking a lot about Kriya Yoga, sharing her experiences of meeting Yogananda through her meditations, she handed me a book called “Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi’s Autobiography”. She told me to read it. I have been distancing myself from books for quite some time now for the simple reason that I have been feeling too full of knowledge that had become a roadblock in my spiritual progress. It blocked me from connecting to people at a soul, heart level. And so as an effort to give up this knowledge, I had given up books. Hence I was very wary when she gave me this book. But I still went ahead and read it since the energy with which she had given it to me was distinctively different. I opened it at a random page to read it later that night and was surprised that it opened to a chapter on Fire, and how Sri M, the yogi-author, had experienced the opening of his chakras by sitting next to fire. The whole science of the spirit of fire was explained by him as Babaji had shared with him. This description almost completely matched my experience of Breathwork with fire. Moreover, the understanding of fire as a Spirit, beyond seeing it as an element in our physical universe that he had given was almost the same as the understanding I had arrived to while having sat with fire in my Breathwork training workshops, except that it was more detailed, more understood. It helped me clarify my own understanding even more. I could feel how much I have fallen in love with fire ever since that Breathwork session.

As one synchronicity unfolded, another one was weaving itself. A few days later, I happened to sit across a wonderful, blessed Australian woman who was from Tiruvannamalai, the home of the self-realised saint, Sri Ramana Maharshi. This is a power spot in India because of Arunachala, the sacred mountain of this temple town where monkeys and peacocks roam about unabashedly even today.

When my guru went to Thiruvanamalai about a couple of years ago, I knew I would too someday. I’ve loved to follow her path like a copy cat in the hopes that I’ll be as self-realised as her. When I started talking to this resilient Australian woman who quit music to run a school for rural children with her Indian husband, in the course I expressed my desire to visit Tiru. She spontaneously invited me to come to Thiru and stay with them. Before I knew it, my roommate at Auroville, this Kriya Yogini and I ended up going to Tiru together. However, inspite of all my desire, I was initially extremely reluctant to leave my “home” Auroville to go to a place for a full moon walk around the sacred mountain, which was said to be thronged by people. My separation trauma came up. I fretted, debated with myself endlessly, stressed and grew restless. I almost cancelled the trip when I realised with a start that I was repeating my birth pattern – that after taking ten steps in the direction of what I wanted, I hesitate at the last step. Instead of fully giving myself in the direction of the pull that it moving me, I hold back. I stepped back and let go. Incidentally, the day we left for Tiru from Auroville, I ended up falling sick. I came down with a terrible stomach, weakness in my legs and had fever all the way in the journey. I knew something was processing. I was not meant to do the full moon walk encircling the mountain, the pradakshina (Sanskrit), among those many people. I had only 24 hours in Tiruvannamalai before I got back. That entire day of the full moon I spent in bed, in a mansion that we were ushered into by the heartful Australian lady, whose house stood in prayer right in front of Arunachala.

The next morning I felt a lot better. I was still wondering what the connection was to this place as I was walking into Sri Ramanasramam, the Ashram of Sri Ramana. Before I could even question what I was feeling, I broke into tears. When I heard that his meditation chamber was there behind, I knew I had to go there and meditate. I meditated for almost an hour during which I was overcome with tears. I felt my heart turn into an expansive still ocean and had a vision of every person that I had held felt hurt from diving into that ocean. I felt washed. There was very little time left for me before I left for the airport to catch my return flight. But I felt compelled to lay my feet on the mountain. I had heard that people could trek barefoot to the Skanda Ashram at the top. An hour and half before I had to leave, I asked my hostess to drop me off at the Ramanashramam again so I could walk up to Skanda Ashram. I started my journey barefoot with a friend of mine. No sooner had I started, that I felt a lot of panic come over me. I started feeling very exhausted and felt that I couldn’t reach the top. Or if I did, I wouldn’t be able to make it in time for my flight back. I didn’t know whether to give up or keep pushing myself. I was about to affirm with my usual self talk that yes I could do it, when it struck me that this was again a feeling from my struggle in the birth canal, where I had given up after crowning. As I kept climbing with a lot of resistance, one tiniest step after another, I heard an inner kind voice say, “Ask the divine to intervene”. I felt a lot of peace come over me. In that moment it occurred to me how affirmations and self-talk can get in the way of true helplessness which in turn is an invitation for the divine to enter. The exhaustion left me and I continued climbing, halting every once in a while. We reached the Skanda Ashram. There was immense beauty and serenity. It was nestled among big beautiful boulders and radically growing trees. We sat inside for sometime and then made our way downwards on another route to the Virupaksha cave where Sri Ramana was meditating in silence for many years and where another saint had taken samadhi such that his body was instantly converted to ashes. Looking at the time before entering the cave I could see that we were running late. I barely had 5 minutes to spend there before we had to rush down. I entered the cave thinking I’ll again come back later some time to spend more time. The silence inside was infinite. There were people meditating in perfectly still postures. A single lamp was burning steadily, unmoving. I closed my eyes. All there was, was silence. Even sounds of people coming in and moving seemed like flecks in that space of deep silence. There was no form to it. After sensing what seemed like more than 5 minutes, we got out and made our way down. As I made my way to the Chennai airport, 3 and a half hours away from this town, I was in deep, childlike joy. My heart was open as I had only remembered it to be in those crazy sweet moments of my childhood when nothing mattered. I was chatting merrily with the cab driver, a local of Tiru. We talked about Shiva, our mutual admiration and love for this Yogi of all yogis. The conversation seemed to come from somewhere else within me that had never seen light. He commented how happy I was, how my face was bright and lit up. He then told me the story of how mountain Arunachala was mythologically Shiva’s endless matted hair. This opened up deep remembrance of how I would fantasize about Shiva as a child. Shiva as a lover. Shiva as a father. Shiva as the protector.

The next 3 days after that I spent in and out of soaking bliss, bursting into tears most unexpectedly feeling a deep connection to Shiva, feeling again those cool waves that I had felt with fire. “Om namah Shivay” became a sweet kiss to this Shiva. I realized the many levels at which my partner makes me feel like I am uniting with Shiva. I felt another level of oneness open up with him, as I glimpsed Shiva’s energy even more in him. Every single time earlier that I had felt this sense of oneness, I had dismissed it as an illusion. This time, my mind was so quiet, there was no reaction. I was only feeling, remembering, resonating. I was finding Shiva in me. That is all I cared about.

Before my birthday trip I had put the intention to have my heart chakra opened. I also wanted my self-doubt to clear and the fire of clarity to illuminate me. All of this happened in such subtle, beautiful, mysterious ways. I feel immensely grateful to learn the gentle ways of Shiva. I had often projected that this Shiva energy burns away all illusions, and often interpreted it to be a harsh authoritarian energy. I realized that that was a projection of my own mind coming from the patriarchal past lives in me. In truth, Shiva, or Consciousness, or Oneness, is just an energy polarized by our perception of it. I am humbled by the gentle ways Shiva or Consciousness has seduced me. I surrender to it more and more each day and just keep asking Shiva to keep me in His embrace.

Deep gratitude to all the souls who participated in this journey. It is a common love for Shiva that intertwines us all.

If you wish to do Rebirthing Breathwork sessions by Fire, please write to me at spirit.of.crea@gmail.com.

Love’s Light.

I heard a second case of a person who got mentally thrashed in a Vipassana course. It’s surprising that no one really speaks about the fact that Vipassana, just like any other spiritual technique has its pitfalls. I know I deeply suffered during and after the course. Having been an anapanasati meditator, which is the first step of Vipassana, for almost 3 years before I went to the course, I’d felt and observed wonderful leaps in my own consciousness. It was easy to flow with life. Then when I entered the course, it put me under pressure to observe when in fact my natural practice was to dive in and emerge from every sensation. The disruption lasted for 2 years after the course. Perhaps reflectively, I also met people who waxed eloquent about Vipassana but were so obviously hard on themselves and disconnected from their bodies, under the facade of observation. This created more anger in me towards the practice of meditation. Thanks to another breathing practice, Rebirthing-Breathwork, I was able to heal the wounded attitude towards meditation. One day I looked up the anapanasati sutra on the net. In that the Buddha talks about how gradually awareness proceeds from bodily sensation to emotion to energy and then to the energy current called ‘dhara-pravaha‘. In his case, of course, this naturally took place. I realised that it was not the process, but the institutionalising of something which is an organic progression, and giving it a time boundness that perhaps went against my inherent nature. I also later learnt that in the original vipassana courses people were allowed to speak. My intuition would keep asking me to write, to express during the course, but following the norms I didn’t. I later understood the inherent creative nature one is born with that seeks to express. When not allowed to, it destroys internally. It took a long time for this reactive self destructiveness to heal. In a larger perspective, no technique is flawless. And I hope those who do opt for a Vipassana course, perhaps the sensitive ones, do a strong consultation with their intuition first. 

This is just the grey side of one technique. But I’ve ended up in these grey zones for many other techniques which are worth mentioning. Especially at a stage where I am arriving more and more into a space of “Let It Be”.

Pitfalls of Past Life Regression

The burden of compulsive regressing

A few months ago, I was going through an inner state of helplessness, lethargy and a constant feeling of being blocked (which a few people told me was the presence of  not-so-well-intentioned ‘entities’ in me). During this time I came across a page from a healer in Pune called Mana, whose work resonated with my own spiritual insights I was having about 3-4 years ago. She was getting these insights through, not surprisingly, hypnotherapy and past life regression. For about a year I was unable to regress. This ‘disability’ began when I had entered an inner void at the deepest point in one of my regression sessions about 2-3 years ago and saw that I was nothing, I was only the emptiness around. After that I lost an inner will to regress. Yet not knowing how else to heal the issues that still surfaced in my life, I dragged myself searching for people who would take my past life regression sessions. In the session with Mana, I told her at the beginning that I was unable to regress, and then we went into a hypnotherapy session. At one point she just took me to a light body stage and I waited there, seeing in front of me the person who’s karmic exchange with me was blocking me. Without getting into any past life, Mana told me to do the exchange there itself. I was unsure if the healing would happen this way. It was deeply powerful as it took me to a higher state of ‘seeing’ than in my earlier sessions. When I came out, I was surprised and asked her how that happened. She said “You don’t need it. You’re done with that phase”. That’s when I realised that though the block might be in a past life, one needn’t go there if one doesn’t wish to.

Handing readymade solutions

Much prior to this revealing session, I’d undergone quite a few unsatisfactory healing sessions during this ‘enforced’ regressive phase. In some, the past life regression therapist focused inordinately on the story part – the dates, the validation, the completion. Not just that, the worst were the ones who handed out conclusions, about what was going on with me and what I should do now in response, in contrast to allowing the various points of your life to emerge for you to connect them. The truth is, past life regression only works if you employ both your subconscious memory AND your conscious logical mind.

Loving unconsciousness and glorifying it

One day I received a client who had come to me for past life regression therapy. After a fairly clear first session, she was disappointed she had not gone completely under. She said she didn’t want to aware at all and wanted that thrill of just being absent. That is the misuse of this technique. Many people get into a past life regression to see a better movie about themselves which is where the therapy turns into an ego pampering session. Over years I have consciously stayed away from past life regression therapist groups of my own teacher, Dr.Newton, to avoid the mindless glorification of what one saw in one’s past lives. Many after reading my experiences of past life regression on this blog expect to see something phenomenal and some have even seen such lives, but the truth is, it’s not the validation, the what-you-were excitement that is going to give you any soul growth. It is your conscious ability to ask deeper, more honest questions and a driving need to expand your consciousness that determines the success of this technique. I have spent weeks and sometimes years with a single past life experience, receiving (not figuring) the many layers that it is unraveling of my psyche. This receiving ability is developed not by some therapy, but by a daily (really ‘non-exciting’) meditation practice.

Pitfalls of Rebirthing-Breathwork

This practice that I love very much and endorse a lot also has its pitfalls. Many people get very excited when they read about Rebirthing Breathwork on the net. However, because this technique is so simple, it runs the risk of being ‘packaged’ with something else. The most common request I receive is that of group Breathwork. In fact my own first experience was in a group of about 40 people in a hall, all breathing together, for about 2 hours. Leonard Orr, the pioneer of Breathwork, and so many of his loyal followers strongly suggest against doing group Breathwork.

The trap of group Breathwork

More than 70% of detoxification of the human body happens through breath. Over the years of taking people’s Breathwork sessions, I have ended up ‘smelling’ or getting drowsy from the anasthesia and other drugs/chemicals that people have breathed out through their noses during the sessions. At times I have even passed out. Imagine that you have such a person breathing next to you in a hall, or even worse, you are that person. Effectively, you are then breathing out your ‘muck’ and at the same time breathing in someone else’s. There’s another reason where personally I felt group Breathwork was not working for me. If you were born in an environment where the place was cramped, or you were hurried away immediately to accommodate for the next woman laboring in emergency, then doing group Breathwork can trigger this trauma, and as there is no personal support taking you through this opened up experience, it might push this trauma even deeper into your psyche.

Excessive focus on ‘doing’

I’ve attended 4 retreats conducted by international students of Leonard, many of them learning under him for almost a decade. Every retreat teaches me something totally new about Breathwork that was undiscovered before, based on the personal Breathwork practice of the one who conducts the retreat. A Rebirthing-Breathwork retreat is not just about breathing, but about certain water, fire and earth practices also. While attending a recent retreat, the focus on doing was extraordinary. The message given was “Why are you resting when you could be sitting by a fire?!” (and it is no small feat to sit by a fire on a hot afternoon). Each day of the retreat became a long list of to-dos. Not just that, but even the breathing was made into something forceful, effort-ful. Breathing continuously in a rhythm for 1 hour takes efforts but there is an intuitive direction to it. But when you breathe to push through, Breathwork becomes more like a treadmill, exhausting, rather than energising you. Moreover, it enhances your sense of control whereas in fact Breathwork, also known as Intuitive Breathing, is about relaxing and giving up control, allowing your breath to take over. What this forceful Breathwork can also do is weaken your heart muscles. One of my very dear friends who got me onto Breathwork experienced this after a year of practicing Breathwork diligently. There is exceptional beauty in the breath because it awakens a primal bliss in the body that exponentiates aliveness and healing at a hardcore cellular level. If one doesn’t practice Breathwork correctly, this same technique can do as much harm.

Not having the correct knowledge

About a year ago I received a client who had undergone intense Breathwork sessions from a senior therapist where he had breathed, cried and howled loudly throughout the sessions he had told me. This therapist had put him straight into warm water (which is only recommended after a minimum of 10 dry Breathwork sessions), which had sent him into intense spirals of grief. When he came to me, he still complained of ’emotional pain’. On going deeper I found out that this therapist perhaps practiced a version of Breathwork where a client crying translated to healing. That is however not true. It can give a high to the therapist who thinks there is healing happening. But for those whose ‘block’ is actually the weepiness and perhaps self-pity they undergo, the healing is actually shaking them out of the drama and getting them to connect to their breath.

Pitfalls of Inner Child healing

Too much openness

When you start connecting with your inner child, you may begin to re-experience the raw emotions you underwent as a child. For a year after I had finished my inner child intensive healing retreat, I was unstable, couldn’t make decisions, became hypersensitive, ran away from home because I was unable to face my parents’ nature, couldn’t work and had emotional breakdowns in a street where seeing a crowd overwhelmed me. It was the most trying time of my life. My sensitivity had come open without any protection. Through this I learned that alongwith inner child healing, one needs to be taught how to take responsibility for one’s feelings and not get carried away by them through inner parenting. For this, an inner parent has to be firmly established, especially in the face of dark emotions that can spontaneously come up.

Over-identifying with the child within

Another time was early last year when I refused to grow up in ways I knew life was asking me to. I had become identified with playing the role of an inner child under the illusion that being childlike is what being ‘real’ or authentic is all about. I learnt, very slowly, that sometimes to live the wisdom in you, you have to play many other roles. And although vulnerability is very highly rated on the internet, socially, it is not wise to be vulnerable where one needs to be decisive and direct.

~

Through this course of ‘evolution’, I’ve come to realise that every technique stays and then leaves. Every technique has a place and one has to go about very intuitively, experimenting with alertness. GD, a spiritual teacher, had a nice way of explaining this. He would say that one starts with the masculine in the initial part of this spiritual journey, where the focus is on doing and learning – doing affirmations, setting intentions, breath techniques, visualisations, manifestations, et al. After a point, you flip into the feminine. Here you begin to unlearn all the techniques. You fall into acceptance rather than pushing yourself to accept. You find yourself listening intently rather than doing. You let go of keeping intentions because there is a trust innately present, an inner sight that the divine has taken over and is unfolding a path through you. I am hovering somewhere here at the moment.

PS: I do online sessions over Skype related to inner child counselling, EFT, The Work etc. for which you can write to me at spirit.of.crea@gmail.com. I no longer conduct past life regression. I am also formulating my own Rebirthing-Breathwork retreats based on the one one one work I do with my clients. In case you are looking for Rebirthing-Breathwork retreats being conducted by Rebirthing Breathwork International in India, please contact their page. Love. 

Interestingly when we started working together, she was feeling an acute numbness – she had been travelling extensively and was in a hectic, stress-filled IT job that gave her no time to process her emotions. There was no time to grieve over broken relationships that had transpired over the years. Through the session she could open the door to a gush of feelings within her. Even though she didn’t cry during the session, a huge release was happening just through breath. After the session she was in a sacred place. She described coming home to herself finally. She had tears rolling down for she had never experienced peace at such a deep, physical level.

And unbelievably all of this was happening in a hotel room, where we were doing this session due to various reasons. She was deeply into Bach Flower therapy. She had been intuitively using them for the past several years to heal herself. I had myself sought advice from her quite successfully at one point.

This session humbled me. As a part of Breathwork all I do is guide people to “birth” themselves through Breath. There is no spiritual mumbo-jumbo involved. And yet I am unprepared for every session. All I do is invoke the presence of Mahavatar Babaji and ascended masters at the start of the session.

Recently I did sessions for someone who loved drugs (not an addict though) for the high that it gave him and he was elated at finding an alternative way of experiencing bliss, with a difference that instead of taking him “out of the world” it brought him straight home into the body, and the effects stayed for a very long time. It cleared his head and vision for the first time. He had not been into any kind of spiritual practice before.

I cannot help but imagine how many avenues could be explored just through the power of Breath. Every spiritual text on earth talks about breath. It is my intention that more and more people are drawn to explore breath as a way of experiencing Source at a cellular level in the body. We deserve to feel at home in our body. I have experienced this bliss and I continue to do so with every session of Breathwork. And each time the love affair with Breath deepens.

“Genuine breathworkers are different. They may happen to be doctors or therapists, or professional counselors, and so on; but in the practice of breathwork, they are nothing more than caring people who have derived great personal benefit from the
process, and feel confident enough to share it with others”
– Dan Brule

Grateful to be one of these and grateful to all the teachers and Mahavatar Babaji for guiding me to this technique.

There are many forms of Breathwork in the world today. The one I use is perhaps the simplest, the most basic of all, brought about by Leonard Orr, called Rebirthing-Breathwork. You can read details of what it is here. If you feel called to explore this with me, please drop me a line at spirit.of.crea@gmail.com. I practice in Pune & Mumbai, India. Love and Light

Happy to announce that this technique that has helped me so much is happening in India this March!

I wish you avail of this wonderful opportunity to not just experience the power of your own breath and heal your birth trauma, but also to learn and practice it with your friends.

Details are:

Retreat Curriculum:

• Rebirthing Breathwork -what it is, and how to do it.
• Healing with the Elements; earth, air, water, & fire.
• Personal Lie
• Building a Prosperity Consciousness
• Physical Immortality -Ultimate Healing
• The 8 Biggies of Human Trauma
• Past Life Regression
• Self worth
• Life Purpose
• One Day Fire Vision Quest

During the Retreat you will have the opportunity to:

* Cleanse your mind, body, heart, and spirit.

* Increase your aliveness and personal intentions for living true to your soul’s purpose.

* Discover and learn how to easily flood your body with Divine Energy.

* Discover spiritual practices of aliveness that support & strengthen you in your daily life.

* Connect more deeply to yourself & courageously learn how to heal your life.

* Learn how to give and receive high quality Rebirthing Breathwork Sessions.

* Receive a certificate of completion at the end of the 5 days.

Meet The Trainers:

Together Jesús and Sara offer trainees a safe and sacred space for healing, learning, vulnerability, growth, and transformation to occur while keeping it fun, light and playful. These workshops are a truly uplifting, inspiring, life changing experience.

Jesús and Sara look forward to meeting you and are honored to be a part of your journey. Jesús Meca finished his Engineering Studies with Honors and has been involved in personal development since 2004.

Jesús is the first person in the World since the 1980’s to finish a One Year Professional Training directly with the creator of this system (Leonard Orr) traveling around 3 Continents, 8 Countries and 15 States in the U.S. Since then he has been working full time teaching Breathwork, giving individual breathing sessions, coaching, trainings and seminars in different parts of the world related with these subjects.

Sara Dawn began her studies with the LifeForce Educational Corporation in 2002.

She worked for four years as a personal coach and team leader, assisting others to actualize their potential and achieve life goals. Sara has been a professional Breathworker since 2003, when she began her training with Leonard Orr giving Breathwork sessions, coaching, and workshops to people from various age groups and backgrounds. Sara continued her studies and received her license as a RScP with the United Centers for Spiritual Living in 2009, giving her a unique spiritually centered perspective and deep understanding of how to transform one’s life.

Course Dates:

10th March 2012 to 14th March 2012

Course Location:

Dr. Modis Resort – in Karjat (Close to Pune and Mumbai).

Check link here:

http://www.drmodisresort.com/

**** To register and for more information ***

Contact: Deepti G Gujar

Mobile: +91 9764899970

Email: spirit.of.crea@gmail.com

http://www.facebook.com/events/339450986079167/
http://www.rebirthingbreathworks.com/

Check out our last year’s video blog of this retreat!

Examples

Citing personal examples here, one of my core birth patterns was the denial to come out into the world, because of which my birth had developed complications and the doctor in charge had informed my family that I might be already dead by the time I am delivered. This attitude of denial was evident in all areas of my life and I experienced difficulties committing to even the simplest things, such as a study course, relationships, projects at work, etc. Moreover, due to the intense difficulties experienced by the end of the labor term by my mother, a fear became imprinted in my mind that the end of any project, etc. will turn bad. As a result I have suffered from nervous spells and anxiety attacks all my life when my engineering course ended, projects ended, relationships ended, travelling assignments ended, which inadvertently developed complications. Typically one would blame the complications for the anxiety but that is not how reality works. The inner state creates the outer – the subconscious was programmed with this pattern that endings are disastrous. However, within a year after my first breathwork workshop with the Newton’s these patterns started healing and I felt a lot more relaxed towards accepting the natural flow of life when things came to an end.

Weight loss

Though I would sincerely not ask anyone to get into this technique for this purpose, weight loss is a natural fallout of the cleansing one goes through as a part of breathwork. The most common misconception today is that food causes weight gain. This is not true unless you have moved from a warm climate to a cooler one and your body is naturally accumulating the fat to keep itself warm. The truth about weight gain which I have experienced, and validated through so many fellow rebirthers and clients, is that emotions cause weight gain. As mentioned earlier, the mind-body-emotions are ONE cohesive unit. You cannot find a dysfunction in any one of them without finding its corresponding link in the other. The root cause is, of course, thought. Hence, weight is often the emotional buildup that has overflowed from the emotion-body into the physical body. So also, problems of people unable to put on weight inspite of trying hard to is because an emotional drain is happening due to which the body is feeding the emotion, more than it is feeding itself. In most cases, people lose the emotional baggage and hence the physical weight associated with it after a few sessions.

Other Benefits – Health

Our emotional framework is the basis for developing physical addictions of all kinds. This is the reason one experiences urges and cravings for specific foods, specific forms of mental excitement, which drive us and wear our physical body down. It has been observed that after experiencing breathwork sessions, suddenly certain habits fall off. Again citing my own experience, I loss the inclination towards alcohol. Another friend I know lost her constant hunger which used to drive her to eat every so often even when she wasn’t that hungry. We naturally turned towards a more fruit-based diet. This made me realize that more than half of our meal is fed to our emotions and very little is actually required by the physical body. Going further, it made me turn to yoga to enjoy my body more consciously, while since childhood I had been physically very weak and hence was averse to any kind of physical exercise.

Other Benefits – Relationships

One of the most obvious healing that takes place is that you end up healing the relationship with your mother – not only your biological mother, but also earth as a mother. The former is a very powerful transformation that needs to be experienced to be understood as to how powerful the connection with your mother truly is, and how it affects every relationship of your life. Personally, I was driven into spirituality to heal my connection with my mother and I could see a tremendous transformation in this relationship for the first time in the one year following the workshop. The issues which made me suffer were deep-rooted anger that went into spells of rage, hatred, co-dependency and miscommunication. These emotions actually started healing in the workshop which I was unaware of until a year later it struck me how much lighter our exchanges had become. They were further healed through the workshop I underwent for a second time a year later – this time under Leonard Orr’s school through the Breathwork course conducted by his highly experienced students in Pune, India.  This was truly the main reason why I was so inspired to follow Breathwork as a lifestyle (more on this later).

Other Benefits – Money

Though this might come as a surprise to many, money is your emotional hologram in life. The way money flows into and out of your life is a direct reflection of your emotional system. And what better way than the breath to heal it! I personally experienced that healing your emotions and especially the connection with your parents directly impacted my financial health. The time before breathwork I was at odds with my finances, running in debt all the time in almost every place and hated the very talk of money. However, it was acutely revealing when I saw how this was a reflection of my relationship with my mother. It seemed like out of thin air I was attracting free courses that year, following the breathwork program, about how to manage your finances and handle wealth in a spiritually aware way. This made a 180 degree transformation in my personal balance sheet. I could pay off a 3-year old credit card loan, invest, save, cut down my expenditures, get more tax-savvy, received a salary hike, donated to charity and became more generous as a person. At the core it struck me how the attachment to money kept me from enjoying my expenditures which caused guilt, which in turn led to incurring debt. This reflected the pattern with my mother how attachment to her caused me to feel excessively dependent on her, because of which I would block her from expressing her affection towards me, which in turn caused guilt, which made me feel indebted to her and caused me to believe that I would never be able to love her back. J

Other Benefits – Creativity

During breathwork I experienced a reconnect to music – I experienced myself humming in my mother’s womb. I looked up on the net and yes science has validation that a baby makes sounds in the womb for various reasons. In my case, it was to heal myself. I would experience severe cramps in my legs right since then and to heal this, I would hum. The past few years prior to Breathwork I had been completely disconnected from music, inspite of having been trained as a singer since childhood. Breathwork made the connection so instantly that a few months after the workshop I became a part of the production of a music television show! But more profound than that, my voice texture was clearer than I had ever experienced, the sinus problem was greatly reduced and there was a feeling of oneness with life which had been missing all along earlier. Through another incredible creation, within a few months of the workshop, a part of my life journey written by me was published in a book by a Dubai-based publisher publicly for the first time in my life.

Coming back to the point, I do feel Breathwork has made this turnaround possible. Healing the connection with the Earth-Mother means healing all associations of the material/physical world – money, wealth, health, your physical environment, the kind of work you do to support yourself on a day to day basis, your creativity.

Rebirthing-Breathwork sessions

Initially it is highly recommended to go through 10 ‘dry’ breathwork sessions with an experienced breathworker, one with whom you are intuitively comfortable with. A Breathwork therapist is more commonly referred to as ‘rebirther’ because one experiences a rebirth thanks to re-living the in-utero experience.

After that, breathwork sessions can be taken in a bathtub – known as water rebirthing sessions – which can be in warm water first and then cold water. The significance of the warm water is tremendous – it is easy to trigger very vivid in-utero memories through a warm water session and can also be extremely intense. A person might feel the stillness/specific pain that he/she experienced in the womb hours after the session. Cold water is used to trigger fears and heal them. Since both these types can be very intense, it is very much recommended to undergo 10 dry rebirthing sessions first.

In parallel to dry sessions, one can undergo sessions in the vicinity of an open wood fire. These can be extremely powerful in healing childhood loneliness, abandonment and self-worth issues, and also burn away the mind’s toxicity – the root cause of our destructive thought patterns – directly. Excessive emotional inclinations also get greatly reduced through these sessions.

Additionally, one can undergo a breathwork session in an open area, for e.g. lying in a hammock under a tree.

Dr.Newton also conducts earth rebirthing sessions by one getting into a sand pit neck down and then doing the breathwork cycle.

As per our trainer’s manual, a ‘rebirther’ is essentially serving the role of a midwife in the olden days who would deliver babies. Hence, we are trained to practice non-interference with a person’s natural breathwork cycle processing, gently motivating the person to breathe, whenever required. We don’t touch the client unless he/she is going through a very intense experience, in which case we just gently put a hand on his/her shoulder after asking for permission to do so. Moreover, we are taught to be as gentle as possible.

“The Healing Power of Christ, the Magnetism of Mohammed, the Miraculous Power of Moses, the Charm of Krishna, and the Inspiration of the Buddha—all these were attained by Breath.”

~Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan

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For more details on how to undergo personal sessions, please mail me at spirit.of.crea@gmail.com. 

The technique

Rebirthing-Breathwork is a technique of continuous, conscious breathing. This breathing takes on a life of its own once you begin it, and goes into 3 stages in the span of 1-3 hours. This technique was discovered by Leonard Orr who has his own Rebirthing-Breathwork International school in the U.S. the reason it is called ‘rebirthing’ breathwork, is because in most cases one goes into the in-utero stage the moment you start breathing. Hence, the very first thing one typically starts reliving and releasing is all the blockages one went through when one was in the mother’s womb. Breath is therefore the whole and soul of this technique.

[Leonard often cites it to be the modern form of kriya yoga, with Mahavatar Babaji being his guru as well]

The experience

Typically once you enter a breathing cycle, one experiences a lot of energy movement across various parts of the body. This is what is known as per ancient science as the prana energy and its movement defines the different vayus in the body. When this energy begins to move, it goes to those places first where there are maximum or most intense blockages, for it is the very nature of breath to dismantle blockages. Hence, the common experiences as a result of this energy movement are –

• Tetany – stiffening of the limbs – which a rebirther guides the client to consciously breathe into. The rebirther makes sure that the tetany is released by the end of the session. However, tetany can come up in the forthcoming sessions as well, and it may take several sessions in some cases to completely be free of tetany as this is usually the result of a lot of emotional blocks clogged up in the body which get released layer by layer through every session.
• Feeling emotional distress and emotionally volatile – our mind-body-emotions together form a cohesive vehicle and each is linked with the other. Breath works on all these 3 bodies (as per ancient Indian spiritual science, mental and emotional bodies are our ‘subtle bodies’ – ones we don’t see but which do exist) simultaneously. Hence, if there are any specific emotions locked up in our psyche, they will be bound to be thrown up during the session. This is part of the cleansing process of breath.
• Feeling aches / pains / shivers / sharp twitching, tingling, etc – though not all of these will happen to everyone, depending on person to person, a variety of these are observed in a person undergoing breathwork during the session.

Benefits

It is unfortunately a very less known fact that the experiences one has while in the mother’s womb forever shapes a person’s psyche. The imprints formed during this stage are known as limbic imprints and are often considered to be impossible to erase. Not just this stage, but also the way a person was born, the birthing process, is also known to have a forever impact on his/her psychological makeup. It is almost as if your brain gets hardwired with thought patterns at this stage.  However, through personal experience I can say that Rebirthing-Breathwork is successful in clearing these patterns and you can immediately see the manifestation of these changes in all areas of your life.

Breathwork can clear the 8 biggies of the human trauma –

1. Birth trauma – the trauma encountered as a part of the birthing process which creates deep psychological imprints. Many times the root cause of why a person attracts a traumatic birth is due to past life conditioning, i.e. experiencing difficult past lives.
2. Death urge – often due to birth trauma the baby wishes to die and go back to the soul form which was freer and gave it the sense of oneness. Complicated deliveries, complications during the mother’s labor are the first signs of the baby’s death urge. Leonard Orr also says that people experiencing sinus is the sign of their subconscious death urge. Birth is decided prior to conception but death is chosen by a person at a subconscious level every moment of his/her life. In the simplest explanation, death urge is every anti-life thought. This urge reveals itself in a person’s life through situations of lack, unhappiness, accidents, and in some cases, suicides.
3. Past lives & specific past life conditioning – healing past life traumas naturally happens through Breathwork. I have personally conducted regressions through the process of Breathwork successfully, after undergoing it myself.  Through this specific past life issues like addictions, relationship issues, etc. are known to heal.
4. Personal lie or specific negatives – due to complicated births/labor, a person can develop specific thought patterns – e.g. “I am a burden to everyone”, “no one loves me”, “I am always alone”, etc. which get reflected in all areas of life. Breathwork is known to heal these layer by layer.
5. Parental Disapproval Syndrome – disapproval of our parents can lead us to making choices that may be unhealthy for us – like denying our unique individuality, leading to a dual personality, not feeling integrated with life, attracting destructive relationships that could even mirror our parents’ fears out of the subconscious urge of confirming to them in any way possible.
6.  Senility – fears of going old and senile, which could also be a leftover from past lives, can be commonly experienced by people of all ages, something not many are aware of.
7. School trauma – our early childhoods are the foundation of our current life and possibly even future lives. Having a harsh school regimen, experiencing a violation of our individuality due to unaware teachers, a distorted sense of discipline, forcibly changing a person’s biological clock to fit school timings, curbing a child’s creativity to fit the school’s timetable, etc. can forever damage a person’s self-worth and reflect in all areas of life.
8. Religion trauma – most of us across the world have experienced this by being forced to perform rituals that could’ve led to suffering and pain, meaningless traditions leading to curbing our natural instincts and the fear/guilt created by it under the pretext of blasphemy, being forced to attend service / chanting / places of worship since childhood.