We’ve just enjoyed an amazing Rebirthing Breathwork workshop. Thank you to you fabulous students who joined me! This somatic stuff is not for the faint hearted and requires heaps of courage, curiosity and a willingness to explore the unknown. So, we used a conscious, connected breath, to step out of our heads, our story and our rational minds and tune into the feelings, emotions and memories that percolated up using this breathing technique.
So why the breath and why is it such a catalyst for change? In yoga we encourage deep belly breaths and this massages and nourishes your parasympathetic nervous system (rest and restore), calms you down and you enjoy the yoga class even more. The aim of the Rebirthing Breathwork breath is quite different. Its aim is to wake up all that stuffed down trauma, emotions, experiences and feelings and gently bring them up to the surface, so you can deal with them and let them go.
Because feelings and emotions are just energy and the law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – only converted from one form of energy to another. Our emotions are literally energy in motion. When we find ways to block the energy from moving through our body, we end up storing emotions in our cells. Some ways that we learn to bypass our emotions include dissociating, addiction, perfectionism, judging ourselves and being critical of others.
So if we spend most of our time cut off from our breath and learned to shut those horrible experiences down into the body, by the time you reach adulthood, you are so expert at “stuffing down,” and generally repressing your feelings that you hardly know you’re doing it. And that stuck energy compacts and compounds until you have physical symptoms: stress, skin eruptions, heart attack, auto immunes … the list goes on.
We can reconnect and wake up these repressed emotions using the conscious, connected breath. Trauma around your birth, your early family life, trauma from the tribe and society, all these feelings start to surface. You might also have been abused, neglected, lied to or been forced to lie or had your boundaries violated in some way, and these experiences were too scary to deal with, hence they go stuck. Over time this gradual shutting down of energy flow creates physical symptoms like tension, pain and dis-ease.
Rebirthing breathwork will help you release the energetic blockages that have been manifesting as tension and your physical problems. Once the emotional knots are released, the body has clearance to heal itself – and it does. It was an amazing workshop!