Discovering Breathwork or Rebirthing

We may believe that breath is life, but what then is Breathwork and what is Rebirthing?

This holistic healing method is based on a simple breathing exercise. It can help us experience more of our life in the present and can also assist in resolving influences from our past.

The process combines accelerated breathing with evocative relaxing music in a safe and comfortable setting so that the person being treated enters a non-ordinary, relaxed state of consciousness. This state activates the natural inner healing process of the individual's psyche, bringing him or her a particular set of internal experiences.

Additional elements of the process include focused energy release work and deep inner peace. Breathwork/Rebirthing can be done in groups however individual sessions are the most powerful.

Breathwork/Rebirthing helps us understand the effects our birth has had on our individual self-esteem, relationships and family dynamics as well as more specific issues. It provides a nonverbal way to heal and it takes most people way beyond the more verbal and cognitive therapies. It leads to Self-Mastery. It also results in such powerful emotional and spiritual releases that it addresses one's whole process from releasing traumas to healing relationships. You can unlock your patterns in life. These patterns although created to support you in the past no longer support your current direction in life. We have received these patterns from our parents and environment through our early years, but we have not looked to see why certain factors occur.

Breathwork/Rebirthing and the Dynamics of Birth

One of the aspects Breathworkers/Rebirthers address in a session is what you know about your birth? Did your parents want a boy or a girl? Were you planned, wanted, was it a long labour, a fast birth, were forceps used, was it a a caesarean, was it a twin birth, was your mother anaesthetised etc.?

These questions relate to the way we go through change and what we internalise about one of our first experiences of change... leaving the womb and entering the world. We examine what the environment was like from conception to delivery.

The Breathwork/Rebirthing Process

In the breathing process, the inhale and the exhale are connected so that there are no pauses between filling and emptying the lung space. After breathing in this manner for approximately an hour, the typical new Breathwork/Rebirthing client finds his consciousness involuntarily leaving the focus of the breathing, moving, instead, to review events in his own individual past. Generally, these events were ones, which resulted in his accumulating negative thoughts and feelings, which still dictate his basic attitudes and beliefs.

As the client continues the connected breathing during this re-experience of past events, the tensions involved with the past are dissolved. This is just by the connected breathing, not by any dramatisation or any other kind of expression. Having let go of these negatives, the client becomes free to make conscious choices about current real-life experiences that previously had been compulsively dealt with in a neurotic manner because the accumulated tensions limited choice. The connected produces healing.

A Typical Session

With the inner healing intelligence guiding the process, the quality and content brought forth is unique to each person and for that particular time and place. While recurring themes are common, no two sessions are ever alike.

A typical session usually starts with the client's sharing with the Breathworker/Rebirther what has been going on in their life. The exploration focuses on what positives the client wants to establish in place of currently held negatives. Some discussion of affirmations that counteract these negatives takes place. Then the client lies down and breathes in the connected pattern, generally for at least an hour. The client is coached and guided by the Breathworker/Rebirther who helps the client remember to breathe when negative associations, coming up on their way to being released, cause the person to hold his breath. The Breathworker/Rebirther also encourages the client to breathe in a full, relaxed manner. After the cycle of release is over, the client relaxes into a peaceful, blissful state, from which he easily emerges as the session closes.