How Changing Your Breath Can Change Your Life
posted by Roman Hanis on April 1st, 2016
For many years now, we’ve been sharing the Primordial Breathwork practice stemming from the root of the Amazonian and Tibetan lineages. This practice has continued to deepen in profound ways the more we practice it ourselves and share it with others, often to the extent that we’re still amazed at the breakthroughs we witness.
Working with the breath alone, you can unlock and release deeply repressed emotional and energetic traumas. When that happens, it allows us to remember states of peace and relaxation, which for some, may not have been fully experienced since our time in the mother’s womb.
Because this ancient practice continues to bring increasing benefit to our global community, we’re featuring it on our current tour (with a number of retreats and session throughout the United states during April and May).
In addition – since our friends at the Sacred Science community recently shared some breathwork methods used by the Paititi Institute on their blog (and it saw a huge response) we’re inspired to share more about how to apply this practice skilfully.
Rediscovering your breath
Why are so many people drawn to these ancestral practices today? Is it that our artificial comfort-based society causes a mundane, robotic existence that lacks greater purpose and passionate inspiration? Or perhaps it’s the relinquished responsibility for one’s life, diverting creative self expression towards superficial values and instant self gratification in a way that leaves a sense of something missing?
Imagine how your life would be if you were fully alive, invigorated and engaged in full presence. How would it feel to see each moment as immensely meaningful, to the point where the destiny of the whole universe is directly affected by our engaged initiative?
There are many techniques and practices available today but often the most direct and effective ones are too simple and close at hand to find, for “it’s right in front of our noses!” It’s the Breath and it’s available to every single one of us! If we learn to use it skillfully it can be one of the most powerful tools for transformation and evolution for all to share.
There’s growing interest in how ancestral cultures approached breath to heal and to transform consciousness. And it’s essential to understand not just the external techniques now unlocking people’s primordial psychic powers (hence the name of our practice, The Primordial Breathwork) but also how generations of ancestors cultivated these energetic blueprints to affect the most practical, lasting benefits.
A new definition of freedom
A profound observation I’ve made studying with wisdom lineage holders of both the Amazonian and Tibetan people is the contrast of their perspective on freedom. In our modern society, some terms associated with our expression of freedom (such as “breaking free”) insinuate something wild, crazy and sometimes even violent.
But in indigenous and ancestral cultures, it’s most often expressed in very peaceful, creative and harmonious ways in-tune with the natural energies that abide in settings such as the rainforest or mountains.
The direct link between creativity and consciousness is another essential element of these techniques geared towards complete inner freedom. Being unconscious of one’s own life force, dominated by disturbing emotions and enslaved by conceptual dramas inevitably causes self destructive tendencies on both individual and societal levels.
We can easily witness this in the ecological, financial and social crises happening on our planet. Just switch on the closest television.
It begins with a single inhale
According to ancestral wisdom, healing begins with a single breath. By learning how to bring awareness into each moment and weave breath into one’s experience, psychic knots responsible for such suffering get untangled. Rather than being a leaf in the emotional storm of childish disturbances breath brings awareness into the peaceful center of the storm – into the childlike source of all creative expression.
Some modern breathwork modalities focus on a more dramatic catharsis. While catharsis may sometimes occur, the main focus of these ancestral practices is on heart-centered presence, consciously facing and breathing through all unintegrated emotional charges that accumulate in organism’s cellular memory.
Of course there’s benefit in the catharsis-oriented techniques, like primal screaming techniques popular today but it’s often short lived. Suppressed emotional content is momentarily released, but the source isn’t consciously reconciled. Consequently, the practice becomes a perpetual need to keep beating that pillow to release the same psychic steam which keeps accumulating through unconscious behavior.
In the Primordial Breathwork, consciousness integrates and transforms energies previously responsible for anxiety, stress and trauma. They can flow positively and freely, without the danger of further stagnating and affecting one’s life.
Practicing mindfully
These ancestral breath work practices involve an integral approach and act as a rite of passage into a profound actualization of human potential; a lasting source of well-being and discerning wisdom of the whole organism.
Initially, we highly recommend being guided by experienced practitioners because it’s possible to energetically receive the ancestral blueprints on a practical level, in an embodied way.
As the Sacred Science shared – the breathwork incorporates both a standing practice (originating from the Amazon) and a lying down practice (originating from Tibet). In our experience, we’ve found that while the first Amazonian standing section can be practiced without guidance almost from the very beginning, the Tibetan lying down section takes at least 10 sessions to establish the seeds of emotional intelligence required to truly benefit from this more intense practice.
