In my first year as a graduate student, I was enrolled in a Women’s Studies class on women’s health with one of the most incredible professors I have had so far. This woman emanated love. If you went into her office to meet with her, you were met with a warm hug and a kiss on the cheek. She always brought snacks to our three hour evening class, knowing that most of us needed some nutrition to stay attentive. Her first priority was that everyone’s voice got heard; her mind was open to whatever her students had to share and she would ask us questions even if she didn’t know the answer. These qualities were particularly important given our subject matter of disadvantaged and silenced groups of people and practices, though I have often dreamed of the day when all academic classes have this consciousness.
During this particular semester I was also in the second half of my training in Emotional Energy Release Therapy at the SET Training Center, meeting once a month for ten months. I have been incredibly fascinated with this work since I started practicing. The process of EERT is based on Bioenergetics and Reichian therapy and uses facilitated continuous breathing to charge the body to the point where it will then discharge excess energy that has been stored. After these sessions I always feel light and clear, and have been surprised by comments from others indicating that they can perceive the change in me as well. On more than one occasion someone, who had no idea I had recently had an EERT session, has told me I have a “glow.” Though I can’t explain it, I have experienced it and have heard similar experiences of clients and friends.
Based on my own experiences of both receiving and facilitating sessions, I find that when a body charges with the breath by continuously keeping it moving, the energy that is created meets with the blocks we have constructed (usually unconsciously) that essentially cut us off from the world. A great example is to think of an experience when you felt bombarded by a flux of unpleasant emotions. The first thing we will all almost universally do is to stop breathing because it seems to dull the experience. It may do so momentarily, but when we stop the flow of life in our bodies, that emotional energy cannot move through us and be released, so it gets stored. Recognizing this, I am able to notice moments in which I find myself reacting to present circumstances as if they are they are the same as experiences in the past where I have felt traumatized or rejected. The present moment always has the possibility to be bouncing off of old hurts; the more we have stored in us, the less likely we are to see this as it is happening and to react in a more explosive way to something that is really only minor and sometimes not really threatening at all. I have found that the more I peel away, the more I am able to appreciate each moment as it is. Even if it is unpleasant, I can more easily feel the pain fully which allows me to release it and move on.
But I have also learned that there is no shortage of layers to peel away. Even though I have probably experienced close to 20 of these EERT sessions, there is always something new to “breath on.” I will say that following each time I am taken through the process, I find changes both internally and externally.
Internally I find that my landscape has changed, the rocky terrain of my insecurities has eroded a bit and that mountain of fear is now only hill (though often still a very tall hill). One of my most exciting observations is I can see how my capacity to hold the space for others has increased tremendously. Whether inside or outside the treatment room, I have found myself in more and more situations where someone else has some “stuff” boiling up to the surface and I am a witness to them, I can be fully there to validate their experience. What they bring up is less likely to bounce off of my “stuff” because it has been cleared away or is in deeper layers that have yet to come to surface, and so I can be there more fully for them. If an argument started to arise, I am less likely to engage in it as a way to prove I am right. I am less tied to this and more interested in remaining open to hearing this person’s point of view. I obviously still have my opinions; just as there is less stuff blocking my ears from listening, there is also less stuff in my throat that may have in the past cut me off from expressing my own truth.
I have also found that external circumstances in my life shift each time I go through a breath session. Unfortunately, we are at this point unable to construct an empirical study of whether or not those changes would have taken place without the breath session, but in my experience I am convinced that the energetic changes within myself have affected the world around me. Following breath sessions, I have had people reappear in my life when they had been absent for quite some time, new opportunities emerge from nowhere, and shifts in my relationships with the people I keep close in my life.
As with any graduate class in the humanities or social sciences, we had to write a term paper for this class I was in on women’s health. I took advantage of the research methods acceptable within the field of women’s studies (which in my experience is more open to the scholar reporting on their own lives than most other fields) and decided to write about my journey with the breath work up until that time. The subtitle of the paper was, “One Woman’s Journey to Wholeness through Breath,” and this is really the point of this post.
Recently, I sent this paper to a friend of mine, who had started to receive EERT sessions from another therapist. My friend had many questions about this unfamiliar process and so I thought I’d share some of what I had written on my experiences. Reading over the first paragraph of my paper, I was reminded of this idea of “unfolding wholeness” and feel it relates to my personal conception of health and healing.
Several years ago, in my linguistic fetish, I realized that the word “health” begins with the verb “to heal.” Reflecting on this observation, I realized that one’s state of health is entirely dependent on the healing journey one has traveled. I adopted Health through Healing as my business name because my services aim to bring this idea of healing into my client’s awareness. Our idea of good health must be prefaced by ongoing efforts to heal, physically, emotionally, and for me, spiritually.
The root of both health and to heal means “to become whole.” I am fond of this idea of wholeness, but as I state in my term paper, I do not believe that wholeness is a static state that can be achieved. I like to think of wholeness as a qualitative word, perhaps changing the form to an adjective, “wholly.” Adjectives are words that describe something else, and that something else is that which is in the process of becoming whole, a continuous manifestation of the subject’s inherent wholeness. In the paper, the subject was myself, but is real life the subject is all of us.
We are all immersed in this ocean of unfolding wholeness, how do you want to open?
