Breath & Presence

I just got back from a Transformational Breath Essentials 6-Day Seminar at The Clearing Center in North Fork, CA. The land and people there are amazing! I would highly recommend anyone who is interested to go and check it out. I’m super grateful for people like Eddie Ellner and Juliet Wilkins here in Santa Barbara who have helped me down this path. Over the last several years I have found breathwork to be theraputic, insightful, and a useful guide post toward being more present with sensations and emotions in my body.

Relationships can be challenging for all of us and I’ve explored many different modalities to improve my interpersonal skills. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” helped me as an analytical college kid, and more recently Non-Violent Communication (NVC) has shaped my style of relating. A couple of years ago though I worked through The Presence Process with a local book group and more recently Damian Gallagher recommended The Power of Focusing heading into this retreat. These ideas set the stage for me seeing the world outside through the lens of sensations and emotions in the body.

I first learned how to focus on sensations in the body through yoga and insight meditation where doing a body scan is encouraged. I have also participated in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy and Somatic Therapy where this comes into play. This isn’t a new idea to me! What is happening now though is that while body awareness used to be sort of a fleeting practice I would do occasionally, I hadn’t wholeheartedly bought into the idea that it is key for healthy relationships. Unintegrated emotions in our bodies drive unconscious behavior, even while attempting to practice active listening through NVC. Of course my mind and ego are going to feel threatened by this! We are conditioned to believe our thoughts and stay out of touch with our bodies.

Story time! For most of my childhood I held pencils in a unique way that everyone told me was not good. Teachers and parents tried to convince me to use different grips and to change it to be right. I resisted because the way I held the pencil was familiar and comfortable for me. Then one day I decided out of the blue that I wanted to change and Voilà! I never went back to holding it the old way. It was an internal switch where I had convinced myself and the rest was easy.

While I still believe that NVC can be useful, I am finding that seeking to have needs fulfilled through making requests externally can be problematic when it isn’t rooted from a place of gratitude and presence internally. I have to be able to handle the emotions and sensations in my body in order to be present and compassionate in any relationship. At first this feels uncomfortable because of my habit of making an external request to fulfill a need, but ultimately it is empowering to take responsibility for my own experience. Thanks to everyone I did and didn’t mention in this post who has helped me find my way on this journey!