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Dharmabreath
(taken from the book "Success Without Goals")


While I was living in India I was introduced to a beautiful and ancient experience.  It involved lying on my back and being guided through a special form of breathing.  This brought to the surface many repressed emotions and fears, releasing sometimes in gushes and sometimes slowly.  After each session I felt as if my mind had been washed clean of years of mental dirt.

Once a week I would go back and repeat this procedure, releasing more and more old mind stuff, and being lifted to greater and greater heights of freedom.  It was as if I were being relieved on tons of stinking garbage.

Each session would be more powerful, swelling in orgasmic force to heights of ecstasy, until I was floating peacefully in an eternity of bliss.  I had never experienced such a feeling, such a high, and it would stay with me for quite a while afterward.

When I left the screened porch where we had the sessions, the world had changed, the trees and the flowers glowed intensely, emitting an exquisite perfume.  I felt like I was floating; the sounds of the birds were enchanting; there was a flow emanating from my center, a feeling of love.

This splendor would last for one or two hours, but there was a subtle, deeper change taking place.  I was more content, more accepting, I had a feeling of being at one with existence.


In India I also learned how to guide others, I learned how to work with them, allowing their feelings to flow, allowing them to eliminate negative programs, and to free themselves from becoming attached and identified to old experiences such as the trauma of being shut in a dark closet; being left by our parents; being brought up by an unloving family or being sexually abused.  This simple process needed an unpretentious name: I named it Dharmabreath

How does this work?  The natural tendency of the mind is to repress these traumatic experiences and build an automatic defense program around them, which does two things; first, as much as possible conceals the event from the immediate memory; second, creates a defense system to help avoid a recurrence of this unpleasant event or any situation which appears to be similar.  These defense mechanisms manifest themselves as phobias, fears, inhibitions, procrastination, low self-esteem and so on.

As a child these mechanisms help prevent it from being re-hurt, but once we become adults they are no longer necessary.  In fact they can prevent us from living our life to its fullest–from being who we really are.  They get in the way, causing unconscious self-sabotage.  These manifestations of fear of success keep us from being adventurous, speaking up, being free from the dependencies of others.  These behaviors can also be, or become, obnoxious and anti-social.


One natural tendency during times of stress and tension is to hold our breath.  This is one method of repressing feelings and emotions.  We "put on a brave face", "Keep a stiff upper lip', say, "It doesn't bother me," or "I can take it," or simply feel nothing, and work at ignoring it.  These repressed feelings accumulate over the years, using more and more of our energy to hold them in. 
As the fear of losing control increases, the tensions increase and we become more rigid and dry, slowly doubling over with age.  The demand on our energy supply to hold in these feelings is tremendous.  In releasing these defenses we free up vast amounts of energy and start to feel lighter and younger. 

Breathing is the essence of life.  We can live for weeks without food and a few days without water, but without breath it only takes a few minutes to die.  Without breathing fully, we die slowly.


It is interesting that the verb "to be" has evolved from the Sanskrit word bhu, which means ‘to grow', or ‘make grow'.  And, ‘am' and ‘is' have come from the Sanskrit word asmi which means ‘to breath'..  Maybe they knew that unless we release the breath we cannot grow.  Julian Jaynes says: "It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of time when man had no independent word for ‘existence' and could only say that something ‘grows' or that is ‘breathes',"

In the past, our very existence was seen to be our breath.  It is by returning to this breath technique that we become revitalized, eliminating old dead patterns of behavior and allowing us to be free.

Dharmabreath is a process that enables this to happen.  It permits the energy to flow.  And like a river, it washes away the blocks and debris stored in the mind-body, allowing us to become, perhaps for the first time, our true selves.

One major difference between Dharmabreath and other therapies is that Dharmabreath does not focus on the cause of the trauma.  It does not focus on the event that caused the pain.  Instead, it focuses on the present, on the limitations we are experiencing at this moment.  To discover the cause may be interesting, but we can become obsessed with the event, or identify with the trauma, or justifying today's limited life by yesterdays event.  "I was an abused child and this is why I have this problem," or "My father beat me, this is why I'm a battered wife."

All that is really important is what is happening, now, at this moment.  What is preventing us from living fully NOW.

By focusing on the trauma, we give it energy.  In my experience, understanding the event is not necessary in eliminating its effect.

The psychologist R.D.Laing says this obsession with the past event is like a man in a dungeon the door is open, the sun is shining and the man says, "I refuse to get out of this dungeon until I figure out how I got in."

Dharmabreath is a way of getting out.  It erases the programs.  We don't need to re-play a cassette that we do not want before we erase it.  Just pass it over a magnet.



The mind protects our habits, these  programs we created from past traumatic experiences.  The mind creates various ways of avoiding the loss of these programs.  The mind will tell you to fall asleep, not follow instructions; it will create excuses.  A good Breatherapy practitioner can help prevent this from happening.  But it is up to the participant to drop the old mind "stuff", to be really willing to let go of the old misery.  Sometime this can be scary.

The Indian mystic Ramakrishna (1836—1886) was approached one day by an extremely       wealthy man who presented him with a a bag of ten thousand gold coins, and said, "This is my       gift to you."
Ramakrishna took the bag of ten thousand gold coins and asked the man, "So now this is my       bag of ten thousand gold coins?"
The man said, "Yes".
Ramakrishna then said, holding the bag out to him, "Take my bag of ten thousand gold      coins and throw it in the Ganges."
The man was appalled and exclaimed, "I can't do that! This is a fortune! Most people don't      make this much money in a lifetime."
Ramakrishna asked him again, "Is this my bag of ten thousand gold coins"?
The man said, "Yes".
Again Ramakrishna said, "Then I want you to take my bag of ten thousand gold coins and throw it in the Ganges."
Reluctantly the man took the bag of ten thousand gold coins and left.  Two days passed and no one heard from him, so Ramakrishna sent one of his people to find him.  There he was, standing on the edge of the Ganges, throwing one coin at a time.

This is what we do with our misery.  We unwillingly throw one at a time.

We say, "I'll throw one at six every morning."

"Darn it! I slept in this morning, I can't throw one today,"

And then, "I'll take the weekend off."

We find every possible reason not to throw away our misery.  Breatherapy is a relatively easy method of overcoming this–and, at the same time, creating rewarding feelings of ecstasy.

Some systems of working with the mind, creating goals, improving self-esteem, becoming successful and other forms of changing the old ways of behavior, use a procedure of repeating affirmations,

For years I tried these systems and experienced some changes.  They were temporary.  They only lasted as long as I was using them.  The affirmations create a surface program on top of a deeper conditioning that the mind created in childhood.  Once the affirmation process is discontinued, this surface programming fades and the deep-mind conditioning re-surfaces, returning you to the old behavior.

The purpose of Dharmabreath is to work directly on the deep programs created by traumas, causing a fundamental change in the mind.
 
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