Life is amazing, but it’s also full of bumps and bruises. Along life’s journey, we will all experience serious injuries to our body and mind.
This leads us to seek answers and solutions: to find healing.
But what if I told you that many of us go about this search backwards?
We look for healing and resolution outside ourselves when we actually have a powerful key deep inside that can turn everything around. We plead with others to help improve our emotions, energy, focus, and health when we ourselves have more potential inside ourselves than any external force.
Don’t get me wrong: sometimes life-saving medicine or surgery and psychiatric treatment is absolutely necessary.
But the kind of life-changing healing that comes from inside and can augment and improve external methods as well is often obscured from view.
Because it’s not about buying expensive medications, joining some advanced secret society or unlocking the arcane mysteries of the universe in an ancient Mayan cave (although that does sound pretty epic I’ll be honest).
It’s about tapping into the power you have inside yourself through self-healing meditation.
In the middle of the chaos and confusion … try self-healing meditation
The chaos and confusion you’re facing now may feel insurmountable.
You may be facing challenges nobody else understands that are testing you to your absolute limit and I have no right or ability to doubt that this could be the case.
But if you can leave it behind for just a few moments you might find that you have a force inside yourself that is – quite honestly – unbeatable.
Here’s the “secret,” that’s been there all along …
That power for self-healing is inside your breath.
It’s in the respiratory process and fusing your consciousness and presence in the present moment with the flow and journey of the breath.
It’s in getting out of your mind and the world of illusion and entering the world that is literally right around you and inside you.
The key to life is in life-force itself.
As the shaman Rudá Iandê says, “We spend most of our lives trapped inside of our minds. Our never-ending thoughts are constantly flooding our minds and taking us into the realm of the illusory: of the past, the future, our daydreams – to so many places except to our here and now.
“If you want to start really enjoying your life at its full it’s essential that you start breaking through the hypnotic state of your mind so you can develop a presence in your life, you can ground yourself – your consciousness – in the movement of life. Your breath is the center where you and your consciousness can meet and be one.”
Shamanic breathwork: a transformational path
The answer is all around you: it’s in the air you breathe and in how you breathe it. The power of life in your lungs is endless, but in order to seek security and identity we establish limits and establish a reality in our minds that’s delimited, solid and something we can grasp.
This establishment of limits is a natural reaction to the dynamic power of reality, but it can also trap us in our minds and our illusory stories.
As Rudá emphasizes, “you are an explosion of movement: nothing is static … we are transforming at every moment.”
Scientific studies are increasingly bearing out what shamanism and ancient wisdom from Zen to monastic practices have long maintained: the breath and the power of our attention are supremely significant.
Shamanic breathwork has made a massive difference for me in dealing with severe anxiety, depression, mental confusion, and feelings of being misunderstood and alienated from society.
It connected me back to a place before all the “stories” about myself that were imposed on me or in some cases self-imposed in an attempted search for security and grounding that actually just left me more stranded.
Shamanic breathwork essentially brings your consciousness to your breath instead of just letting it run on autopilot. This brings about a long-term process of healing and helps you connect with your core.
Trauma, illusions, attachment, and demands on the external world begin to slowly come into perspective and recession. You can even tap into ancestral memory in your DNA and deeply-stored generational pain that’s been holding you back and trapping you in someone else’s story and reality.
You can begin consciously interacting with your body and embracing its functions and living nature.
That is the job of a shaman: it’s not like the movies with all sorts of fancy magic or decorations. It’s more about aligning society and the individual with the flow of authentic life and experience in themselves and others and helping them on their journey past unnecessary and old stories, attachments, and traumas.
It’s not that you’ll suddenly be “happy all the time” or some other silliness: it is more that through breathwork you will be able to enter a much deeper sense of being grounded, connected, and in tune with the world inside you and outside you.
There are many specific types of shamanic breathwork that can be done, but it all starts with the simple process of breathing itself and then guides you through Rudá Iandê’s simple and powerful process for awakening and tapping into your core self.
Everyone’s experience of breathwork will be unique, just as all of us are unique.
Moving at your own pace through the guided process is the optimal way to begin on your breathwork journey. Don’t resist or have pushback in yourself if pain or sadness comes up: this is all part of the process of releasing locked energy and letting go of old patterns that are no longer contributing to your growth and journey.
Self-healing meditation really works
Large studies on meditation and the power of self-healing are confirming what shamans and Zen masters have taught for centuries.
Self-healing meditation really works.
It has even been credited with physical miracles such as Tibetan lama Phakyab Rinpoche’s apparent curing of his gangrenous leg through self-healing meditation and consciously guiding his life force (breath) to the affected areas of his body.
Ailments of the mind such as depression, anxiety, and anger also often lurk in our body and are significantly eased through meditation which can break us out of the mental cycle of obsession and self-focus that often worsens mental health challenges.
Through the power of our breath and intentional breathing, self-guided meditation can help us on a path to transformation and empowerment.
It doesn’t happen overnight, but it happens: and the process is the whole point anyway …
Take a deep breath
For most of us, breath isn’t conscious. It’s an automatic reflex controlled by our brain. Even though it keeps us alive, if we had to think about it every time we breathe we wouldn’t have time for anything else. Right?
Well, yes and no.
It isn’t that you want to “think” about your breath as you do it – this kind of conscious monitoring and meta-analysis would be entirely counterproductive, in fact.
It is that you want to inhabit your breath with your essence and let it flow through you as part of a living, empowering process moment by moment.
Air is pretty crucial to everything if you think about it: you’re swimming in it at all times and without it you’d die almost immediately.
Those who have become very sick and have trouble breathing often report being stunningly humbled by the realization of the extraordinary gift they were given to be able to breathe for years! How absolutely incredible that we freely breathe in oxygen that sustains our existence every day.
In an average human lifetime, we breathe about one billion times.
It is truly miraculous.
Let gratitude flow through you with each breath and into your cells. Make each breath a prayer of thanksgiving.
Instead of praying with words, pray with your breath. Ground yourself in the present moment and connect to the divine force around you and through you.
Channeling the energy within …
Breathwork isn’t about some abstract state of bliss or about “feeling” happy or accomplished.
It’s breath in action: it channels your energy and vitality and can assist you in every area of your real-life from your relation with yourself to your interactions and cooperation with others.
Your breath is the key to unlock creativity, power, energy, and clarity that can seem elusive or abstract until you bring it home to where it was always intended to live: in you and through you.
Your breath is your first experience in this world.
It’s your link with our planet and life itself. It’s the first connection that we all have: that absolute proof that we are all inter-dependent and connected.
Many spiritual teachers and popular coaches may talk about the power of “positive thinking” or setting intentions, but the truth is that breathing well is an entirely different level and magnitude from trying to craft emotional or mental states.
You’re not intentionally trying to do something: you’re just doing it.
Each breath in borrows the precious oxygen that surrounds us; each breath out gives back carbon for other lifeforms to use. Becoming deeply imbued in this process will help you get out of your head and intellectual prison.
I’ve found that the more I practice breathwork the less I keep grasping at outside things to fulfill me.
I’ve come to realize a lot of the things I was looking for to “complete” me were attempted substitutes for lack of a relationship with life itself.
I was grinding my teeth at night and breathing shallowly, locked up in resentment and bitterness over the past, and anger and fear of the future. And I’m not saying that’s all perfectly gone: but through acceptance and breathwork, I am processing my way through it and making progress.
It’s all part of a cycle: the respiratory system can contribute and enhance negative and positive emotions and vice versa. And by pursuing this symbiotic relationship we can become masters of how we relate to ourselves and life – and choose consciously about how we accept and move forward with our emotions and thoughts rather than being buffeted and controlled by them.
It doesn’t take long
The transformation that can take place through breathwork is profound, but the time commitment each day is not burdensome. In only five minutes you can start to make progress and have a better day.
Rebooting the respiratory system is just a matter of making the choice to do so and then getting started.
It’s so easy to get bogged down in the let-downs and problems of the past or to dream about or dread the future. I still catch myself doing it a lot.
I used to dismiss the talk of being in the present as New Age mumbo jumbo. But there’s something to it. One of the ways I came to realize I was often not in the present and wasting time was that my thoughts simply weren’t producing results.
I was lost in intentions and daydreaming or past regret and overanalysis (read: mental masturbation) and breathwork has helped enormously in beginning the process of leaving that time-wasting land of illusion behind.
Our lungs are deeply connected to our somatic nervous system. We can’t control our autonomic nervous systems like our kidneys or our liver, but our somatic system with our breathing is the “meeting point” between conscious and unconscious, and by working with it we can begin to positively and proactively influence the healthy functioning and transformation of our organic processes from digestion to mental acuity and energy …
Your breath is the key to unlocking hidden potential and embracing the full power of your life and all of life.
Choosing to ignore the power of breath is a bit like telling the best player on the football team to go sit it out on the bench because you have some calculations to do about the best plays to do and when you’ll be able to afford to move the team to a new stadium.
Why would you leave that player on the bench?
Get out there and play. Your breath is powerful and it can be the healing agent for a transformation in your life.
