Illness and Awakening – The Deepest Acceptance

I lived with major chronic illness for over 10 years.
Fifteen years later I am immensely grateful to the experience.
It played a huge part in my coming to consciousness.
It brought me to humility, tenderness and wisdom.
It forced me to look at the whole of me and let go of what was causing tightness or stress on the system.
It demanded I pay attention to what and how I digested the world, from the food I was eating, to what and how I was emotionally digesting my experiences, past and present.
It was a total revolution of awareness and understanding.

You just can’t experience this kind of thing without it teaching you valuable and humbling truths.
Of course you can also turn away from it in (over) medication, depression, resentment and resignation but that’s not the focus of my attention here. I am speaking to those who are confused, who long to open, who experience the confusion and shock, to those who seek awakening but might be ‘stuck with a persistent chronic (or acute) illness.’

This is really about love and the deepest acceptance of what is.

Yes, I was diagnosed with bowel disease. I felt it was the result of a lifetime of toxic living, major inflammation, buried fear and anxiety and a bad luck call.
I fought it and surrendered.
I loved it.
I hated it.
I listened to it.
I raged at my fate, at the unfairness of it.
I accepted the prospect of death, or the possibility of never healing.
I took it only as personally as I needed, which was a warrior’s task in itself.
I saw the body as illusion and still turned towards love.
I worked with all my beliefs, the good, the bad and the dark.
Ultimately I died into it.
And still I kept on inquiring into it, healing it, working with it.
And don’t misunderstand me, I also worked on inflammation, detox, nourishment, body work modalities, releasing deeply held stress and trauma, and so on. Mine was not a purely ‘spiritual’ journey. It was truly holistic.

The shock of a huge diagnosis in 2005 catapulted me (and Amoda my wife) into fear and panic. It totally engulfed my life but strangely it also focused my energy. There was something almost inevitable about it, it didn’t feel separate from my life. I don’t mean this on the superficial level, because on that level it DID come out of the blue. But on the deeper, intuitive, subtle level, there was a sense that this was a part of my life, albeit uninvited (maybe), but it would be unwise to completely push it away.

I had no choice, it came at me like a massive wave, crashing into my life, into our life.

Those of you who have experienced this know. When illness really strikes it is impossible to ignore. It becomes your new lover, your new teacher.
Illness moves in with you, whether you like it or not. And if you are in relationship suddenly you are in a threesome. It is exactly like an uninvited guest taking up lodging in your body and life.

It becomes your guru or your tormentor, and usually both.

Oh! it hasn’t been easy, it has been relentless. But it has compelled me to go so deep inside myself I found the mine of rubies, that which is untouched by illness, that which is innocent and always free. It actually liberated me. And brought me to love without attachment.

The thing that I learned most about illness is this. It is not ultimately about whether it physically heals, or goes, or any of those things. Of course on a certain level it is very much preferable to be restored to functionality.

But ultimately it is about the depth of the love it can bring us to. The body is a wild teacher, and illness is very wrathful. But it has so much to tell us about ourselves and about life.

This little poem sums up how I feel.

‘If you haven’t fully digested past experiences,
Assimilated what was nourishing
And eliminated what is no longer needed
You may have digestive issues
On all levels of your being.

The past is poison if it rots in your system.’

If this speaks to you, if you are experiencing some of this, I hope it has spoken to you and allowed you to go deeper, or just relieved stress for a moment, or you can feel my tenderness towards you and your suffering. It is all the mystery and none of us knows why or even what really we should do.

As Ram Dass wonderfully said, ‘We are all walking each other home.’

With love – Kavi

Reactivity in Auto Immune Conditions and Inflammation

Please do not take this as scientific proof. If you are looking for modern science you probably wont find it here. This blog and website is only about ideas that might be possible.

As I always say in my blogs and posts, find out for yourself what is true. Believe nothing unless you truly believe it deeply inside. And if you don’t know, be ok with not knowing and make your inquiry into healthy living and illness come from an unknown perspective.

Basically, develop discernment and inner wisdom, it will serve you for life and help others who also don’t know.

My conversations are speculative and holistic. I’m trying to connect dots that medical science doesn’t want to, or can’t, or won’t, connect. Mainly that means exploring the connection between matter and thought, or body and mind you might say.

I want to look at patterns, beliefs, language, energy fields, that sort of thing. I truly believe we only have a small bit of the puzzle of being human. Most of the rest of the puzzle will not be found in science or conventional medicine.

But the puzzle and the mystery is where the exciting stuff is. That’s where I like to dig around. I am an investigator and explorer.

So I have been contemplating the nature of auto immune conditions, described by conventional medicine as ‘self attacking self,’ and decided to talk a little about how our emotional mental ‘reactivity’ to life, thought and situations may play a very big part in perpetuating the suffering of self attack.

The key here is to understand why reactivity, particularly over-reactivity, is happening on the mental, emotional level, and to attempt to ease it down and relax it. In my world awareness and understanding is fundamental in the healing.

Reactivity tends to come from fear. That fear can be fear of danger, fear of lack of safety, threat to life, violence or extreme vulnerability. Fear is an existential issue we all have somewhere deep within. People with trauma, childhood wounds, acute sensitivity (sometimes from birth trauma) and unstable childhoods are prone to this fear more than most. This fear is visceral, it’s not simply emotional or mental. It becomes physical, make no mistake. And that physicality we now know (through science and biology) can affect our gut microbiome, digestive process, gut permeability, ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, and adrenal glands, as well as the whole body. Every physical effect I have just stated impacts the immune system.

The deeper trouble with this is that it sets up a chronic pattern that may lock us in for life. If these things are happening in childhood and youth we learn them as survival mechanisms and repeat them every time something real OR IMAGINED reminds us of the old trauma. It doesn’t have to be a real threat, it can just be the thought of it or something similar. In fact much of this reactivity will happen IN ANTICIPATION of trouble THAT ACTUALLY DOESN’T HAPPEN.

This has been one of my ongoing life stories revealed to me over the years through various body work therapies, deep inner exploration and more recently chiropractic testing. I developed a secret inner part of me that was always alert to danger, always on the look out and hyper vigilant, whether I was asleep or not. The consequences of this are serious and disturbing, both physically and mentally. Physically it means being always in reactivity mode and high alert, and never able to get into deep restful delta sleep where healing and renewal comes from.

It means immune system and nervous system are on constant alert to danger. It began in my early teens during my parents slide into acrimonious divorce and my slide into ‘out of control’ drug taking chaos. It has lasted a lifetime (the effect not the drugs!), and been mostly hidden from view but had massive repercussions on my relationships, purpose in life and most important on my physical health. Specifically on my immune health, gut health, and now thyroid health. It also resulted in addiction problems.

So what does this say?

Well I actually see this reactivity, this over active ‘fight or flight’ mechanism, at play in many people I work with, and almost always with those who experience some form of auto immunity. And it can disguise itself in many ways. Being over critical of self or others is one way, being self hating (remember the ‘self attacking self’ phrase at the beginning of this article?), being extremely resentful, being highly anxious, fearful, angry or depressed are all permutations of the same thing, reactivity.

This blog piece is just the beginning of a much bigger conversation about mind and body and trauma, and about how the immune system gets over activated when we are young.

If we accept that reactivity might be an issue both physically and emotionally it gives us knowledge and insight, and puts us in a greater position to be able to take action.

What action? I am going to discuss this next time.

I would love to hear from you what you think, as I really don’t have all the answers, but thousands of questions that I love exploring.

And the next piece I think will be how to turn our unhealthy reactivity to a healthy and calm responsiveness so we can maintain calm in our inner world.

Thank you so much for reading, and please please comment and add something to the conversation. And share this is you feel moved to.

What Did I Do To Heal Ulcerative Colitis?

One thing I am always careful of when I talk to people about healing ‘disease’ is this. No two people are the same, there is no one magic bullet that heals all people of all diseases, and thus what worked for me may not work for someone else.

Once we really understand that we have a choice to take greater responsibility for our own predicament. It is not always easy being both the sufferer AND becoming the investigator and researcher. But that is what must happen. Of course we will always need experts and professionals to guide us, support us and test us, but part of the healing itself is for us to become actively involved in making sense of our situation and becoming our own healers. That process creates new energy within us that becomes part of the journey.

So with all that said let me share once again some insights into my own healing path and what it involved.

When I was diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (in particular Ulcerative Colitis) I had no idea what it was or what to do. But my first instinct was to investigate more rather than just accept the medication and prognosis the consultants and doctors offered me. I figured (intuitively) that my body was in meltdown with an overload of toxicity so to just load it up with more pharmaceuticals was heading in the wrong direction.

The professionals thought I was irresponsible and just plain wrong. I walked out of the hospital. I believe I was right, and the proof is that I never took any medication from that day to this, and those same professionals were emphatic that I would be on meds for the rest of my life. It just goes to show some of what is possible. They are not always right by any stretch of the imagination.

So that was important for me. I didn’t load my body any more than it was already loaded.

And then I went full-on detoxification. I could no longer eat properly anyway, suffering at times 20 bowel movements a day, losing a lot of blood and becoming increasingly weaker and more anaemic day by day. I went to India for two more detoxification panchakarmas, and I shifted slowly to a raw food diet. Raw food is inherently cleansing, but also pretty rough on the colon and very cooling, so there was a positive effect but also a negative effect and pretty soon I think my immune system was all but shut down, leaving me vulnerable to other issues like Raynaud’s disease, possible scleroderma and thyroid problems.

I spent two years 90% housebound and lost in confusion, fear, anger and physical suffering. It was tough. But I worked and worked on myself. I left no stone unturned, and even when I gave up I didn’t really give up. I hit rock bottom but somehow hung on in there and trusted that something deep was happening. I learned that healing is not a linear movement, it works in a spiral. And that means sometimes we feel worse when we are getting better, and at times we must revisit old traumas and scary places in order to assimilate them and/or let them go.

I learned that healing is PROFOUND. The healing call, if and when it calls, is not some little voice that just wants everything alright again. It is bigger, much bigger than that. The healing voice is shouting at us to change everything, to change fundamentally. It is huge. It wants TRANSFORMATION.

It took everything for me.

But here is the most extraordinary thing that changed for me, and for which I am still grateful and still amazed.

I saw and healed the dysfunctional relationship between my mind and my body. I came to understand what part in my illness, and wellness, in fact my whole life, my mind played. It was a HUGE revelation and one which still reveals itself over and over again.

I don’t think we have yet fully grasped the power of mind to influence body, both negatively and positively. I am so glad I worked on it, and I always advise those who are in any way suffering, to inquire for themselves what is going on.

I like to think of it like this. There is a mutual relationship going on between mind and body. Mind affects body AND body affects mind. It is a bio energetic feedback loop. And it can get very stuck in one mode of operation, that of negativity. It doesn’t matter where it started, in the body or in the mind, who cares! What matters is intervention in the endless loop. Intervene as deep as possible on the body level and things will slowly change on the mental level, which will then affect the body level. Intervene on the mental level and it will slowly have an impact on the body level.

But intervene on BOTH the body level AND the mental level and transformation of the whole organism may well happen.

It was tough for me. It lasted at least ten years and it took me to every part of myself. It was slow. It was scary. Like all huge journeys it challenged me, called me to step up to the plate, but eventually things started to change.

Clean up the body. Clean up the mind.

As you can read, I’m not talking about the details of what I did to heal. I haven’t mentioned any foods, herbs, protocols, supplements, exercises, meditations or anything. That is the challenge we all face.

The people who I have met who have healed have all got one thing in common. They have activated their inner power, their inner guidance system. They have taken massive action to heal. Of course it doesn’t always lead to healing in the way we understand it. Some people heal their hearts but lose their bodies. There is no rule that says if we do this action we will get this return. Life is mysterious and we really have no idea what is happening. All we can do is love ourselves and the world as much as possible, heal our wounds, our bodies and our minds and leave the rest to God.

That is what I did.

If you are on this journey I apologize for not offering you anything that feels definite but I always hope this gives you cause for optimism and encouragement. The healing journey was the greatest experience of my life. It helped me, no it forced me, to confront myself, let go of old grievances, heal my wounded heart and mind, change addictive patterns and come into the full bloom of my being. I have become very grateful to what happened, and even though it was not something I would have chosen, by embracing the journey and the experience I allowed it to heal through the power of divine intelligence.

Human beings are extraordinary and our capacity far outreaches our current knowledge or belief systems. Stretch your beliefs, stretch your imagination, stretch your actions and sure as heck something will happen.

Four powerful steps I took.

1. I supported my body in the healing journey. I didn’t suppress symptoms. I navigated them.
2. I took massive action to learn about my experience and apply my learning.
3. I healed my toxic thoughts and beliefs through meditations, visualization, therapists and healers.
4. I developed a deeper trust and resolve and power.
5. I NEVER gave up.

With great love Kavi

The Need To Heal Old Wounds

From my personal experience, my research and coaching lots of clients I really have concluded this one simple yet profound truth:

When we deny old emotions and/or present difficult feelings we put an increased stress on our body, on our nervous system, immune system, and important organs like heart and thyroid, and our brain. Whether that actually ’causes’ illness or not is academic, because the bottom line is it really doesn’t help.

My holistic principle is to understand that which puts extra tax and burden on a delicate and finely balanced system (the human organism) is ultimately destructive, and will assist in early degradation of healthy life. As we age it gets harder and harder to bounce back and regenerate. Which means that as we get older we must get wiser and get MORE relaxed and more FREE of old burdens. Old burdens will rigidify us physically, mentally and spiritually unless we consciously release them. They might even kill us.

This point is not as nebulous or subtle as you may think. The river is meant to flow. If it doesn’t flow it stagnates. If it stagnates it becomes toxic and allows disease to happen. It is exactly the same with us. Energy is meant to flow through us. Old emotions and toxic thoughts impede this flow and become somehow ‘trapped’ in our cellular body. The same stagnation can happen. 

Thus detoxification is useful on the physical level AND the emotional energetic level. This proposition might annoy some people and even be dismissed as new age but I have experienced it and see it everywhere, and it is a self evident truth.

In my own healing journey, healing a huge auto immune condition (inflammatory bowel disease) it really wasn’t long in my detoxification process that I was propelled into the fury and powerful world of my pent up, hot, acidic and generally volatile emotions, the ones that I had buried and denied for years and years since the traumatic break up of my parents when I was 16 years old. I held on to the trauma for decades but could never access the pain and therefore never receive any healing. Make no mistake, trauma in the body, just because its not present in everyday experience, is powerful and dangerous. It’s not inert, meaning it doesn’t just sit there in a neutral state doing nothing. 

No, it has a negative power. It influences decisions, it can drive addictions and lifestyle choices. It ramps up stress response into hot stuff like rage or scary stuff like fear and anxiety. It may play a huge part in depression. It creates havoc with the nervous system and immune system, both of which have a DIRECT effect on health. It is known, for example, that stress has a direct impact on the gut micro biome, reducing healthy gut flora and allowing the ‘bad guys’ to gain the upper hand.

I truly believe that my healing had plateaued until I dived into my emotions. And then it catapulted into an increase in healing. It’s not the magic bullet but it is incredibly powerful.

I would go as far as to say you can’t truly heal without it.

If you are on the same journey that took me over 10 years, please listen. Do the emotional stuff. Find a way, find a resource. Follow your instinct for what your body wants, listen to your own inner voice, and get guidance from others who know this territory, and then fully embrace your healing. Even when it is difficult because dragging old stuff up hurts, still press on. It is far better that you meet the pain, and it hurts, and you release it, than you don’t meet it and it kills you.

I wish you love and blessings on your path.

Thanks for reading!

 

Being ‘Triggered’ and How It Affects Health

One of the links between the body and the emotions, between emotions and health and illness is the nervous system and ‘triggers.’

Most people these days have heard the term ‘triggered.’ It’s a term used to describe a largely unconscious response mechanism activated by some event, or thought or experience. Something ‘triggers’ you and in a flash you have gone to a different place within yourself and might suddenly feel emotional rage, stress, anxiety, or any negative sensation. It is rather like, and can be associated with PTSD. There is an element of PTSD in it.

Something triggers you and bam! You are jettisoned into a different reality and you lose perspective and balance and might become irrational and emotional, or feel like a trapped child, or anything. Triggers are individual because they come from our individual experience. In most people they have their roots in childhood trauma and stress, situations of powerlessness and lost innocence, experiences that have never been processed but been ‘lived with’ or even denied. They are extremely powerful and should never be underestimated.

But here is the point. The triggers are not just in emotions but in the body, held within the nervous system. These triggers activate the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism and have the power to instantly release cortisol and adrenalin, necessary for survival in the face of great danger but destructive in times of peace.

So the more you get triggered, the more the nervous system is activated, until, left unchecked and unacknowledged, it starts to create chronic patterns that easily run down the adrenal gland, and contribute to thyroid degradation and immune system overload. The nervous system is fundamental to health, and a huge contributor to illness. Thus emotional life is hard wired to body health.

For true health to be realized these triggers have to be fully met and understood, and at some point they must be released from their stranglehold over the organism. This process of moving beyond the triggers is one of the great liberators I have seen in many people, and in itself can cause a cascade of transformation that is profound.

I have also seen the damage triggers create when left un investigated. They can run rampant and cause chaos. And the worst thing is they will almost definitely cause illness.

The Body Is Always Pointing To Love

I have this statement on my website:

The Body Is Always Pointing To Love

What does it mean and isn’t it a bit woohoo and weird?
And how can the body and love be connected?
And what happens if the body gets sick and dies?

Good questions!

What I am suggesting is that the body is a reflection of consciousness and personality. It stores all the stories we have had, all the dramas of our life, and all the things we could not process during our childhood, youth or adulthood.

And that includes all the times we moved away from love’s innocence because we were afraid.

Your body is the reason you are here in this world. If you didn’t have a body you wouldn’t be here. As consciousness you owe a lot to the body you have. It is probably the greatest miracle of high tech, biological, electrical engineering we could imagine. It is extraordinary in the extreme, but to reduce it to its chemical or biological, or even electrical components is something of an insult, because it is so much more than that.

The Indians first came up with the awareness of inner energy vortices inside the body that vibrate at different frequencies and have different purposes. They called them chakras. Chinese medicine has studied and used the inner energy system of the body for its acupuncture work for centuries, and so its not new information to be aware that the body has deep intelligence that we don’t really fully understand.

BUT…you are not the body. Well, in truth, you ARE the body and your are NOT the body. Ultimately you are consciousness. But while you are here in form you are intimately connected to your body. 

And therein lies the word intimately. You as consciousness are intimately connected to your own body. But the body itself will perish and die. It will develop issues, get old, wear out. It will carry scars and wounds and let you down, and finally dissolve into the dust from which it came. Your body teaches you about who you really are. 

And since who you really are is consciousness, which is unconditional love, it is fair to say that the body is always pointing you to love.

I would actually go one step further and say that life itself as we experience it, all experience and everything that manifests, is pointing us to love, the love that is our unconditional nature.

But we miss that because we are so full of our stories and our hurts and wounds and fears and resentments and grievances. We miss the best bit of being human. And what is that best bit?

The best bit is forgetting we are love itself and getting lost in the dream and the drama, and then waking up again and finding our way home and remembering our true nature. 

That is the best bit. It’s worth all the effort of being lost.

But finding your way home to this exalted, yet utterly natural, state, can be tricky. It takes persistence, great humility, and warrior-like guts. And sometimes a guide to point the right direction.

I like to think I am one of those guides, a pointer in that direction.

My website: www.kavijezziehockaday.com

How Well Do You Know Your Body?

How Well Do You Know Your Body?

It may seem like an obvious, even stupid, question, but in my experience working with people it is actually a very revealing and provocative one. So let me make some bold statements:

I don’t think a lot of people actually DO know their own bodies very well at all. They think they do but actually they are not very tuned in to what their own body is saying, what messages it is sending, or the bio feedback relationship happening all the time between mind and body.

I also think people are very cut off from their intuition, and intuition itself is located in the gut.

We are living in fast paced, toxic, mind dominated societies that favour caffeine, distraction and urgency, and not relaxation, body centred, natural and harmonious lifestyles.

The amount of addiction, disorder, illness, depression etc etc is a sign that ‘we’ are out of alignment with our selves, and that must also mean with our bodies.

And here is the clincher: A humanity that is out of touch with its own body is undoubtedly going to be out of touch with the earth, because they are one and the same thing.

I see this as a big problem for us all in the west. We just don’t know any more what its like to be in touch. And I certainly don’t just mean men, who have a greater tendency to be cut off from their feelings anyway. I mean all people, all walks of life, all social strata. Everyone. And now we are all disappearing down the rabbit hole of our phones it’s only going to make us more disconnected.

Now here I want to say two things.

1. Its not a great idea to get too attached to your body, or get too lost in it. Firstly its only a temporary vehicle and its going to go the way of all temporary things and you are going to die.
2. If you get too lost in it you will become over identified with it and thats going to lead you towards addiction in some way that is not going to make you happy.

The body is, in many ways, a dilemma for us humans. Animals have it much easier than we do. They accept the body they get, they instinctively feed it just enough food to survive and thrive and they don’t get too neurotic over how it looks. They are, by their very nature, body centred. It is all entirely natural.

But we have a choice. And we have an ego that wraps itself around how the body looks and feels. This awareness we have, one of our gifts as conscious beings, is a handicap to easy living when it is affected by damaged conditioning and self worth issues.

So lets cut to the chase of how to go about this relationship.

Firstly, you get to know your own body when you find out who you really are. The body is included in a deep spiritual inquiry. 

The body holds old wounds and traumas. It will hold them forever unless you consciously decide to release them. If you decide to release them you will probably have to find a modality that assists this process. That can be anything from rebirthing to massage, maybe yoga, or dance, or any specific technique that aims to unblock the stuck energy flow in the body. This automatically takes you deeper into your body.

Attending to diet and health, doing some detoxification and cleaning out colon and liver, will help to balance the body mind system and bring you naturally more aligned.

Meditation and getting into nature, watching sunset and sunrise, sitting next to the sea or bids a roaring fire, all help to bring you back into relationship with your own essence, and that means your own body.

Listenting to your body, paying it attention, intuiting it, talking to it, loving it, nurturing it, these are key elements to develop with your body. It will pay great dividends and soften up the whole of you.

The bottom line is: Include your own body in the love you have for things. Don’t exclude your body. Love it with all your heart even though it is not yours and will one day turn to dust. Just love it anyway, with a care and a joy and a freedom that makes it sing and dance and flow.

Thanks for reading!

Help me return to this

Spirit – Mind – Breath – Body: The Divine Connection.

Yesterday evening I had a rebirth session as part of my striving for healing after my recent ‘rash incident.’ I haven’t done a rebirth session for years so expected difficulty and struggle (a common experience is these profound sessions). But nothing happened! It was effortless and easy, and flowed like a divine river.

But I did get an insight into the power of the mind to influence the body systems, and the power of the breath to release us from unconscious patterns and grievances that may be hanging around in the energy body.

So I decided to write you a new blog to inspire you to ‘get with the breath.’

Breath is neglected, taken for granted, and certainly not considered relevant to healing illness.
Breath – It is the first thing you do when you arrive in this reality.
Breath – It is the last thing you do as you leave.
You are born on a breath and you die on a breath. If you stop breathing death approaches quickly:
After 1 minute of not breathing brain cells begin to die.
After 3 minutes serious brain damage can occur.
It is the first thing to stop in a moment of panic.
Most people are not breathing to their full capacity.

If you can master your breath you open the door to miracles.
If you deny access to breath you will starve yourself of the divine.

You see breathing reflects where we are at. It connects the body with the emotions, with the mind’s beliefs, and with spirit. It really is a bridge between the mundane and the divine. It may not appear like that right now, but I guarantee if you were to explore it in a rebirth session or similar, you would see.
Breath is one of the mysteries of life. It is paradoxical in its nature, on one hand its the most normal thing of all and we all do it without thinking about it, but on the other hand when we bring our conscious awareness to it, it is miraculous and incredibly powerful. And incredibly healing.

It should be included in everybody’s healing tool bag.

Many years ago I was a different person indeed. I was tight in my emotions and my body was a mess. Thats one of the reasons I got so ill, there was so much stored up in my body, both physical ‘stuff’ and emotional ‘stuff.’ The illness arrived in my life as a signal to deal with all this stuff. And I did. Bodywork was a key liberator of energy for me. I have cried and cried during many body work sessions. I don’t mind telling you it took a lot of work to release my emotions, they were very stuck and very hidden. When they came it was a tidal wave of trauma, grief, anger and pain.
But it was so necessary to release it, because agree flowing body is more likely to create health and wellbeing. You just cant be truly well if there is stuff trapped in your body. And by stuff I mean the past.

What?

Yes, the past gets trapped in the body during traumatic episodes in our childhood and youth that we couldn’t deal with or accept.

And it stays there influencing our lives until an opportunity comes to release it. We are not meant to carry traumas, but they get lodged and stuck, and the only way to release is through consciously attending to them.

Bodywork is fantastic for this.
And rebirthing is excellent for this.

It wasn’t until I did a series of 10 rebirth sessions with my wife (who was a trained rebirther) that I experienced the full release of all stuff from my body.
When I began those sessions I was a classic newbie to the process, and I suffered all the afflictions that come when there is such stuckness. The hands and fingers curl up and spasm in something called tetany. There is incredible sweating and heat, as well as incredible cold and chills. But most of all there is, at times, a total absence and lapse into an unconscious state. In this state the breath stops in mid air, and ‘nothing happens.’ Its almost funny because its kind of like being in suspended animation. You fly off into a different world, like a dream. And this can happen quite quickly into a session, or whenever. The rebirther might coax you out of it gently, and sometimes just a hand on the chest will bring you back again, but they may leave you to just get on with it.
That ‘absence’ itself is part of the healing process. It really is quite fascinating.
Ultimately there is no right way of doing the rebirth session, and everyone carries their stuff uniquely, but there is an aim. The aim is to be so consciously soft with the breath coming and going that nothing really happens, just an awareness of the whole process, and a sense of something beautiful.
It took me all of my 10 sessions to get anywhere near that!

But I am persistent and I don’t give up.

And one session towards the end of the 10 it kind of happened. The breath just came in and went out, like the waves of the ocean. I fell into a divine state and became overwhelmed by the simple beauty of existence itself. It was so deeply profoundly simple that I cried and laughed at the same time, as awareness saw the whole universe as awake, and it was pouring through me. I truly felt the phrase ‘Breath is God,’ said by Hazrat Inayat Khan.

But this time, last night, it was just normal. It was easy and relaxed, but no flashing lights of illumination or cosmic insight. Just being here now.

This remarkable process absolutely contributes to well being and health, for all the reasons I have stated.
Here is a link to again to the Hazrat Khan piece about the power of breath. Enjoy, dive in, find a great rebirther and get breathing! https://wahiduddin.net/mv2/VII/VII_19.htm

Thanks for reading!