So I've tried "breathwork" on my own before. That is, I've sat down for ten to thirty minutes doing various yogic breaths like the Breath of Fire or Bellow's Breath, etc. Always I was trying it with the intention of, I guess, increasing the energy flow in my body. But aside from feeling tingly and super-oxygenated, it was never very remarkable. It did produce positive effects, but I never thought much of it.
Last night I did my first guided breathwork session. It was an hour long and I laid on the floor. My Reiki teacher played all sort of music, from classical stuff to whales. She has a stereo that lets her cross fade different tracks and have two running simultaneously. When I say it was "guided," all she really did was talk us through a basic relaxation sequence and then asked us to breathe through our mouths at about twice the speed of your normal breath rate.
My intention was simply to get into a state of emotional flow. The result was amazing. First of all, it was exhausting. I never hyperventilated or felt faint, although I did feel tingly from the high oxygenation early till about the halfway point. My whole body was sweating. My breath pattern changed in response to the emotions that came up and it naturally changed on its own (my body sort of told me how to breathe through a lot of it). At one point I was took a 30 second inhalations and 30 second exhalation without any real strain. A few times I stopped breathing entirely for at least 30 seconds -- so much oxygen was in my blood I didn't need to breathe. Always I returned to the fast, deep mouth-breathing.
At first I thought that the fast, deep mouth-breathing would only make me feel tense, and there was some tension, but ultimately it was more relaxing than I could have imagined. For the last twenty minutes my body settled into a one-second "sleep breath" that was easy and deep. It felt exactly like my body was sleeping, except I was wide awake and my body was moving (breathing and some tossing and turning). It wasn't the usual, heavy trance-feeling because my body was moving too much for that. Maybe it was closer to the type of trance experienced by ecstatic dancers or whirlers. It was a trance. In some ways a lot more intense than a quiet, meditative trance because I was experiencing that clarity in the midst of an active body.
My mind was sometimes clear and sometimes perked up, but by about a quarter way into it I was continuously in touch with my spirit and thought became a cloud-around-the-real-me-feeling. My subconscious started throwing up these seemingly random memories from throughout my life: all these times when I was in touch with my spirit. And it showed me times when the "cloud" around it was especially thick. The experience wasn't visionary, but one of intense feeling. I could feel the presence of the people I was remembering, of past me's, etc.
By the end the lesson was: you are never not in touch with spirit, or God. If you feel you aren't, the problem isn't that you aren't, the problem is that you're identified with that which is not you. But it was really the experience itself that was meaningful.
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