Forestluv

Tonight was my 9th consecutive night of facilitated breathwork with an online group. Every night has been deeply insightful, yet each in a unique way. I will describe my session tonight since it's fresh and I want to sit with it. I will describe some previous experiences in another entry. It was a powerful breath work session tonight. Some things are being revealed from a different angle. So far ime, breathwork is one of the best ways to go beneath the ego / thinking mind and explore mind and body from a valuable conscious state. Yet I've found it does take work. There can be resistance in the beginning and one needs to have intention and motivation to let go of the thinking mind. Then, all sorts of things can arise. Tonight, he facilitator started off asking us to think of three vision / purpose words for the next year. The he asked us to think of one feeling word such as joy, love, peace, inspiration etc. He then told us that when we aren't feeling that we are misaligned to the vision. I thought "Hey, that kinda sounds like @Nahm". The the first 15min. of breathwork was to calming the mind and body. He than starting ramping it up with deeper, faster breaths with some tribal music. Then there was a switch to upbeat techno music and we launched off. My breathing became powerful. Every in-breath was "creation" and every out-breath was "experience" and the feeling driving it was "inspiration". And then all barriers fell and it was pure inspirational creative experience. Years ago I was a competitive marathon runner. During the intense breathing part tonight, it was like a was running intensely in the zone. Perhaps an intense tempo run. The body was breathing itself. I've been experiencing chest pain for a couple months, yet there was zero pain tonight. The lungs and body were powerfully breathing - fast smooth breaths driven by inspiration. During the comedown, all sorts of inspirational images came to mind. Inspiring things I can create. Imaginations of facilitating a breathwork class at my college to help students realize and breakthrough their blocks - and to greater experience and express what they love. I felt inspired to start a breathwork facilitator program. During group chat after the session, I mentioned it was powerful and I wanted to integrate this. What do I do next? Lay down and reflect? Meditate? A couple people smiled and said "You now do what you love to do". A perfect answer. After an hour or so, ideas of "Yea, but" began to arise. Things I "should do". Yet it's nice to have the contrast. I'm in closer connection to creation, experience and inspiration. It's like a beacon of light that has appeared, yet it has dimmed down a bit. Hopefully with daily practice, the mind and body will get better conditioned to naturally move toward creation, experience and through the feeling of inspiration. * I should also mention that I am off work now and I live alone. So I don't have a lot of responsibilities at this time. As well, I've been doing 1hr per day of kundalini yoga, which is also impactful - so that may allow greater insights during the breathwork sessions.

Duplicate thread

I’ve used facilitators with EMDR, plant medicines and breathwork. I’d say there are a few skills involved: 1) creating a good setting, 2) guiding the actual trip and 3) helping to integrate afterwards.

For sure. Yet I try to be mindful about assuming psychosomatic causes to all physiological / neurological conditions. Telling someone “it’s all in your head” can be very empowering in one context, yet unfair in another context - and could create secondary psychosomatic conditions. Telling someone with two mutant alleles of the CFTR gene that their chest pain and breathing problems are psychosomatic and they can heal themself is unfair and unhelpful. That person is not going to have a normal chloride channel in their epithelial cells. It can put greater pressure on the person that they are creating their condition an heal themself. It would be like telling a dwarf that their height is psychosomatic. Yet there also seems to be lots of idiopathic conditions that are psychosomatic. And perhaps combinations of psychosomatic and physical. In this area, I’d say powers of self healing are underestimated. Many others have gone far deeper into this than I. Drawing cause and effect connections does seem tricky and there might not be direct cause and effect. I’d first get it checked out with a doctor to make sure it’s not an identifiable condition like an aneurism. If not, then I’d go into body wisdom - yet there are all sorts of directions. I imagine someone who has chronic headaches. This could be as simple as not drinking enough water or poor posture. Or something more complex with repressed emotions, muscle tension, energetics, diet, genetics or a combination of many things. I’d say disrupting patterns could be helpful. If the person is constantly engaged in activity that re-enforces the identity and condition, it’s going to be much more difficult to have insights and be ‘reborn. And I’ve found intellectual knowledge and awareness to be insufficient. One may go through therapy and develop an understanding of how toxic relations with blame and guilt have impacted them. This may help somewhat, yet is still at a surface level. And someone may develop an intellectual understanding of nonduality and have an awakening of no-self. Yet still carry baggage within the body. One might reach transpersonal omniscience with 5-meo and return to a body with clogged pipes. Perhaps the key is calling in a ‘plumber’. It seems we all have an inner plumber that is rarely accessed as it lies underneath the thinking ego. From a resistant ego’s perspective, this involves letting go, breaking through resistance and work. And even profound breakthroughs that take the mind-body into depths of insight, realization and awe can fade away into ingrained patterns. And I would say facilitators with embodiment and resonance can be helpful as a guide. A couple of the facilitators I do breathwork with are amazing. They can help relax the mind and body, going beneath thought control into experience and body-mind wisdom. What the facilitator said would have been intellectually discussed, had I not been beneath the hood. Even simple words infrequently spoken brought up new ‘scenery’.

Nice work if you can get it

Did you venture outside the main city? Lake Mead and hiking is beautiful in that area. Especially in the winter when the air is warm and dry. There is a lot of beauty in desert biomes.

At a personal level, absolutely. Yet this can get tricky with the dynamics of blame and guilt. Some people externalize too much responsibility and blame others. And some people internalize too much responsibility leading to guilt, that can be deeply ingrained. And the next level of meta awareness for personal responsibility gets tricky in a different way. I consider dynamics of personal responsibility, guilt and blame to be highly influential on one’s mind-body and their inter-personal relations. Some people intensely hold onto, and defend, their beliefs of personal responsibility and it can be very difficult to transcend.

Mike’s transformation is wonderful. And I can’t believe how coherent he is on 8g of shrooms!

Inspirational energy is such juicy aliveness. Yet it seems sometimes that energetic pipe gets clogged.

@knakoo I think you are spot on in one area, yet are limiting yourself. In one realm of pure experience, knowledge and concepts don’t mean shit. You gotta leave that at the door for entry. An example would be engagement in kundalini yoga and moving energy, entering a state of no mind in meditation, or experiencing a concert. Imagine going to a concert and your friend won’t stop yapping about concepts of enjoying music. We’d probably ask them to shut up so we can actually experience and enjoy the concert. Yet just because conceptualization can be a distraction and barrier in one context, doesn’t mean it is in all contexts. Consider someone like Matsuo Basho. That dude was woke af and sat around for weeks in nature writing poems. That is a form of description through abstraction. Or someone like Alan Watts. He was highly conceptual. Concepts have a role in many areas of life. Yet I would say for those seeking realizations / awakenings to use conceptualization and thinking sparingly. I have a tendency to overdo it - my default is probably 90% conceptualization and this can be a major distraction / barrier for how I would like to live life. A healthier balance would be about 50% conceptualization, yet this takes work and effort for me.

The sun shines on everyone, it doesn't make choices. When it rains it rains on everyone, it doesn't make choices. The One Spirit, lives in everyone, it doesn't make choices. We pray, we pray for everyone, we don't make choices. Peace to All, Life to All, Love to All

Would you say sitting around with no energy/feeling to do anything is actually a peaceful feeling (before thoughts come in and say “You are unmotivated, you should be doing xyz”)

Congrats to those that had *Leo vs Tai Lopez* on their 2020 Actualized Bingo Card.

Would you say this is also true for body feelings and energy? I see a lot of ideas that enlightenment flicks a switch, the body is reborn and there is abiding peace and joy. Can there still be past traumas, repressed emotions and subconscious psychological barriers that may appear in an enlightened being and need to be worked through? Or does it all evaporate?

@benny

What if there is resistance and lack of feeling toward the dream? For example, one might like to imagine having a healthy body and active lifestyle, yet there isn’t an underlying feeling motivating one to cook, workout, hike, do yoga etc.? It feels more like a chore and the person sits around all day surfing the internet and beating themself up. Does the dream board serve to have that imagine on the board everyday to stir up the fire? And if that doesn’t happen a newer, truer imagination arises and makes it to the dream board?

That is a feature of exploration. Explorers are generally comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty, ambiguity, multiple perspectives and paradox. The journey is the destination.

In addition to depth, I’d add breadth. There are a lot of experts that go deep into one or two topics, yet much fewer that go deep into a diversity of topics.

It depends on how the term “consciousness” is used. From a holistic perspective, we are all made out of the same consciousness. So, it would be like asking “Are the roots more tree than the leaves?”. We can also use the term “consciousness” to describe awareness or cognitive development. We could say someone who is half drunk is less conscious than when they are sober. And we can increase our consciousness by becoming more aware of our subconscious and expanding our peripheral awareness and attention ability. For example, through meditation we can be in a state of consciousness in which there is detached observation of our thoughts, feelings and happenings in our environment.

The most gentle way I’ve found is using a dry herb electric vape set to a temperature below the optimal vaporization temperature. This is inefficient, yet the amounts are so small, its not a big deal. And if you want control, you want slow inefficient vaporization. The vaporization is so slow that one inhale doesn’t do much. Since effects are within seconds, you can dial the intensity as you like. You won’t need a sitter. You can literally take an inhale and be like “is this it? I think I’ll take another inhale until I start feeling something”.

There are some things that are very hard to realize or work through solo. I would consider a “teacher” different than “a master”. I’ve got about 30 teachers in my life and I play both teacher and student. I learn from others everyday, yet I’m not beholden to any teacher. A friend of mine is deeply entangled with a teacher, who us more of a master. She does anything he says and holds his words as the highest authority. In some ways it’s good. They have a deep relationship and he can often mirror things she cannot see in herself. In other ways, it’s very limiting.

@Lyubov For sure. Immersion into music is great for connecting to emotions. You might want to add some conscious breathing into the mix. One facilitator of my Breathwork group plays techno and house music as he guides us through a journey. Great stuff. Sometimes I get in touch with something so wonderful that a sadness arises as I long for everyone in the world to experience it.

I’ve found resistance may arise when I exit my comfort zone. It’s not something I can simply decide “I’m not going to resist anymore”. It’s programmed into my body. Observing that resistance has some benefit. At times I can let it go. Yet resistance can mean that I’m resisting something. Perhaps taking some action or looking at something. Breaking through the resistance can be beneficial. Fir example, there may be resistance to meditating or going to deeper levels with yoga. Sometimes it’s good to poke, provoke, confront and elevate.

Thank you for the loving intention ♥️ ?