Rebirthing

   Rebirthing is a tool that enables you to directly experience the One Spirit that moves through everything. Not only that, rebirthing teaches in a way that allows you to create for yourself an inner experience of unity as an ongoing process.

   The only way to unite with the Spirit is to discover it within. This is the only way, and in so doing you're uniting with the infinite power of the universe.

   Rebirthing is about learning how to breathe energy with air. It is the same energy that built and maintains your body; it is life-force energy or prana. It is thoroughly capable of cleansing, balancing, and healing your body.

   Rebirthing is much more than just breathing; it is a combination of consciously breathing energy along with correctly using your mind so that you bring the two into harmony, working in alignment with each other.

   The practice we are talking about here is rhythmic breaths in which "inhale" and "exhale" are connected without any pause in between them. The emphasis is on the inhale; the exhale is totally relaxed. This type of breathing will facilitate the movement of energy in your body—very pure, very powerful light energy, the energy of the life force itself. The natural tendency of this energy is to bring to your attention anything that you are holding on to that is less pure than itself.

   Again, rebirthing is much more than just breathing. The process also includes expanding your ability to relax into, tune into, feel, and be at peace with whatever is going on in your body. This results in emotional resolution. The focus is on expanding to include all the physical sensations in your body, ranging from emotions (which do feel like something) to tingling, vibrating, and the like. These sensations will then gradually integrate into your greater sense of well-being. This enables you to let go of negativity you have been carrying around as a result of suppressing emotions.

   Rebirthing is about completing the past. Incompletions from the past live in the body, absolutely, totally, and completely in the form of what you might call stuck energy, held in place by shallow breathing. To those of you who have done any bodywork, it might be obvious what I am talking about here.

   Contrast rebirthing with the ways in which you might have dealt with unwanted emotions in the past. Let's take anger, for example. First, it is almost certainly not present-time anger, but most likely is an incompletion from the past being triggered by a present-time experience. This is how incompletions from the past work; they continue to manifest in present time and we usually resist. Around and around it goes. One way people deal with anger is to internalize it by denying it, suppressing it, or blaming oneself. Another way is to externalize it by blaming others, kicking and screaming, or acting it out in some other way. Neither way ever produces emotional resolution.

   What works is to apply the process of rebirthing, that is, connected breathing, relaxing into the feeling, feeling it in exquisite detail, and continuing to make peace with what you are feeling.

   Working at the feeling level is faster and much more direct than working directly with the mind. You do not need to have a cognitive understanding of what is happening. You can do it entirely at the level of sensation. That alone will change how your mind relates to the situation.

   Fundamental to expanding your ability to relax into and feel bodily sensations is the context in which you are holding your experiences. At the very least you need to be willing for sensations to be the way they are, even if you don't like them. This will work. Even more useful, however, is the willingness to hold everything you are feeling as a healing in process. By relaxing into and allowing your feelings on the deepest level you will create your own healing. Ultimately, this will lead you to a feeling of gratitude for things being just the way they are.

   Keep in mind that the natural function of energy as it moves through your body is to bring to your attention whatever you have been suppressing or holding on to. That's just its physics, how it works. Thankfully, it does this a layer at a time—you do not get more than you can handle. A layer at a time, breath by breath, emotions or feelings that you have been avoiding are brought to your attention by the moving energy. "Avoiding" here implies that you have been judging that there is something about these emotions or feelings that is "wrong."

   I want to lump a few terms together: make-wrong, judgment, and resistance. When I use one term I am generally connoting them all. So whenever you are judging something or making something wrong, what you are doing in effect is locking the energy in place. What is fundamentally important here is the willingness to change your mind about whatever it is you have been making wrong.

   A rebirthing session operates in a setting of safety and trust, and this environment gives you an expanded ability to be with and relax into physical and emotional sensations and, in so doing, begin the process of their completion. Shifting to a positive context gives you an expanded ability to allow things to be the way they are, rather than resisting them. Whatever you and I resist not only persists but, in direct response to our resistance, also gets stronger. If we find a particular mood or sensation uncomfortable and avoid it, then its demands on us become stronger and harder to evade. We are giving it energy by resisting it. If you are breathing against resistance it is going to get magnified and multiplied. The very things you are avoiding almost magically confront you again and again at every turn. On the other hand, you can easily and effortlessly move through the same material and dissolve it by going with it.

   When you are breathing energy and relaxing into and tuning into the sensations you are feeling in your body and allowing them to be the way they are, the healing process begins. This can be easy, pleasurable, and even blissful.

   Now, having said all this, perhaps the most important point is that none of this has to be taken literally, none of it is chiseled in stone. The key factor, the most important aspect, is your willingness to participate in the process in the first place. Included here is the willingness to let go of whatever you have been holding on to and to feel that peace and happiness are more important for you than being right or getting even. This willingness is what allows everything else to happen. With this volition, you do not have to do anything else perfectly, and the session will be effective.

   The most important factor, whether practicing how to ride a bike or learning to breathe energy, is your willingness to do it in the first place and your commitment to it. lf that willingness and that commitment are rock-solid, you will learn, and everything that happens will contribute to the completion of the process. That willingness alone gives you enormous freedom to just be. The freedom leads you to an expanded ability to relax and let energy flow.

   In order to have a direct experience of the unity of being, you have to expand to include all of yourself. In other words, the habit of compartmentalizing yourself is a direct offshoot of duality, of creating your source externally as opposed to internally. The fragmentary parts of ourselves—incompletions from the past, things we are too fearful to be with—we tend to compartmentalize. We think we are putting them away, burying them so we won't have to deal with them. But this is fundamentally holding part of ourselves as shameful or wrong, and that part will always be exposed as less pure by the breath.

   There is no possible way to experience unity of being when you are holding your life, your being, like this. Expanding your ability to accept the underlying safety and trust of the universe in the setting of a rebirthing session gives you an expanded ability to be with those things you have been resisting. As you experience them in this way, they begin literally to dissolve, and when they dissolve your duality begins to dissolve also. That is, events arise and dissolve in breath. It matters little whether the events are childhood, birth, past life, or whatever you consider them to be. It matters only that there is stuck energy that is dissolving. What you are left with is the unity of being as a living presence within you. You have a direct— not a theoretical—experience of the living spirit in your body.

   This is equivalent to saying there is integration of both sides of the brain. The conceptual male side fuses with the female intuitive side.

   I emphasize that this is not a regressive process to take you back to birth, early childhood, and so on, even though memories of these experiences may come up for you in a session. What alone matters about these incompletions from the past is to discover what you are currently carrying with you in a way that continues to manifest in present time. Your best access to these feelings is in present time. What you are carrying with you in the form of stuck energy definitely feels like something, and you can access it in that way.

   The process then is about breathing, relaxing, tuning into feelings, and shifting the way you have been habitually holding them in avoidance, resistance, and making wrong. The process is about expanding your identity breath by breath to include these feelings so that they can integrate into a greater sense of well-being. In doing so, the past begins to complete itself.

   Learning to rebirth yourself from a professional rebirther gives you a tool that you can use anytime to spark emotional resolution and the experience of the unity of being.

   Over time you will learn to rely more and more on your own authority rather than external authority. You will learn more and more how the source is within, not without.

   The teacher is the breath itself. It unfolds to you at its own rate. It moves at the rate that is perfect for you, which is never the same for any two people. Your breath is the vehicle to take you to your own source, the higher self that resides within you.

Twenty Connected Breaths

   The foundation of rebirthing is a simple exercise that I learned from Leonard Orr, called twenty connected breaths.

   You can do this exercise throughout the day, whenever you feel the need. However, it is recommended that for the first week you only do it once daily:

I. Take four short breaths.

2. Then take one long breath.

3. Pull the breaths in and out through your nose.

4. Do four sets of the five breaths, that is, four sets of four short breaths followed by one long breath without stopping, for a total of twenty breaths.

   Merge the inhale with the exhale so the breath is connected without any pauses. One inhale connected to one exhale equals one breath. All twenty breaths are connected in this manner so you have one series of twenty connected breaths with no pauses.

   Consciously pull the inhale in a relaxed manner and let go completely on the exhale while continuing to keep the inhale and exhale the same length.

   Use the short breaths to emphasize the connecting and merging of the inhale and the exhale into unbroken circles.

   Use the long breath to fill your lungs as completely as you comfortably can on the inhale, and to let go completely on the exhale.

   Breathe at a speed that feels natural for you. It is important that the breathing be free and natural and rhythmical, rather than forced or controlled. This is what enables you to breathe prana as well as air.

   Since most of us have developed bad breathing habits you might experience some physical sensations, such as lightheadedness or tingling sensations in your hands or elsewhere. If you do this exercise daily, you will notice that the sensations may change and become less overwhelming, and more generative of healing. This indicates that you are learning about breathing consciously and are getting direct benefits in your body.

   Daily practice of this exercise will teach you more about breathing than you have ever learned in your entire life.

   If you wish to accelerate the process, contact a professional rebirther and schedule a series of one- to two-hour guided sessions.

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