I am lying on the mat, as quiet as a kindergartner, trying to concentrate on my inhale and my exhale. I am trying to concentrate - while at the same time surrendering to my inner healer - but the truth is I'm a little distracted by a sound I think I'm hearing, over to my left.
At first it just seems to be part of the music, which is loud and tribal, frantic with bongos. But then there is a pause in the music and I hear the sound distinctly: The woman on the mat behind me is shrieking.I think she may also be thrashing and yelping and throwing herself against the wall, and now I'm beginning to understand why we were asked to sign medical release forms at the start of today's workshop. Do you have a past history of or currently suffer from any of the following: fractures, heart attacks, severe mental illness, retinal detachment?
The workshop is called "The Healer Within: Holotropic Breathwork." Twenty-three of us have signed up, all of us surely people who have spent several decades breathing. But a few, we discover, do not just breathe. They do breathwork. It has changed their lives, they say, but it isn't for the faint-hearted, or the retinally detached.
"The yucky way to enlightenment" is the way one woman puts it, with pride and fondness in her voice.
Later we lie on the mats. "Close your eyes," our instructor tells us. "Now take a couple of gentle, deep breaths through your heart." Let go of your muscles, he tells us, give yourself up to the mat, let the floor support you and let the earth support the floor.
"Now begin to let your breath deepen. Deeper, fuller, a little faster. Full, clear and clean . . . ."
The brochure arrived in the mail: "Holotropic Breathwork: A revolutionary synergy between psychology and spirituality." It wasn't the first brochure, though. A few months before, there had been one called "Awakenings Through Breath." And another called "Breath of Life: The Ultimate Experience." And still another for Hydro-breath Therapy ("utilizes breath, water, music and expressive/integrative energy work").
These days, it seems, America is full of breathing lessons. Heart-attack victims learn how to reduce their stress levels by breathing deeply. People who suffer from panic disorders learn how to calm down by breathing deeply. These are the breathing lessons we accept.
But other lessons promise the possibility of something not yet sanctioned by the Reader's Digest: an exploration of our deepest psyches, a release of emotional memories trapped in our bodies, the overthrow of our own tyrannical misperceptions about ourselves, even a re-enactment of our own births.
Americans come late to the study of breath. We breathe almost as an afterthought, paying attention to breath only when we've run out of it. Other cultures - Hindus, Buddhists, aboriginal shamans - have been entranced by breathing for millennia.
Breath for them is something metaphysical: not only oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, but life itself, and not just life but maybe a way to journey past life, into more mysterious realms.
We are lying on our mats, feeling the earth support the floor, beginning to breathe. Suddenly there are drums and chants, pumped into the room from loudspeakers. The music is intense and hard-driving and seductive; pretty soon I find myself breathing deeper and faster.
And soon after that I feel my fingers start to tingle, then my toes and my arms. I know this feeling. I felt it once when I was deep-sea fishing in the Pacific. Actually I was lying down while other people fished and I concentrated on the breakfast I shouldn't have eaten. I was hyperventilating.
This sometimes happens to people when they begin their breathwork, our workshop leader told us. My diaphragm was starting to tighten up and it felt like some big marble slab was squeezing down on me. I wanted to get up and go home, but I also wanted to see what would happen if I stayed.
Surrender is the key to breathwork, a woman had told me at the introductory talk the night before.
As the music pounds, I can feel my breathing as waves and I see myself standing in the ocean trying to get up the courage to body surf something besides foam. So I keep breathing, through the drums, through the sounds of other people on other mats, shrieking and moaning.
Earlier in the day, before it was my turn to breathe, I had been a "sitter," watching while my "breathing partner" lay on the mat. My job as a sitter was to pay close attention to my partner, but it was hard not to be distracted by what was happening on other, busier mats.
I couldn't take my eyes off one woman who spent part of the two-hour session on all fours, sometimes raising her arm up as if she were trying to reach something. Another woman, who had blindfolded herself to keep out the light, was on her knees, with her back arched and her arms extended, like some hostage bird.
Now that it is my turn to breathe, I feel that I am coming loose from my body. My forehead starts to twitch, uncontrollably it seems, although my sitter later tells me she hasn't noticed anything. Then the twitching moves to my eye, and down to my check and then to my chin.
Something is happening! Maybe I'm releasing stored memories!
The notion that our bodies, not just our minds, hold onto memories is a major tenet of breathwork. Memories are stored deep in our tissue, like invisible cellulite and just as tenacious. This is why traditional psychotherapy, the kind where you talk for a 50-minute hour, doesn't always work, say breathwork practitioners.
Paula Grosch uses a computer analogy. You have to get to the hard disk, she says. Grosch is a Salt Lake certified breathwork practitioner who, along with her partner, psychologist Daniel Sternberg, has trained with Stanislav Grof, the founder of the holotropic breathing technique.
The right kind of breathing will get you to "non-ordinary states of consciousness," says Grosch, and that can get you to the hard disk of your beliefs and behavior patterns. Get to the hard disk, she says, and you'll be able to reprogram the stuff that doesn't work for you, the stuff that keeps you from being a fully awake human being, the stuff that may even be responsible for certain physical ailments.
"We live in a culture that wants to medicate," Grosch says, sitting cross-legged on a comfortable chair in her office. She has lighted several candles. "We live in a culture that sees everything as matter." Viewing the world in terms of what can be physically seen and proven is "the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm," she says. "That's too small a framework for what is experienced in holotropic breathwork."
Grosch's mentor, Stanislav Grof, came to breathwork by way of hallucinogenic drugs. Grof, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, used hallucinogens on his patients during the 1950s and found that they were taking trips to parts of the psyche Freud never dreamed of.
At first, Grof figured the psychedelic experiences were simply toxic reactions to the drugs. Later he decided that the hallucinogens were simply activating something that was already in the brain, some capacity to transcend this plane and enter one where it was possible, for example, to feel brotherly love for house plants.
When hallucinogens were banned in the United States in the 1960s, Grof began studying other cultures, the ones whose shamans and mystics often used non-ordinary states in their rituals and healing practices. While it was true that some of them smoked and ingested items that took them to those non-ordinary states, others used techniques that had nothing to do with chemicals: drumming, bodywork, breathing.
When people breathe deeply and quickly, Grof learned, they experience non-ordinary states on four different levels: The first is the sensory and emotional level: twitches, colors, grief, peace. The second is the level of biography: images and memories. Sometimes people lie on their mats and actually relive these memories. Some people, says Grof, regress so far back and with such authenticity that their bodies actually reproduce a Bubinkski reflex - that involuntary movement of the feet that only infants have.
But it gets even odder still. If they breathe deeply and quickly, says Grof, some people remember two pivotal times of their life generally assumed to be beyond memory: birth and the womb. And, on the fourth level, some people have "transpersonal" experiences beyond ego and reality. At this level, say the people who say they've been there, it is possible to feel like a cheetah running across the African plain, to know what it feels like to be a star, to feel connected to the divine.
"I think of this work as the underwater world of Jacques Costeau," says Paula Grosch, who has plumbed the dark depths of her own unfathomable psyche many times. Breathwork is not a substitute for psychotherapy, she says, but sometimes logic and talking aren't enough.
Experiencing your body, says Grosch, is "where the truth is."
I'm lying on the mat. My breathing stays fast and deep, a continuous wave that rides me along on it. And then I notice that I am no longer breathing so fast. The music has slowed down. Fewer snare drums, more violins. I feel still and calm and actually quite joyful. You've been breathing for two hours, my sitter tells me, and I am surprised that so much time has passed.
I feel very relaxed, but also disappointed. I have not been a cheetah today. Or a fetus. I haven't even remembered anything startling about my life. I haven't shrieked in psychic pain.
And I will never find out why that other woman, on the mat behind me, shrieked for an hour without stopping. Quite rudely, I think, she leaves after the breathing and doesn't participate in the "integration" session.
But I do find out that the woman who had been on all fours with her arm raised up had a transpersonal experience in which she was a seed trying to sprout through the ground. And another woman had seen herself in a coffin with her family around her. And still another, whom I had heard gagging, had re-experienced her own birth.
Stan Grof believes that most people are still emotionally stuck in the moments just before their real birth, still stuck metaphorically in the birth canal, where they adopted the perception that life is an endless struggle and that they are forever doomed to be its victim.
Our own births are something we really shouldn't miss reliving, say the people who believe in this sort of thing. Our births, they say, are where we learn our first lessons - hard lessons that form that hard disk of the rest of our lives. But you may not be ready for a rebirth right now, our workshop leader had told us. Your inner healer lets you experience what you need. It knows what's best for you.
Wouldn't you just know it: my inner healer thinks I'm a wimp.
But there are other breathing lessons in town and other lessons to be learned from breathing.
I trek up the Avenues to visit a yoga teacher named Jay Jones, who can tell right away that I need help. I'm talking a mile a minute, and when I'm not talking I'm slumped over my notebook. I am definitely in my head, she says. Western society creates shallow breathers, she says, because it expects us to be thinkers; it expects us to be out in the world.
Try this, says Jones. She folds up a mat and sticks it between my back and the chair, so my chest is pulled back. Now breathe deeply, she says. She wants me to see how relaxed I feel, how my thoughts can't possibly race when I breathe this way.
Breathe in and out through your nose, she says, because when you breathe through your mouth you'll dredge up more emotions. This kind of breathing isn't about emotions, she says. It's about staying calm. Yogis think of breathing as the vehicle that brings us prana, the life force. Breathing, they say, is what connects our body, mind and spirit.
In India, Jones tells me with a sly smile, the length of a person's life is measured by the number of breaths he takes. Fewer breaths, longer life.
So I go to see Vern Goldsmith, a New Age kind of guy who runs mind-body workshops. He lends me a MotivAider, a device that I can set to vibrate every two minutes to remind me to breathe deeply and slowly.
Breathing deeply is the single most important thing we can do to improve our health, says Goldsmith. It means more oxygen to our cells, more cleansing of waste products.
I wear the MotivAider to work. Every two minutes it wiggles against my waist and I realize that yes, I am breathing so shallowly I hardly seem to be breathing at all. So I let my abdomen expand, pulling in oxygen, and then I slowly let the breath out.
I had learned about the MotivAider from Terry Twitchell, spokeswoman for the state Department of Social Services. Twitchell used to have excruciating sinus and tension headaches two or three times a week. She had tried codeine, exercise, reflexology and massage, with little relief. But since she started wearing the MotivAider - taking time every three minutes to breathe a few, deep breaths - her headaches are now much less severe, and occur only once every nine days or so.
I show my MotivAider to Peg Hunter. Hunter is a social worker who helped establish the Stress Reduction Clinic at LDS Hospital. "Bells of mindfulness," she says when she sees the little device.
Buddhists, she explains, use temple bells to remind themselves to come back to the present moment. Every time they hear the bell they stop talking, stop thinking, and simply focus on their breath, in and out.
They don't force their breath to do anything in particular. They just watch it, being mindful that they are alive there, sitting, breathing. It's a way of slowing down. Of remembering what is important.
But I'm still intrigued with this idea of being born again. So now I find myself on another mat, this one in the home of Sueanne Russell, a native Australian who has lived in Park City since 1987.
Russell is the founder and owner of Breath of Life, a practitioner of what she calls conscious connected breathing. Instead of breathing so quickly that you hyperventilate, this technique has you breathe deeply in through your mouth, then exhale naturally, then, without stopping, breathe in deeply again.
There are several "rebirthers" along the Wasatch Front. Gwyneth McNeil does her rebirthing with snorkels in a hot tub. Barbara Bellows-Terranova makes house calls.
Today I am in Russell's study with a blanket over me. Take a deep breath, says Russell, who is lying down close to my ear. Breathe in all that is good. I breathe in and out, in and out. Pretty soon my mouth is so dry all I can think of is a glass of water. But I keep on breathing. You're doing fine, she says.
We continue to breathe this way for a while and then Russell says she wants to try something else: some bioenergetics and "sounding." Shake your legs as hard as you can, she instructs, and beat your hands on the mat. Now scream as loud as you can, she says, as she puts a pillow over my face. So I shake and pound and scream. My socks fly off my feet. My scream sounds like it is coming to me under water.
We do this several times. I feel silly and I'm exhausted. Now breathe again, says Russell. Does it feel like you can breathe into a part of your lungs you couldn't before, she wants to know. Yes, I think maybe I can, I tell her.
We stay on the mat for over 90 minutes. I am eager to re-experience my birth, an emergency Caesarean that began with my mother being trapped in an elevator. It does not seem far-fetched for me to think that the lessons I may have learned there - that life is a fairly scary proposition, for example - have shaped my outlook and behavior for decades. Or that, having been plucked out without engaging in the struggle of the birth canal, I have chosen to spend the rest of my life as an observer.
But apparently today is not my day to be reborn. After 90 minutes I put my socks back on and go home, armed with instructions from Russell to practice conscious connected breathing twice a day.
Maybe I'm just not cut out to dredge anything up from deep within my psyche. Certainly I am too lazy. It has been two weeks since I met with Russell, and I have only practiced the breathing a couple of times.
But I have to admit that the notion that simply by breathing in some fancy way I can wipe out decades of insecurities and ineffective behavior (laziness for example) is very appealing.
I keep remembering what Hunter told me. Hunter has tried holotropic breathwork many times and has relived her own birth more than once. She has healed herself in many ways, she says. Most importantly, she has come to see herself as no longer separate from other people and the world.
Breathwork, she says, is a transformational process. "For some it's solving a past of abuse. For others it's transformation on a high spiritual plane. It's about being connected to God, about feeling real compassion, about being able to give from a place of generosity not just because you're supposed to."
And I keep remembering what Russell said as I lay on that mat with my mouth parched, trying to inhale yet again.
"Breathwork is about coming all the way home to our hearts."