emotions – The Kansas City Breathwork Community

Who Greased My Spiral?

October 13, 2013October 16, 2013 Sacred Spirals KCLeave a comment

We all hurt. Everyone of us has had times of great pain and stress in their life. There seems to be a lot of simplifying, letting go, clearing out and paring down going on. It has many looks and many phases, all personal to our own process but there are also many similarities.

Lately everywhere I turn I find an article discussing the process of collective spiritual awakening that many believe is currently occurring in our society. So many people writing about it and so many people I know who seem to be in the process documented in these articles, there probably is something to it. I have also been listening to many accounts from others, describing people who would never be expected to be open to what was once considered “woo woo” who are suddenly open to trying alternative modalities.

So far I have read a lot of soothing words that make me feel better for a moment, but I have to say the feeling doesn’t last long. Something has been missing for me.

The story of spiritual awakening can be told in the Hero’s Journey. Everything can look and feel like it is going well in life, when somewhere deep within us, a little alarm clock goes off signalling “the call” and before we know it we have set off. The alarm clock sounds like a call to adventure, it speaks to our souls or we would never listen and never set off on the journey. The journey looks innocent enough, as innocent as spring cleaning or starting a yoga practice. What it looks like in it’s initial stages is not important, it is what lit the fuse that matters, our higher selves.

Once we have embarked on the journey, there is excitement, and we know we cannot turn back even if we want to. Usually early in the stage of spiritual awakening we don’t want to turn back, we are learning and trying new things and we are on a journey. Why would we want to turn back?

In what seems like a short time the journey is no longer excitement, it is painful. It feels as though things are being ripped from our lives. Things that matter, things we have even defined ourselves by. We feel small and alone in a harsh cold world. What had been our cozy wonderful life, is now paradise lost and the harder we try to get it back or keep what is left, the more out of control we feel. We try to force outcomes and manipulate situations, even our own thoughts, all in the name of survival. We are in the middle part of our journey to spiritual experience, the battle between fear based survival and the innate drive to return to love.

This is a dangerous point because of the instability, this is a time when people turn to addictions if they are prone, or in trying to turn back and go into denial over what has started, they draw some big consequences into their lives. The ego may have power over us, but once we have started listening to the soul, and stepped onto the hero’s journey we can’t go back without paying a big price. We can’t unknow what we know, and trying to often requires extreme effort.

If we stay with the process, aware of the fact that we called this in, we become aware of a power within us, a power with a greater push than our puny intellect can provide. Coming to our power is a process of death and rebirth. The death and rebirth is a stripping away, and letting go of our old ways in order to open to a new source of power, a power from within.

At the moment we let go, we genuinely feel as though we are going to die. In a sense we do, the person we are, or think we were up until then, needs to die, before the person we called forth can emerge and take the reins in our lives. The letting go, the surrender is essential and needs to be embraced before we can transform from lost and frightened, separate individuals into spiritually connected parts of a Universal whole.

Making contact with something much larger and more potent than ourselves is another occurrence essential to spiritual awakening, or the hero’s journey. The experience can be our limited conscious mind tapping into the vastly more powerful, parallel processing capacity of the subconscious mind as occurs in the breathwork experience. Or tapping into the collective unconscious as Carl Jung describes. Whatever the means, the fact is, the process is necessary, and it happens.

We often think of this as the Hero’s Journey, process complete. “I have let go, surrendered to the process, experienced a power greater than myself that is somehow within and informs me in ways previously unimagined. I have new energy and hope for life, all is good”. It would be nice if it were that simple. In some cases it can be. But with the big, life changing, dark night of the soul, stripping away of everything that previously mattered sort of spiritual awakenings it usually doesn’t end there.

Sometimes we think we have released and been stripped bare, we have been through the underworld and are starting to feel better, get some energy back and the sun is beginning to shine again in our lives. Just in time to go through another round of release and continued stripping. What the…? What is this? Just when I feel that I am starting to make some progress and climbing back up to some modicum of a life, it seems as though someone greased my spiral and I am sliding back down into another forced bout of letting go.

Personally, I had fought and kicked and screamed in order to avoid losing my marriage. I finally surrendered to the process and let go. In order to let go I also had to sell my business and even moved 700 miles away. Just over a year later, after months of personal work and breathwork I moved back, just in time to take back my business because the conditions of the sale had not been met and face it’s devastation. I used most of my life savings digging myself out of yet another hole. I was in another round of release and I wasn’t sure I could face any more of it.

This is the part of the Hero’s Journey that is often overlooked. The return journey. We don’t turn around and retrace our steps, as it feels, but we do have what appears to be a relapse. It is no less painful than the first round either. In reality, it is the rest of the cycle, once complete we become the master of two worlds. This is where we find the real freedom to live. We now have a spiritual foundation in place in order to go out and create in the mundane world, but now we can create with heart.

It does not mean we will never go through the painful stripping away of the Hero’s Journey again. We will outgrow this manifestation of our soul’s creation too, but we will understand what is happening and we will know how much pain trying to hang on can cause. We learn to release with grace, knowing that nature abhorring a vacuum will rush in to fill us and Spirit has better plans for us than we could ever come up with. Most of the pain of the stripping away was in the story we told ourselves about it and our ego’s attachment to the identity created by it. So it will never be as painful again, we have mastered the art of living in two worlds, functioning in the mundane, while creating from a spiritual perspective.

Living The Life You Deserve

September 12, 2013 Sacred Spirals KCLeave a comment

You deserve a wonderful life. Is that your experience or do you even believe it’s possible?

You deserve to live, to breath in life each moment and live in glorious 3D color. After all, you are a human being, not a human doing. A wise person told me I had value just sitting and breathing. Imagine that! She said I was more than a job title and more than all my “doings.” She said I deserved to love and accept myself.

Hmmm….that was not my experience. On the outside, my life looked happy. I had a nice home, education, a career, my health and the love of family and friends. But on the inside, there was a tape buried deep inside my brain that said, “You don’t deserve to be happy.” (Note: It took me 44 years to determine that tape existed).

I immediately began therapy! I mean, why was this stupid tape in my head and how could I get rid it? And so began the work to purge this negative belief. And work it was, but the journey to build a life I truly believe I deserve has been worth the effort.

My experience: a few tools for creating a life deserved

I can’t tell you how to solve your problems or achieve a state of happiness. But I can share my experience, the tools I use to deal with life, and what works for me. If you seek to make life changes, you might consider Talk therapy and body work/breathwork.

Talk therapy can’t do everything, but it’s a great start

If you are stuck in a rut or have identified a negative tape in your head, consider finding a good therapist. Ask for referrals and make sure you do a “chemistry” check. A therapist can provide objective feedback and help dig out any “tapes” that are diminishing the quality of your life.

I began work with a therapist in the summer of 2004. She explained that as human beings, until we reach the age of five or six years old, we can’t evaluate the messages our brains and bodies receive. As infants and children, our minds and bodies are basically the equivalent of sponges. We absorb and soak up everything around us — good, bad or in between. All of our parent’s, sibling’s and family’s beliefs, as well as society’s messages and rules, are imprinted on our subconscious minds. And we typically don’t know what those tapes are. But we adapt within our family (family of origin) as best we can. A good therapist can help you uncover any hidden tapes that are affecting your life, re-evaluate them, toss or re-frame them, and recover your true self.

Letting go of Ego; accessing your inner healer

Maybe you are thinking, as I did, that to achieve my goals all I need to do is work more, think smarter, or apply more discipline. Those strategies can be helpful sometimes, in certain situations. But consider that your body has a mind of its own.

Yes, your body has a mind of its own! Just as messages and tapes are imprinted on our minds as infants and children, our bodies are also imprinted by the experiences and feelings during those same years (and in years after). Our body has a memory of everything that has ever happened to us, even if we don’t remember.

For example, say we’ve had a traumatic experience and are working with a therapist. We’re feeling better, but not entirely. Talk therapy is great, but it can’t help you move the experience, feelings and memories OUT of your body.

Some of the ways to release embedded memory from the body include: yoga, massage, cranial sacral balancing, emotional breath release (EBR), tapping, breathwork, and resonance repatterning, just to name a few.

Personally, I have found breathwork an effective means to process change, get in touch with what’s truly important in my life, and move energy through my body. Breath what? Breathwork involves deep cyclical breathing, with music, for an hour or so. This is followed by artwork (creating a mandala) and processing with another person or a group. For me, the practice puts me into a “waking dream state” that lets my body do its own healing. It provides a rare opportunity to let go of Ego and let my soul soar. I love it.

You deserve the life you want. And the good news is it’s there for the taking, if you are willing to ask for it, grab the tools that work for you, and do the work.

Nancy Jenkins

Escaping?

May 2, 2013 Sacred Spirals KCLeave a comment

There are almost as many ways to escape the high level of stress and agitation that bombard us in our day to day lives as there are people looking to escape the pressures: cigarettes, alcohol, pills, food, gaming, facebook, sex, shopping, gambling add any combination of the above and the list expands exponentially.

We do these things because they work, and they work fast, they help us escape, turn off, and build our own personal container in order to continue to push forward and accomplish all the things we have to do in our fast paced society. There comes a time in many of our lives when it becomes too painful to continue using these escapes, the consequences are beginning to severely outweigh the benefits. The truth is these things are killers, and we are losing our families, our careers, our health, and even our freedom to these fixes. When the day comes that we realized we are putting more and more effort into our fixes and getting less and less reward for a shorter period of time. When the scale has tipped to such a point of obvious injustice, it is usually at this time that we become willing to look for a different solution and find a way out of the crisis that has become our lives.

I have been having conversations with others that evoke change in thinking and behavior for decades. I have worked with business executives, and spiritual leaders, many creative personalities and a wide variety of colorful people that have deeply touched my life as we worked together to overcome adversity, meet challenges, push past obstacles, to establish resiliency and begin to thrive again.

If life were always good and easy, we would numb to the enjoyment and cease feeling the joy. This does not mean that life need to be a veil of tears. We do need to be able to experience a range of emotions without over identifying and getting lost in the emotion. Alcoholics tend to be highly intelligent and sensitive people. I believe there is a different scale of intensity of feeling for everybody, and alcoholics are on the high side of the scale.

If our feelings are intense, the painful ones can be excruciating.

(Stay with me here, I know it is a departure, but…) Learning to see emotions as guides to our beliefs, and following those guides to see which belief of ours is out of synch with our current experience can be a wonderful tool to releasing our attachment to the suffering. At the same time we can honor our deep capacity for feeling, we can walk the fine line of allowing our emotions to move in and through us, to act as guides and, by learning to decipher their messages in a way not taught in our society, we can go from apparently disadvantaged by our sensitivity to highly functioning individuals. Once this change has taken place, escaping becomes not only undesirable, but a hindrance to our new effective and present lives.

My personal commitment to Shamanic Breathwork and the discovery of my own inner healer/shaman has been a crucial part of my journey. I have gone from being taken over by my emotions, to being able to walk through significant life experiences while remaining present for the experience, and for my loved ones. This is emotional sobriety, it is the key to a quality of life far better than I had ever achieved, or imagined possible. It doesn’t exist because I have narrowed my life down to the few people and places that don’t set me off. It exists in spite of conditions that I wish were different. I can say “yes” to life, to adventure, and experiences. If you are reading this, and you have read this far, my deepest hope is that you will contact us at Sacred Spirals or one of the other Shamanic Breathwork Facilitators and commit to yourself. You are your most precious asset, the life you create deserves your best!

Namaste