– by Ray Bratcher
Embodied enlightenment is a process or understanding that I was guided to after decades of giving Rebirthing-Breathwork sessions to my clients and to myself, while studying wisdom teachings, both ancient and modern, and is the foundation of the Breathwork Modality I call “Sacred Breath”. In this essay, I attempt to elucidate its basic principles and provide a general overview and orientation.
Embodied enlightenment is all about using our breath to explore our energetic relationship with the “world” around us as a tool for transformational personal and spiritual growth. Rather than escaping into the head, turning everything into verbal concepts, embodied enlightenment is heart centered. We FEEL our way into the enlightened state. You can also use the mind and the emotions for growth, but nothing works as fast as working with energy. Those energies often show up as emotions, ie. our emotional response to “things” (persons, places, situations, etc) happening “out there” in the “world”. In actual point of fact, the energy underlying the emotion is not the same as the emotion. It’s a subtle difference and you’ll probably have to work it a bit before you can tell the difference. In the meantime, for most people, working with it on the emotional level is a good beginning.
These emotions can be thought of as being on a scale, ranging from low (negative) to high (positive). So emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, resentment, etc., would be near the bottom, negative end of the scale, while emotions like love, joy, peace, etc., would be near the top, positive end of the scale.
The emotional response of gratitude plays a singularly important role in embodied enlightenment because of it’s position, mid-way, on this scale. Gratitude is the first positive emotion. You cannot feel gratitude while continuing to feel a negative emotion, nor can you feel any positive emotion without going through gratitude. Many positive emotions have a gratitude component as well. So gratitude is the “bare minimum” so to speak, for having a positive experience of life.
Yet most people consistently live below that bare minimum, with a general experience of life that tends to be negative, taking the forms of pessimism, lack, self-doubt, and victim consciousness, for example. In other words, most people live life everyday, moment by moment, with an ongoing negative “overlay” based on a fear based need to “protect” themselves, constantly “on the look-out” for what could go wrong, is going wrong, or might go wrong. This activity of the conditioned mind (conditioned by our parents, school teachers, early life experiences, society, etc.), or ego, means that we are continuously in evaluation or judgment mode. Evaluating our current situation, comparing it to our idea of how it “should” be, judging it to be lacking in some way, thereby “making it wrong.”
Anytime that we make something “wrong”, it makes us feel bad. That is, it causes a certain kind of energy to arise within us in response, which we associate with the “wrong” , and therefore call that energy bad, and consequently feel “bad”. Human Beings have two very strong desires: the desire to feel good (which also means to stop feeling bad) and the desire to be right. So if we feel bad because we have made “something” wrong, the only way to stop feeling bad is either to admit we were wrong when we made that “something” wrong (which we don’t want to do), or to simply withdraw our attention from the “wrong” “something”, i.e., to just stop thinking about it so that it doesn’t continue to make us feel bad. This is also known as suppression.
That suppressed “make wrong” does not go away however. It doesn’t disappear just because we’ve stopped thinking about it. It becomes a contracted area of negative energy deeply suppressed in our physical body, held there in part through the development of “glitches” in our breathing.
At this point, a concrete example may be helpful. So, imagine 20 years ago you went out to eat at a restaurant with friends and were unlucky enough to get the world’s worst waitress. She was slow, rude, and unfriendly. She brought the wrong dishes and she brought them cold. Your experience was just plain awful. So awful in fact, that it was practically all you could talk about for the next few days. To your family, co-workers, friends, to anyone who would listen, really, you were all about, “Let me tell you about this awful experience we had at that restaurant…”
You probably didn’t notice at the time, but whenever you talked about it, or even just thought about it, it made you feel bad. You don’t want to feel bad for the rest of your life, so what to do? Well, one thing you could have done was to forgive the waitress. To try to see her not as an awful person going out of her way to make you miserable, but perhaps as an overworked underpaid worker in a short staffed restaurant doing her best. But then that would mean admitting you were wrong, which is hard to do for most people, so you want to continue to make the waitress wrong. But you don’t want to continue to feel bad, so what to do? Easy! Suppress! Forget about it! Forget about the waitress. Go on with your life.
This is actually a rather sane defense mechanism on the part of your ego. You sometimes meet homeless street people who are constantly muttering to themselves about some incident that happened 20 years ago. Running over the same conversation in their mind over and over. They seem to lack this defense mechanism.
OK! Wonderful! It is 20 years later and you’ve forgotten all about the awful waitress. Or have you? Did you know that under hypnosis, you will be able to remember every detail from that meal? What you ate, what your friends had, what the bill was, the waitress’ name, what she wore, how she acted, her rude behavior, etc. etc.–it is all there, every detail–stored in your subconscious mind. It didn’t vanish just because you suppressed it. It is still there, you just are not consciously aware of its presence. Also still there is the negative energy associated with it. This is the energetic component of the experience, the actual cause of your “feeling bad”. You can think of it as a concentration of negative energy that gets stored deep down in the body. Deeply enough that you can’t feel it anymore. If you could feel it, it would feel painful. That pain is still there, but so deeply suppressed that you don’t feel it. But in your physical body it has the effect of being a blockage to the smooth flow of your natural life force energy, depriving your physical body of what it needs to maintain health. Not only that, it takes energy to hold that negative energy down. Like trying to hold an inflatable beach ball underwater. This activity of suppression of the energy is accomplished via inhibitions in the breathing mechanism. So in breathwork, we cultivate breathing in a full and free manner, without inhibitions. When you are breathing this way, you cannot keep things in suppression. Notice this means you get back not only the negative energy, but also the extra energy you were previously using to hold your beach ball down. That is one reason people feel so energized after a session.
But here’s the thing. That energy is NOT negative. It never was. It is just energy. It is your very own life force energy, in fact. You just made it negative, by making it wrong. In Breathwork, we call these “make wrongs”.
And here’s the even bigger thing: that energy did not arise in you because of your experience at the restaurant. That energy has been there a long time. It was your experience at the restaurant which arose in your perception because of that energy. And similar experiences will continue to arise in your perception until the illusion that that energy is negative is seen through, and the energy loved and integrated back into your system, instead of being suppressed, held away and apart, i.e. in separation.
The mis-qualification of that energy started at the beginning of Time, when you had the guilty perception that you had separated yourself from “Source”. It started at the beginning of Duality, when the “One” APPARENTLY APPEARED to become the “Many”. This actually never happened and could not happen, but we replay the same illusion, dream, hallucination, over and over and over again in our lives, situation after situation, and even life time after life time. This is the origin of the feelings of deja vu, ennui, boredom, and sameness that some people experience. In the back of your mind, you can’t quite shake the feeling that you’ve done all this before. Because you have.
So, here’s the good news. Each experience like your restaurant experience is an opportunity. In the moment, as it is happening, you can consciously choose to look at the energy that is arising. To question it and to investigate it. To question the apparently arising illusions around it. Look at the waitress and ask yourself, is it really true that she is going out of her way to make me miserable? Is there another way of looking at this? Even if I can’t find that other way, can I at least be WILLING for there to be another way of seeing it?
Go deeply into the energy itself. Can you feel the addictive quality of it? How you are addicted to the way the energy makes you feel and then create/project circumstances in your outer perception to justify the energy so you can get another hit?
Breathe into that. In the moment, as it is happening. Be present. Be here now. Fully experience. Experience fully. Don’t suppress.
Can I see that this waitress is doing nothing wrong and fully forgive her? If I can’t do that, can I at least be GRATEFUL for this learning opportunity to see and explore my own energetic responses? Can I be grateful to her?
See what you just did? From anger or irritation at the low end of the scale, you’ve just gone straight to the mid-point, to gratitude!
Now, forget about the situation and just explore the energy as energy. Breathe into it. Feel it. Become aware that it is just energy which appears to take the form of a “negative energy blockage” only because you have made it “wrong”. Bring that to the truth. The truth is, you are perfect and therefore perfectly invulnerable. Created perfectly by a perfect Creator. The truth is:
“Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
(ACIM-Introduction)
So if it feels bad, it can’t be true and you must be perceiving or thinking in error. Because the only reason anything feels bad to you is because you are perceiving it as a threat in some way.
You’re a perfect creation of a perfect creator, so obviously you are real. Since you’re real, you can’t BE threatened. So anything which appears to threaten you must be unreal and therefore does not exist.
This is the process of seeing through your illusions and forgiving them. Which restores your mind to sanity and the energy to wholeness/holiness. Your life force energy, no longer negative and “made wrong” is now integrated and brought back into Unity.
So you can always be grateful to any trigger which arises in your perception, because it is showing you a negative energy blockage which you can then release, integrate, and heal. Feeling is healing. By feeling the energy as it is, rather than as you have mis-qualified it, you realize, or even better, you experience, that it is simply your own pure and perfect energy which doesn’t need to be held apart. Feeling is healing.
These negative energy blockages show up as concentrated areas of tension and contracted energy. And you realize, or experience, that it’s always possible to relax even more! Eventually your energy is no longer tense and contracted in a defensive protective barrier against “the world”, but open and joyously expanding, as befits your true Self.
At first it seems difficult. You’re working with one blockage at a time, and each one seems a real challenge to see past the illusion and to relax the tension and integrate the energy. But after a while, you begin to see common patterns and find yourself healing whole groups of them at a time. You even find yourself looking forward to triggers, which now come few and far between, because they show you something you didn’t even know was there, and give you the opportunity to integrate a deeply hidden pattern. And eventually you can say, with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, when asked if the egoic personality ever still arose in him, answered, “Of course it does, but I see at once it is illusion and discard it.”
So, while embodied enlightenment acknowledges the illusionary nature of the body, and the illusionary nature of the “world” that seems to arise in our perception, it traces the arising of both to the primordial mis-qualification of our energy at the beginning of the separation into (apparent) duality and contends that that mis-qualified energy can be directly investigated and transcended by going deeply into our physical body’s felt sense of energy, fully feeling it, and feeling/observing the interplay between that felt sense of energy and what appears to arise in consciousness, both interior and exterior. By fully feeling the energy, as it is, intrinsically, as energy, without labels of wrong or bad or guilt or fear, we realize, or better, we experience, that the energy was never the problem, only our resistance to the energy seemed to create problems, and that that resistance was based on illusion.
Rather than ignoring the body, trying to escape the body, considering the body to be some kind of useless prison, or anything like that, in embodied enlightenment we make the body our trusted friend and ally by receiving its messages respectfully and with an open heart. We recognize the body for the treasure chest of energtic information it offers us and learn to decode its ancient mysteries.
In a nutshell, embodied enlightenment says, “Don’t try to reach Heaven, don’t try to Ascend. Just go deeper, and realize Heaven is where you already are.”
Sacred Breath 