So, what’s this all about, anyway? Why should I do it? I already know how to breathe?

If you would like to unleash your full creative potential and be free to fully enjoy life–high quality breathwork can help.

If you are dealing with stress, anxiety, trauma and drama, bad or unfulfilling or non-existent relationships with anyone from significant other to family to your boss and co-workers, fear or anger issues, financial abundance issues, emotional issues, health issues, poor quality of life issues, a general sense of frustration, business or career issues, including “career burnout”, etc.–high quality breathwork can help.

If you are seeking inner peace, better health, more abundance and a more meaningful life–high quality breathwork can help.

If you feel blocked or not progressing as fast as you would like on your career/self-development/personal growth/spiritual path–high quality breathwork can help.

The original form of Breathwork, from which all other forms are derived, is called Rebirthing-Breathwork and was discovered by my main breathwork mentor, genius eccentric Leonard Orr, considered to be one of the “founding fathers” of the New Age, along with Fritz Pearls, Ram Dass, and Timothy Leary.

Perhaps luckily, perhaps serendipitously, Rebirthing-Breathwork arose in the heady days of the beginnings of Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology, which focused on what constitutes “healthy well-being” and the transcendent aspects of the human being, instead of seeing us as “sick” or “broken” and needing to be “fixed”. Shared for example at the Esalen Institute, considered the epicenter for the Human Potential Movement, Rebirthing-Breathwork was quickly recognized as one of the most powerful transformational modalities anyone had ever seen and soon spread worldwide.

Unfortunately, as the movement grew too rapidly for its discoverer to supervise and quality control, and as the various derivative versions strayed further and further from the core techniques and principles, the quality suffered and its popularity declined.

Now, as it makes a resurgence, the same sorts of dynamics are coming into play once again, this time abetted by the internet. People these days are doing one hour zoom sessions, physically alone, but sharing screen (and the facilitator’s attention) with a hundred or more other people, and think they are doing breathwork. Actually, it is breathwork, and does help some, but it is not high quality breathwork.

I do not want to take anything away from the practitioners giving those sessions, or the benefits many people receive. Especially considering that a lot of that started during the pandemic lockdowns, when there didn’t seem to be any other choice. And I am glad that people got to have at least an introduction to the power of the breath. However, my first sessions (as a client) were high quality breathwork sessions, and if it weren’t for them, I would now be in a wheelchair, crippled from the neck down, my body wracked in excruciating pain. To say nothing of the huge leaps in emotional, personal, and spiritual development I made thanks to breathwork.

So I know the real power of the breath available through high quality breathwork. I personally benefited from it. It changed my life. It saved my life. I guess you could say I feel a moral obligation to make sure high quality breathwork remains easily available to anyone who wants it.

High Quality Breathwork is one-on-one with an experienced breathworker, and the breathing portion of the session usually lasts at least an hour and a half to two hours. Or longer, depending on the individual’s needs and process. One hour just is not enough time for most people to do it right. There is usually also an additional thirty minutes or so of talking consultation and written exercises. There may also be “homework”.

So you can see real breathwork is not a superficial thing and you probably shouldn’t start if you aren’t willing to make a commitment and engage seriously. If you do, though, the rewards are immense. For this reason, many of my clients think of their lives as “before Sacred Breath” and “after Sacred Breath”.

One of the many reasons (I could write pages on this, but trying to keep it brief here) that Rebirthing-Breathwork is such a powerful modality for personal and spiritual growth and transformation is that it allows you to access non-ordinary states of consciousness while remaining completely relaxed and yet fully aware. Which gets you past the surface level stuff and into the deeper levels where you keep false conditioning and limiting beliefs you don’t even know you have. These are controlling your life and lowering its quality.

So now you have the freedom to change them, for the first time in your life. Even better, they often change immediately without much effort once you see them. You see them, you see how silly they are, and you just naturally automatically drop them.

“I’m seeing you guys from a whole new angle! You are true healers! I mean, everybody does yoga, and breathing, and pranayama, and yada yada yada. And I go to some of them, but nothing ever impacted me like this did! And you’re teaching on a really advanced level. This isn’t just basic beginner stuff!” 

Furthermore, we expend huge amounts of energy keeping these unconscious patterns out of our conscious awareness, holding them “down” in a sense because we don’t want them to rise to the level of our awareness. So that energy becomes available to you once again for you to use in more healthy ways. That’s one of the reasons people feel so energized after a session.

The key to this access is what Rebirthing-Breathwork calls “the energy cycle”. This energy is initiated in you by the process and will probably be the most powerful energy in your body you have ever felt. In fact, it is so powerful that it sometimes scares people and they, consciously or subconsciously, begin to shut it down. This prevents them from having a completed energy cycle and taking full advantage of all the process has to offer. Another thing that prevents people from completing their energy cycle is simply not having enough time.

“Morning Ray! I just wanted to let you know how large of an impact you’ve made on my life and how forever grateful I am…thank you 💛”

It is impossible to overstress the importance of having a completed energy cycle in this process. So it is incredibly important to have the sole attention of a skilled practitioner, who can guide you in working with the energy, at first, and then playing with it, as your skill develops. It is incredibly important to have someone who has “been there” by your side, your ally, your champion, your “protagonist” giving you their full attention as they support you in learning how to work with the energy and assist you in going further than you could on your own, ensuring you have a completed energy cycle and get first hand experiential knowledge of what it feels like to have a completed energy cycle. There is also an energetic rapport that occurs between facilitator and client, so the more experienced the facilitator the more places he or she has “been”, so therefore the more places the facilitator can assist you in getting to.

This is the only way to truly master the Breath, which is important because once you have, you will be able to give yourself a session whenever you want for healing and/or improvement on all levels–physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual–thus empowering you and freeing you from dependency on others or any “system”.

“I’ve made more spiritual progress in two months with you than I did in ten years with Bryon Katie.”

Brief Bio

“Ray is very psychic. There are Rebirthers in Los Angeles who charge $200 a session and the sessions Ray gives are 10 times better! So probably he should be charging $2,000 a session, but then very few people could afford him!”

–Leonard Orr, Discoverer and Originator of Rebirthing-Breathwork and all modern Breathwork Schools; Author of “Rebirthing in the New Age” and “Breaking the Death Habit”, among many other books; along with Ram Das, Fritz Pearls, and Timothy Leary, considered one of the “founding fathers” of the “New Age” Movement. My Teacher.

He has also trained with Dan Brule, Sondra and Markus Ray, Heike Strombach, and Yashoda Deschenes, among others, as well numerous “on-line” trainings.

His client list includes people from every walk of life: farmers, factory workers, administrative assistants, retirees, housewives, construction workers, yoga teachers, psychotherapists, recording stars, best selling authors, Artists, corporate executives, Emmy winners, Fortune 100 CEOs, law enforcement, M.D.s and Nurses, lobbyists and Legislative Staff, as well as many leading international Rebirthers, among others.

“Thank you! Thank you so much…this week I had my first agency presentation in front of 100 participants and not once was I anxious, had butterflies…I was ready and confident!”–Satisfied Client, St. Croix

“That was the most powerful process I’ve ever experienced!”–David Jeans, European Coordinator for the Melchizedek Synthesis Light Academy, London

“I could hardly walk before my session with Ray. Now I feel fine!”–B.C., St. Croix

His wife and he attended Dr. Joshua David Stone’s invitation only global Spiritual Leadership Conference at Mt. Shasta.

“Ray Bratcher and Agnieszka are very dear friends of mine!…Ray is one of the finest spiritual leaders and persons I know!… I am also honored to call him my friend and spiritual brother!… I strongly encourage anyone reading this introduction to Ray to support Ray and Agnieszka in their spiritual mission in any way you can and to attend their classes and become involved in all that they do. You will find no two finer people on planet Earth!”

—Dr. Joshua David Stone (Ph.D. Transpersonal Psychology, lic. marriage, family, and child counselor, author of 47 books on Ascension, Spiritual Psychology, and Healing, 

He has a weekly radio show and podcast, called “Children of the Sun”, exploring advanced concepts in metaphysics, spirituality, and health and healing.

He has been interviewed on NPR and “Nothing Media”.

He has also received Third Degree Sekhem-Seichim-Reiki Initiation from Master Teacher Rev. Diane Shewmaker, M.A., L.P.C.; C.P.C., and Second Degree Melchizedek Synthesis Reiki Energy Mastery from Susan Anthony (Author of “A Map to God: Awakening Spiritual Integrity” and close protege of Credo Mutwa) during Wesak at Mt. Shasta.

He has had a number of mystical initiations in many traditions, including Vajrayana, Vedic, and Christian.

A long time ago, he was a member of Mensa and served in the U.S. Navy operating Nuclear Reactors, during which time he was awarded the Navy Expeditionary Medal.

He currently lives on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, with his wife of 28 years.

He is an ENFJ-A, which happens to be the perfect personality type for the work he does. So maybe the Universe knows what it is doing.

“I’ve been to lots of workshops, and self-improvement seminars, and they give you a ‘buzz’ that lasts a few days, but then all your old fears come back, and you go back to being just the same. This is different! You can actually feel your fears and doubts just leaving your body!”–C., St. Croix

“Awesome! Indescribable! Never felt anything like that!”–C.S., St. Croix

You can check for availability and book a session with Ray here:

https://raysacredbreath.youcanbook.me/

Further Bio and Advanced Info

Should you work with me? That, really, is the only question that matters. Can I, as a wise or “spiritual” friend, be helpful to you? I don’t know. My path has been so eclectic and so weird, that I can’t even say who I am best suited for. I never know what to say about myself. So usually, I lead with what past clients have said, in the hope that will give you an indication of what to expect.

If I bullet point my life with a view towards providing you with some context about me to help you decide, it could look like this:

• I have been on a spiritual path my entire life and have had a number of “mystical experiences” beginning when I was seven years old with a physical visitation from Jesus Christ.
• Like most people, I first came to Rebirthing-Breathwork as a client. How I wound up taking my first sessions at Leonard Orr’s (Breathwork’s Discoverer) own center, from his Lead Trainer, is a perfect example of the sort of miraculous synchronicities Jung wrote about. Actually, my life has been filled with miraculous synchronicities.
• At first, my interest in Rebirthing-Breathwork was strictly in the self-improvement and personal growth aspects it offered and, after my first session, in the fact that it got me to a place in only 15 minutes that I normally had to meditate for 5 or 6 hours to reach. Serendipitously, however, at the same time I began those sessions, I was diagnosed with an incurable disease that was supposed to put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, my body wracked in excruciating pain. The disease was healed by the Rebirthing-Breathwork sessions. This was the first time I became aware of the possibility of “spiritual healing”. Until then, I had always thought of them as separate and unrelated: if you wanted spirituality, you meditated or went to church or the local dharma center; if you got sick, you went to the doctor.
• So now I work with healing on all levels: physical, emotional, mental, psychological, and spiritual. My clients have had successful outcomes with everything from bad relationships to cancer.
• My primary spiritual influences were Jesus, A Course in Miracles, Babaji, Leonard Orr, Joel Goldsmith, Karma Kagyu Tibetan Buddhism, Bubba Free John, Agni Yoga, Imitation of Christ, and Eckhart Tolle, as well as a hodgepodge of various other non-duality teachings and teachers in a supplemental fashion.
• When I related to Lama Norlha how Jesus had told me it would be good for me to learn meditation at Kagyu Thubten Choling, he said, “Wonderful! You already have your Yidam!” I studied with him for over 3 years, receiving empowerments and initiations, and an audience with the 16th Karmapa. I co-founded a satellite dharma center in Virginia.
• I spent 5+ years with Leonard Orr, eventually becoming his Lead Trainer and Executive Director of Rebirth International, the worldwide center for Breathwork, training Breathworkers from around the world.
• I received Sacred Breath, a modification of Rebirthing-Breathwork, from Archangel Gabriel, (who is female, btw) who physically appeared and gave me my first Sacred Breath session. During that session, I experienced a oneness of consciousness which began the dissolution of ego. Over the next year, I continually saw the unreality of separation on a case by case basis until one day, it all just fell away and I awakened in the dream.
• Which is why the subtitle of this website is “A Gateway to Freedom”.
• Since by now you may be thinking I’m a delusional woowoo, it might help to know I’m a mensa member and used to run nuclear reactors.
• If you’re worried that I’m a bit too “Christian” for your tastes, it might help to know that I was always more interested in what Jesus actually taught, rather than the religion about him, and that my path has taken me beyond religion and even spiritual beliefs, to a place where mystical experiences of Jesus and Gabriel have been recognized as manifestations of the one consciousness in forms that were comforting and appropriate to me at the time.
• I have been doing this work professionally for some 30 years now.
• If you work with me, you might get a “regular” Rebirthing-Breathwork session or you might get a Sacred Breath session, or you might get regular Rebirthing-Breathwork sessions at first and then a Sacred Breath session when you’re ready. I never know until it happens.
• Probably worth mentioning here that even a “regular” Rebirthing-Breathwork session is awesome; often the most powerful energetic initiation most people have ever experienced.
• Probably also worth mentioning that my approach to the work has evolved quite a bit over 30 years. I used to try to impart to the client an intellectual understanding of the process and then initiate the energy, let it do its work, and debrief and discuss after. Now I’ve realized it’s more fruitful to keep the intellect out of it and focus more on assisting the client to work directly and skillfully with the energy, in a non-intellectual, non-conceptual way. This makes my sessions fairly unique.

• I live on a Caribbean Island with my wife of many years.
• Lastly, my hallucination is that the somatic aspects of this work may be of benefit to those transitioning from awakening to enlightenment, that is, embodying the awakened perspective and replacing the arid head space mental intellectualism of “no longer suffering” awakening with the heart space joy and passion of enlightenment. And laughter.

If you don’t know that much about Breathwork and wonder if you would benefit from it, first off you should know that anyone with a belly button will benefit from Breathwork, and second, here is an older article, a little dated now, about the benefits of Breathwork, with references to third party sources like “Yoga Journal” and “MindBodyGreen”:

https://sacredbreathfreedom.com/about-sacred-breath/

So I hope this was helpful and if it resonates and you feel drawn to work with me, as a spiritual friend, who helps you to see clearly your own perfection, and not as some kind of “Guru” who “fixes” you, then feel free to use the “Contact Us” tab at the top. Thanks!