Another
Breathing
by Idit Ben-Porath
Did you know that you breathe between 18 and
20 thousand times a day, totaling about 5000 gallons of air? Just to give you
an idea, this is 35 times the amount of food and water we consume per
day. With Carol Lampman, in the breathing workshops, you learn how to
work correctly with this mass. How do you breathe? How do you use your
breath? What does it do to you? Take a breath and read.
"Linshom" (breathe) says Carol Lampman in a heavy American accent,
and the group, stretched out on mats in the working hail of “mivtach” (the
center for health and personal development at kibbutz Yagur), breathes,
and how! “Linshom’ is the first, and may be the only, Hebrew word that Lampman
learned shortly after setting foot in the
Michal Alexander, an Israeli living in the U S A and working as Lampman's
assistant, is responsible for bringing her to
TURNING A QUARREL INTO A CONVERSATION
Lampman teaches
breathing, or in a different perspective, if you wish, she teaches how to love,
to be joyful, how to feel or in one word how to live. It is difficult to
describe her work in words. For five days we breathed, we screamed, we cried,
we laughed , we loved, we hated, we loved again, we laughed again and in
between we learned about Chakras and about layers of armor with which we have
covered ourselves since early childhood and through which we are trying to
sense life. No wonder it does not work. We learnt how to treat a patient
lovingly and how to sit facing one another and how to turn a quarrel into a
conversation that would end in understanding and love.
If there is good
news for me in Lampman's workshop, it is the message that It can be done.
Lampman does not disclose too many details about her past, but she was not
exactly born wrapped in the smiling, flowing and energetic wrapping, with
energy which enables her, sometime around midnight, after approximately 15
hours of work, to work her way through a glass or two of wine and chat until
dawn. She did not, for a moment, seem tired, nervous or under
pressure, despite the group of Israelis chatting in their unclear native
language around her. She did not seem to be bothered by the fact that the
following day was going to be of similar length and intensity, or by the food
in the kibbutz which was not exactly the diet she is used to back in
To sum up five days
of experience, (to be exact, four days, I missed the first day but I stayed for
the fifth even though I did not plan to. It was impossible to leave.), I would
say that the main idea that I learned or absorbed apart from personal,
emotional experiences at various levels, was the personality of Carol, a
personality that one rarely meets, a person who says, I not only teach you how
to do the work, I have also done it myself.
This is also the
condition Carol sets in order to grant her students the authorization to
practice and use the method. The process includes training on one another,
treating people and writing reports, but first of all it consists of
self breathwork for 30 consecutive days. Skipping one day means starting
the counting afresh. We, of course, want know if you stop she says, “but it is
a matter of your integrity towards yourself and above all, it expresses your
commitment towards yourselves, which is the basis of your commitment to
your patients.” Although in this country everybody considers himself smarter then
everybody else, a short survey among the participants in the workshop
showed that the message came through. All those who did the work did it with
the utmost seriousness.
THE CONNECTING ACTION
Why breathing?
Breathing, explains Lampman has a long history of thousands of years as a route
for mental and spiritual development. One of the most ancient yoga books is
Shiva Sutra, a book that teaches how to breathe in order to focus. Pranayama is
the Yogi term for breath work. Prana means energy of life and Yama is
prolongation. The intention is to intensify the energy of life by prolonging
and deepening the breathing. The ancient Yogis were probably the first to
discover the link between breathing and our mental - emotional state.
Another trend which
emphasizes conscious breathing also originates in
Breathing, explains
Lampman, connects our head, body and spirit. It is the mutual interaction
between our internal self and our surrounding environment. When we breathe, we
also absorb into our internal system, apart from physical elements, the reality
around us. On the other hand, when we do not breathe, we physically depress our
emotions by creating an armor of muscles. In time, it becomes a chronic,
automatic state and we loose the ability to experience and to express emotions.
It empties us of our vitality and robs our ability to experience
the positive feelings of love, joy and pleasure.
Breathing is the
essential condition of life, and it is not in vain, adds Lampman. Breathing is
considered the source of energy bestowing upon us life, healing and
purification. When we breathe in a relaxed manner, our metabolism works
better. It affects the synthesis of the proteins, the fats and the
carbohydrates, enhances the creation of cells and helps the immune system
function.
WHERE DOES OUR
Lampman’s
workshop starts with everyone learning to diagnose the form of his own
breathing as well as that of’ the other participants. Some people breathe with
their chests closed, other do not involve the belly in their breathing and
there are those who breathe ‘backwards” from their chests into their bellies
instead of from the belly into their chest. Placing one hand on the chest and
the other hand on the belly, make it possible to immediately define the
person’s breathing pattern. The goal is to achieve circular breathing in which
the inhaling and the exhaling are connected. When you succeed in
doing this without interruption, (Strictly speaking it is rather simple. What
is more complicated is to continue doing it after the workshop is over.), your
breathing not only takes oxygen into the body, but also a flow of energy.
Usually we have a kind of internal thermostat, which determines the amount of
positive energy we can absorb. Whenever we do breathing work, says
Lampman, we slightly increase the level of that thermostat, so that even
after the therapeutic session is over, we continue to take in more positive
energy than before. The positive influence is slow but cumulative, as if we
were making room for more good in our lives.
The workshop starts, as mentioned before, by mutual diagnosis of the
breathing and by checking the flow of energy through the Chakras with a pendulum.
But working according to schedule does not last beyond the first hour of the
morning. During a seemingly neutral exercise, one of the participants is
suddenly thrown into a situation which belongs to a different
planet. She lies on the floor crying. Lampman does not loose control. She sits
next to her, presses here and there and starts a conversation with the patient.
What do you feel? Where in the body is it? What kind of sound does it make?
What does it want? The patient sinks deeply into a state of almost death she
had been m as a result of an accident, and continues from there into early
childhood. Her experiences rush backwards and forwards, they intermingle in no
apparent logical order. Later Lampman will explain the COEX phenomenon, or the compressed
system of experiences, a term coined by Stanislav Grof, one of Reich’s students
and Lampman's teachers. The compressed coil of experiences is a kind of mixture
in which all the traumas we experienced in our lives are connected in a
disorderly way. Touching any of them during therapy will arouse all them and
initiate an upheaval. Emotional relief will reduce the load of energy in one of
them, in some of them or in all of them. Some of them may disappear; some may
stay and reappear until emptied of their energy. It is difficult to
systematically handle one problem in this method, because one thing leads to
and arouses another and even if the problem presented by the patient is money,
he may end up crying on the mat because of a feeling of lack of love in
childhood.
The patient on the
mat slowly calms down. Lampman stays calm and continues to work while
Alexander, her assistant, translates the questions and the answers. It ends in
a catharsis. Lampman warmly hugs the patient, pours into her all the love
that was missing there all the years. A short break to enable the rest of the
participants to breathe. Then we go on according to schedule, which includes,
alternatively, periods of work and periods of frontal lessons covering various
subjects related to breath work: Chakras, emotions, relation cleansing
exercises, etc. Lampman stays calm even when at a later stage one of the
patients goes into a trance and decides to stop breathing. He starts
turning blue, his body stiffens, the participants consider panicking, but
Lampman is familiar with the situation. She calms the participants down and
asks them to start breathing because it helps the patient. “Linshom” she
recruits her one word vocabulary and helps the patient decide to choose life by
energetically pressing and striking his chest. Eventually a big breathing
bursts out, followed once more by a great catharsis.
THE FACES ARE SMOOTHED
At the end of five
such days, none of the participants’ lives is the same as they were upon
arrival. Each of them had gone through at least one extreme experience of
encounter with deep, tough and especially long neglected emotions. Faces
smoothed, wrinkles straightened, all of us looked lighter and smiley. Every one
of us had at least one big cry and one big laugh. We all yelled at each other
as part of an exercise and some of us forgave and made peace. Lampman uses
every conflict that occurs between two participants, even if it is small and
marginal, to demonstrate once more how to create the element she believes in most
- love. Love is one of the three basics turning a person into a therapist.
Second, according to Lampman, comes technique and this is followed by honesty
and reliability. Even if the therapist has a wonderful technique, it will not
work if he cannot bring in with him a lot of love, unconditional love to
himself, to his patient and to life. All the love and the technique in the
world are worthless without personal honesty and reliability which create a
safe space for the patient, in which he will be really ready to breathe out all
the traumas, the pain, the guilt, the shame and the fear, and exchange them for
joy, love and optimism.
Lampman also keeps repeating and emphasizing the importance of the
continuous work the therapist has to do with himself. She explains that all the subjects floating
on to the surface with the patient during breath work arouse elements in
the therapist who breathes with the patient. His own work enables the therapist
to become an empty container and to do his work as an observer without being
involved. ‘When something annoys you, breathe into it. Someone in your
surrounding is out of order, breathe into it. You are frightened of something,
stressed, angry, simply breathe into it.” Lampman reminds us from time to time
during the five days of the workshop.
Even the structure
of the workshop slightly resembles the COEX, a kind of entangled coil of
theoretic studies, preplanned experiencing and unplanned experiencing like when
one of the participants, who has been walking around for five days in a
relatively open and defenseless state, unexpectedly goes into a state. Lampman
not only talks about flowing, she flows with all these events. She has an
amazing ability to remain calm and focused, to announce a pause when she feels
this is correct, and to work until midnight if necessary. She comforts us and
sax’s that the more tired one is, the quicker the defenses “go to sleep” and
the quicker “good” subject matters float to the surface.
Eventually, in a
miraculous way, not only did we all do the work but we also came out of the
workshop with an orderly notebook containing all the issues that are important
for the therapist, homework and a program of work to do until the second stage
workshop which is to take place in February. In April she will be here again
with more workshops for beginners. What started as a rather bizarre visit in a
rather remote country now appears to be a mutual love affair with a lot of
mutual love.
To sum up I read
everything I wrote and I keep asking myself whether I succeeded in explaining
why to breathe, how it works, and the connection between breathing and relief
of emotion, and between these two and living a fuller life, and I am not really
convinced. But I also feel that maybe it is self-explanatory because everyone
who reads and breathes feels the connection. And maybe it does not matter and
maybe the explanation is not really logical. When t returned from the workshop,
and for a long time afterwards, and every time I remember to breathe a little,
I feel it is a kind of magic. Maybe this is what it is all about.
CHAYIM ACHERIM” issue 41
February 2000 pp 34-36