Articles: Breath--The Third Dimension of Touch
by David LautersteinBreath and the Coming of Age of Energywork
In the last 20 years there has been more progress made in the realm of touch than at any other time in history. This is a phenomenal cultural and evolutionary event. The proliferation of modalities arising from new theories and practices is ecstatic and bewildering - like the sudden profusion of a thousand flowers.
The predominant strain in the therapeutic garden over the last 10 years has been linked to our anatomical coming of age. NMT, Sports Massage, Deep Tissue, Myofascial Release, Trigger Point work - these and other approaches have owed popularity to their skill and their frequent brilliance of applying anatomical knowledge Many therapists are now competent, even expert in their ability to understand and respond to the needs of human structure.
The strength of structural approaches is they have allowed us to put our work on a solid scientific footing. This enables us to help our clients more effectively. The limit is that people are far more than structure - they are also energetic, feeling, thinking, spirited beings. A strictly structural approach is therefore not very effective in relieving tensions which may arise from feelings, thoughts, and restricted energy flows. That is to say anytime we imagine we are working just on "tissues", we have dehumanized the person.
I believe we are now seeing and participating in a new and appropriate phase of our proliferation - one which will be perhaps even more exciting and fruitful than our anatomical coming of age. This is the conscious development of knowledge and skill with regard to the energetic aspect of bodywork. For, in our world, needs deeper than structural are crying out to be appropriately met.
Until recently our culture has mostly defined progress in terms of structure, technique, "know-how" - the software of intellectual understanding, the hardware of trains, airplanes, computers, etc. But, because technology has been over-emphasized for so long, we have reached the point where the ever more desperate need is to address the unanswered question - how shall we live? How can we optimize our healthy relation to ourselves and the nature of which we are a part?
That is why we are seeing in the last 20 years more progress in the realm of touch than at any other time in history. Touch is unconsciously realized as a bearer of answers to fundamental questions humanity must now answer if we are to survive and hopefully thrive. Touch therapy heightens physical experience, helps us attain a new emotional balance, vitalizes the spirit, as well as inspiring new thoughts on the appropriate relation of nature, mind, emotion, body and spirit. The reason that history at this time has provided us with this incredible momentum is that sophisticated touch therapy is helping us evolve with our whole beings, not just technologically. Were this opportunity to be diluted into massage as a structural medical modality this would be a tragedy of historical proportions.
Let us enthusiastically accept our new good luck - to evolve new ways of being in touch with ourselves and the world.
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An enlightened experience of being-in-touch recognizes the way we are connected subjectively and objectively. Even though touch takes place in space, it has many more dimensions than just those of geometric space. Refined qualities of touch also convey new worlds of sensation, feeling, intuition and insight. Each dimension of touch has a structural and energetic aspect.
When we initially touch the body, establishing a one-dimensional point of contact, where and how we lay our hands can convey radically new ways to meet each other with compassion, curiosity and courage. Where and how we move within the body, establishing two-dimensional planes of movement, can illuminate how we're structured and enhance energy flows throughout the pathways of our being.
The Source Of Our Work Is Not Our Hands
The third dimension of bodywork arises from the miracle of breath. The life-defining expansion and contraction of breath fuels and refreshes every cell in the body. Each time we heighten our capacity to breathe - through our therapeutic impact on the nervous, the endocrine systems, the muscles and fascia which define the excursion of our lungs, and all other bodily tissues - we facilitate more oxygen delivery, and a higher quality of life for every single cell in the body.
This is energy work! We don't need to get esoteric to understand energy work. Let us rescue energy work from the obscurity of some of its devotees. Every enlivening breath helps open us up to greater life, greater vitality.
Each exhale lets go of unneeded metabolic and energetic wastes - emotional tensions, old patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior. As we exhale carbon dioxide is made available to the plant kingdom. Trees can be seen in their structure and energetic role as being the lungs of the earth. We animals, with the tree-like structures of our bronchioles, participate in the grandeur of planetary gas exchange. It is easy to overlook the profundity of breath as an energy source. We breath an average of 20,000 breaths each day. Let us compare this frequency to our need for food or drink. Every book on nutrition should start with a chapter on breath!
We are used to thinking that we do bodywork with our hands. This is not deeply true. It is true our hands are the structures we most commonly use to contact the body with. But the hands are not a fundamental source of our energy. We do not fundamentally get energy from our hands. On the other "hand", we get a tremendous amount of our energy from breathing. Energy flows from the breath into our hands. From an energetic standpoint, breath is the fundamental energy source of our work. To teach about breath as a part of good "body mechanics" misses the deeper point. Hands are structural tools for our work. However, let us remember, breath is the fundamental energetic tool of bodywork.
Breath as Autonomic Modulator
Wholistic bodywork leaves nothing out. Since people aren't actually divided into parts, we can not but work the whole. We work with body, emotions, mind and spirit. Breath is one of the primary access points to spirit. Unlike the heartbeat, for example, which is fundamental but not under the control of the conscious mind, with the breath we are given the unique opportunity of conscious control of one of the deepest actions within ourselves. Through conscious breathing we can modulate the autonomic nervous system - we can fine tune our spirit through breath.
Breath, while personal, is not experienced in the realm of ego. It is deep inside us but not of us. When we breathe, we take in from the outside and give out to the outside. In many ways the experience of breath is simply and profoundly of a life-giving movement of air through us. Therefore, so many meditation techniques instruct us to focus on the breath. To the extent that we place our awareness in breath we move beyond ego. Living beyond narrow self-centeredness is a central theme within all religions and spiritual disciplines.
Breath then is an avenue to autonomic self-modulation and a direct access way to the spiritual. For the therapist wanting to bring their spirit fully into their work, we bring ourselves into a honored, conscious awareness of breath before we begin each session. And this intimacy, this staying in touch with our own spirit continues throughout the session as we continue to breathe easily and fully.
The Experience of Three-Dimensionality
Most people experience themselves as having only two dimensions, a front and a back, that have height and width. They know they have a front because they see it in the mirror. They know they have a back because it hurts sometimes. Another structure which has basically a front and a back is a piece of paper. Most people experience themselves in their self-image as having no more depth than a piece of paper. The self-imaging of their body structure as two-dimensional is itself a source of dis-ease. Firstly the image is out of the synch with the reality, which is at least three dimensional. Secondly, on an energetic level, if we do not feel depth within ourselves, we experience a diminished capacity for emotion which requires a sense of spaciousness, internal room to move. In an experientially two-dimensional world, the organs themselves do not have enough room to function optimally.
The key to therapist and client experiencing their depths is breath. For breath, with its nearly ceaseless in and out flowing, is the most dramatic experience we have of three-dimensionality . We feel, when we slow down, the three dimensional tidal movement of inhaling and becoming larger, feeling our borders widen, broaden and deepen. We feel on the exhale the air outrush and all our boundaries easing in toward center. It is even through this three-dimensional pulsation that we sense our aliveness. The three dimensional waving and pulsation that breath ever presents to us, accompanied by the heart waves/pulsation, is the primary way we know we're alive.
As therapists then it is imperative that we fully inhabit our three dimensionality and pulsation through a conscious and enthusiastic relationship with breathing. Firstly we energize ourselves through the effects of heightened cellular respiration. Secondly we let go of held tension in our bodies, so that we can move more effectively and impart a tone of ease to the session. Thirdly we then set a therapeutic example for the client. Your breath as a therapist gives permission, your blessing to the breathing aliveness of your client. Watch them virtually inhale your permission to inhabit their living three-dimensionality, communicated purely by your breathing.
Hold your breath and touch yourself. Notice what is lacking. In various ways, a touch without sufficient breath feels unalive. Unmoving, not waving, not caring - there is a sense of waiting. Without breath we really haven¹t begun. Just as in the birth process, we await joyfully and with expectation the first breath. And when it starts, oh my, the waves of new life which begin! Grounds for rejoicing! We feel care, presence, a promise and spontaneity of relationship.
We don¹t and can¹t touch with just a part of ourselves because we are not divided. We touch with all of us. And a fundamental aspect of this wholly touching is the breathing, the re-inspiration and the letting go with ex-spiration of our beings that takes place within a conscious breathing atmosphere. We see how fundamentally therapy is breath touching breath.
Palpation with Air
Too often we imagine that the client's restrictions are things we have to remove. We can fall into an earth-mover/bodyworker approach, plowing through the fields of flesh attempting to re-route the fascia. Structural work tends naturally to emphasize this way of working. But imagining the body as a fascial substance which we need to remodel gives rise to unnecessary struggles within and between the therapist and the client.
Let us remember then that first of all we're mostly water. Secondly, that water itself is mostly empty space. The ratio of empty space to matter in an atom is the same as the ratio of empty space to stars in the universe. The most visible experience we have of this open space is through breath, through the experience that air is in a fundamental sense what we are. Empty space inside us constitutes our reality more deeply than the blip on the mind screen which is our conscious ego.
Through the air element we become vastly more conscious of the open space inside us. The way to communicate this feeling and essential insight to your client is to breathe freely. Then touch with the imagery that you are both breath. Breath touching breath. When we breathe freely, palpate with the imagery of touching air, and thus heighten the client's perception of their own waving aliveness, then we are working in a manner which is both structurally more accurate and energetically more connected.
Your hands energetically and structurally modify the fundamental energy of breath, in much the same manner as do your mouth, teeth and tongue shape the air column of breath into speaking sounds and song. We shape the energy of breath with our hands, in same manner as the vocal apparatus shapes the air column in song. In Hindu philosophy sacred shapings of the hands are known as mudras. We can see each beautiful shape the hand makes of the breath in energetic touch as a healing mudra.
When we touch with the air element, our touch is penetrative. But it is penetrative not in the way one drills into earth. It is penetrative the way new weather, new air flows into a region. Breathing we bring fresh air into our situation. Bring air into your touch. Use air to penetrate without effort. And use your hands to shape and direct this energy as beautifully and powerfully as the singer shapes each moment of their singing. As the great poet savors the sound and profound meaning of each word. With this spiritual and aesthetic attention the client will find him or herself changing naturally and almost effortlessly.
This way of working can remind one of Gandhi's term for his manner of encouraging political change - "Satyagraha" - meaning soul force (often translated as non-violence). What a privilege it is to approach the body with soul force! So often the tensions we find are those created by the structural and energetic violence committed against us and by us. The soul force of breath shows us a way to end the violence against our beings, the traces of energetic and physical injuries, that we all hope to heal with this thrilling work of ours.
Window to the Spirit
It is said that the eyes are the window to the soul and certainly this is the case. The intimacy of looking into someone's eyes is a soul-to-soul contact. The joy of gazing eye to eye is a sign of love.
Even more intimate is the contact of breath to breath. This is usually reserved for good friends and lovers. A prolonged hug, sleeping together, watching one's child's or an animal's sleeping breath - these are experiences of the deepest connection.
The therapist feels with their body and sees with their eyes the breathing of the client. From moment to moment it changes - slowing into sleep, breaking its rhythm like a wave when we let out a sigh, breathlessly talking with excited insight, the shaking quality of breath when the client experiences the gently surfacing force of emotion. The breath is a window to the spirit.
Once the therapist is conscious of this, their gaze and their touching are transformed. As in the Creation, as we work, we can see if "it is good". The breath now shows us just how the spirit is being affected. Through it we can track the paths of being the client takes throughout the course of the session.
When we touch breath to breath, sensing the moment to moment shifts of being, both therapist and client are alive fully in the presence of spirit. It is - in the therapeutic sense - an act of love as palpable and real as a song in the open air.
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"Between the conscious and unconscious the mind has put up a swing." Kabir says. A major element of this swing is breath. As we feel the waving of us, the living swells and tides of breath controlled both consciously and unconsciously, we feel pulsation, we know we're alive. Breath reminds us that being alive is a continuous miracle.
The rhythms of living breath inform the rhythms of our hands, our body movements, and synchronize feelings, thoughts, and beings to give rise to a profound bodywork/bodymind experience. And when we participate in this rhythm together we experience life together, the life that we share. Then as we swing with our focus through the vast dimensions of being - the structures, the consciousness, feelings, energy flows, spirit - we know we are not alone. We are all on a great swing. We are ALL ONE WAVING WORLD. The waving that goes on through us reminds us that not only can we not divide ourselves into parts - feelings here, body there - but we can not truly divide the outer world into parts either - air here, fire there - everything is connected and swinging. From a rigorous physics' view of energy the universe is one incredibly complex wave form.
As therapists we are connected with the words of the Laguna Pueblo people -
I add my breath to your breath
that our days may be long on the Earth,
That the days of our people may be long,
that we shall be as one person,
that we may finish our road together.
