Breathing into Consciousness with Clarity Breathwork

Tell me a little about how you came to breathwork?

I became involved with breath work in 1993. I met Sondra Ray. She is called the mother of rebirthing. When I met her it was a huge catalyst in my life. I then became a trainer, and then really developed the curriculum and ways to teach it. Dana Delong is my partner, originally one of my trainers, and then I eventually became a co-founder of the work we do now. In 1999 we trademarked the name Clarity Breathwork.

Why is the breath so important?

To me breath is life, and in many languages the word for breath is the same as the word for spirit. It’s a direct connection to our spirit nature. Many of us were disconnected from the breath right at birth, because after world war two they cut the umbilical cord right away. For many of us the first experience was to be hung upside down and not be able to breathe, the greatest mammalian terror. Welcome to life!
Many of us have had interference to our natural breathing. We hold our breath, hold things in. In breathwork, when we start breathing we start coming alive. All the kinks that were in the system - the body, mind, spirit, emotions - they start unkinking. And we start to come online. I have to say it’s extraordinary and miraculous, because you never know what is going to happen in a breath session. And we have groups of people lay down and unbelievable miracles happen and they are just breathing. Breath is consciousness.

What is different with Clarity Breathwork?

We have made it much more gentle. Dana and I have designed it over the last 16 years so that it doesn’t have to be as cathartic or intense. In fact, the more gentle the more integration we experience. The cathartic model is much more intense with the strong release and then you feel “high”. But it didn’t necessarily change anything. What we want to go for is a fundamental shift in your organism, in your being - towards integration. We want to go for full embodiment. How can we show up fully present in these bodies and meet all the emotional material that has been incomplete in our systems, and allow it to complete so we can come into real wholeness. I like to see that we are helping to clear the trajectory of how we came into the body of wounding or stuckness. There are may preconceived misconceptions. There is material from conception, time in the womb, birth & delivery and everything after that! There are so many places where we can become stuck, frozen and dissociate, places that we are not even aware of. So we are not fully online, fully present, in fact we are trying to escape.
With Clarity Breathwork, we are looking at how we can unravel and release those places, come fully alive and aligned with our higher purpose of being, and give the incredible gift as a soul that we came in to give.

Is breathwork totally safe?

The safety is really crucial. I think that is a big part of the work for Dana and I - that we create a space with a lot of safety, love, care and devotion. Surrender to allowing something greater than us to work through us. We bring a lot of prayer into our work, and chanting mantras with sacred music played by Dana, who is an incredible musician & artist. We chant five-thousand year old mantras and that really elevate the vibration of the room. I channel these meditations that expand consciousness and bring in beautiful helping energies. We do a lot of dance and movement, and to me, it is a full body prayer. Praying with our whole body while we’re dancing. And then we do a process and we lay down and breathe. The group field is awesome. In the group you have a magnified, amplified field. We are truly transforming together.