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Breathwork and birth

  
 
gyrus
11:01 / 12.07.06
Alrighty folks. Was invited here just before I went travelling early this year, but now I'm relatively settled (here in green & hilly Bristol) and I can start wasting time on Barbelith. Hurrah!

Now, I just read Stanislav Grof's Psychology of the Future - basically a summary of his life's work. Since reading Realms of the Human Unconscious I've always thought there's a lot in Grof's work. Even if his idea of birth experiences forming the root of psycho-complexes might verge on reductionist sometimes, it's a damn convincing model, and his case histories from his LSD therapy are pretty convincing.

Of course he went on to do breathwork. Someone I know who'd trained in Rebirthing and Vivation synthesized his own approach, and he taught me the basics six years ago. I found it amazing for releasing body energy blocks, and I managed to reach the same state I do when I've had serious panic attacks, but without panicking. I've found a guy doing Rebirthing here in Bristol, and I'm seeing how this goes. So far it's incredibly interesting and useful.

I'm just wondering what anyone else's experiences of this kind of breathwork are, plus thoughts on the negative side of it all. Monica Sjoo had some pretty severe things to say about it all after her son got involved in Rebirthing here in Bristol, and I've been discussing the whole idea that it "blames mothers for everything" with someone via email. Whaddya think?

I also found that Rebirthing founder Leonard Orr's last book is called 'Breaking the Death Habit: The Science of Immortality'. I don't see any necessary reason why breathwork would lead to immortalist wackiness, but many seem to draw a causal link between the two... Seems crazy to me! Any thoughts?
 
 
illmatic
11:34 / 12.07.06
Eey oop Gyrus

Nice to see you here – can I refer you to my essay on the Grand Ddady of the subject? Can’t remember if you came to the talk or not. From what I recall, the dodgy side of rebirthing came from the more cynical new agey money making aspects that attached themselves to it around the eighties (you can see foreshadowings of this in some of the books – there’s a lot of very lightweight but cash heavy affirmation stuff in the Vivation book, and I think Phil Laut wrote one called “Money is your friend”?) . A mate reported going to see some rebirthers in Manchsester in the 80s and getting in trouble with them when he mentioned the prices – apparently and they found him “at cause” that he didn’t have enough money to pay for it. I’ve a Reichain pamphlet from a group in Manchester a few years earlier and the work here is all structured on a free/collaborative group therapy basis. I think both approaches refelect the orientation and overriding concerns of the respective decades.


Can you link to the Monica Sjoo comments?

I'll talk about my own experience in a bit. Basically, as I see it, rebirthing/vivation relies on reframing the bodily tensions, so one experiences them differently while Reich's work relies on dissloving them altogether. In pracice, I'm sure there's much overlap between the two.
 
 
gyrus
12:52 / 12.07.06
Yeah, I was at the Reich talk, great stuff. I am a bit dubious about the wholesale "reframing" of negativity - but also about completely dissolving blocks and armour. There's positive and negative, and anyone trying to skirt around the basic nature of either is avoiding reality - seems pretty basic, no?

In my last session my big focus was on the pulse of my heartbeat as a feeling all through my body. Brought up images of waves crashing on the beach. For me breathwork's about undoing knots in the natural pulse of the body, the rhythms of the heart and breath. And I wonder if "reframing" and "dissolving" might both be part of this? Not really sure yet.

Sjoo quotes... Can't find any on the web. The guy I've been emailing with quotes extensively from her book 'New Age & Armageddon', so with the caveat that these quotes are 2nd-hand, some selections:

"When talking of 'prosperity consciousness', rebirthers teach that the poor are poor simply because they are not capable of receiving. Why is it that the poor are mostly in the Third World amongst non-white peoples? Answer: 'They have lessons to learn in this life-time' and they have brought this upon theselves. Such thinking sits well with the right-wing philosophy of Major, Thatcher, Bush and the white South African rulers to mention but a few."

"By concentrating solely on the individual mind-body-spirit, blame and guilt is thrown back on the individual who is made to think that s/he should be able to heal/himself by mind alone. This takes responsibility away, very conveniently for the rulers, from the obscene and death-dealing structures of imperialism, multinationals, nuclear war industries, coercion of, and violence towards, human beings and the feminisation of poverty..."

Seems like familiar New Age nonsense, views that can crop up in relation to any "technique". Or is there something inherent to certain technical approaches that create certain mindsets? If anything, though, my experience of breathwork seems to take me in exactly the opposite direction than what Sjoo sees in it.

Something more obviously specific to Grof/Rebirthing is the stuff about birth. This is a Sjoo quote from that guy's emails again, so caveats again about possible misquoting...

"Grof does not recognize that fear and confusion in an inexperienced mother, and alienating hospital surroundings, make delivery difficult and, he claims, creates
in the child a combination of libidinal feelings, painful physical sensations and aggression. With typical Christian puritan sentiment he says that confusion in the adult heterosexual male arises from the act the genitals and thighs of the woman are both the place of love and sex as well as 'where the nightmare of birth and filth had happened', the place of 'dangerous evil filled with the power of the witch'. He could not be more unequivocal than this. He writes that hospital birth is remembered vividly in LSD sessions down to the odours of anaesthetics, sounds of surgical instruments, use of forceps, bright lights and uncaring hands. The misogyny of therapists like Grof and of te Rebirthers makes it impossible for them to join hands with women demanding willing motherhood, and end to the oppression of women and the cruelty to women and our new-born babies involved in male-controlled hospital births. Not willing to question their own privileged positions as white males in oppressive societies, they end up blaming mothers."

Now, this seems like literalist wrong-headedness. I don't know about Rebirthing "ideology", but Grof is very far from Sjoo's image of him. Everything he's done points to a call for more humane birth practices. She sees those quotes as "unequivocal", but they're out of context. In context, he's giving expressions to people's experiential perception of certain aspects of "reliving birth" - experiences which also include images of the nurturing mother, ecstasy, joy, etc. So she zeroes in on the phrases that make her think of misogyny and holds them up as evidence.

Grof seems to me to accept that people have these horrific images, but wants them to be accepted and integrated. I wonder if dismissing any mention of horror in relation to birth, on politically right-on feminist grounds, actually serves to repress that aspect of birth even further - and leave it unintegrated, fuelling misogyny.

Makes me think of Kali - one aspect of Kali in relation to the whole Grof model of birth experience would be the threatening aspect of the mother as the baby's expelled. Our culture has blatantly repressed anything Kali-esque - leaving the negative aspects of motherhood to fester in the background and obsess people neurotically. Sjoo was well into Kali, but it doesn't show in her approach to Grof's work. Kali expresses something about motherhood, the dark side - and if she's dressed up to avoid words like "filthy" and "dangerous", she's probably not Kali anymore, eh?

(BTW, don't get me wrong, I love a lot of Sjoo's work - I just think she's dead wrong on this.)
 
 
illmatic
13:16 / 12.07.06
Yyeah, the first quote there is exactly the mentality my friend encountered. I think you can see it in a few of the Vivation books, as I said.

The "natural pulse" of the body is soooo Reichian - Reich said the rediscovery of ogonontic pulsation was the point from which every other piece of his work developed.

Re: Sjoo vs Grof - Might not some of the confusion here come from Sjoo confusing or blurring the distinction between rebirthing/vivation with Grof's work - two schools which (AFAIK) weren't directly connected?

You might find this thread of interest: The Politics of Birthing - there's some interesting links about halfway down first page (posted by Saturns Nod) to empowered Womens' birth stuff.

The second quote reminded me of Kenneth Grant, funnily enough, and there's a letter somewhere in one of the old Kaos mags drawing out the qlipothic aspects of the birth process, stating it's "a tunnel of shit, piss and blood" - this was put forward in a positve way (1) mind, as a response to some kneejerk anti-KG stuff. Will think more on this and post.
 
 
SteppersFan
13:41 / 12.07.06
Hello Gyrus, welcome.

Not done re-birthing, but "intensive breath work" helped get me through attending the births of my children.

Paul
 
 
gyrus
14:03 / 12.07.06
The "natural pulse" of the body is soooo Reichian - Reich said the rediscovery of ogonontic pulsation was the point from which every other piece of his work developed.

Yeah, all my intense experiences in breathwork are to do with pulsing. I once felt like I could feel a kind of "energy body", kind of interspersed with my physical body, but undulating without much respect to the boundary of my skin. Only, it seemed to be "snagged" on areas I had blocks in.

Re: Sjoo vs Grof - Might not some of the confusion here come from Sjoo confusing or blurring the distinction between rebirthing/vivation with Grof's work - two schools which (AFAIK) weren't directly connected?

That's the best explanation I can see - although she seems to be reacting directly to Grof's writings, and the Rebirthing critique seems to be much more to do with the karma / "wealth-consciousness" stuff than attitudes to birth.

Thanks for the birthing thread link - some interesting stuff. The bottom line does seem to be that it's an incredibly intense experience which the woman involved should have the final say in.

The second quote reminded me of Kenneth Grant, funnily enough, and there's a letter somewhere in one of the old Kaos mags drawing out the qlipothic aspects of the birth process, stating it's "a tunnel of shit, piss and blood" - this was put forward in a positve way (1) mind, as a response to some kneejerk anti-KG stuff. Will think more on this and post.

This whole negative aspect, I wonder about people's "reliving birth" experiences. I tend to believe Grof when he says he's had objective facts people have reported from LSD sessions be confirmed by medical records of their birth. On the other hand, obviously the "reliving" isn't a literal replay. It would be bound up with all the attitudes, feelings and so on that have accumulated around that experience since it happened. I think Grof's "COEX systems" model kind of assumes this - that a certain aspect of birth will act like a snowball, gathering related feelings as it rolls through life. So there may be shit, piss and blood in birth, but working through feelings about those is unravelling our culture's attitudes to them as much as any "natural" reactions.
 
 
illmatic
20:57 / 14.07.06
I've had a couple of experiences which may have been related to reliving birth memories. I'll tell you about it offline sometime. I've also had lots of piss/shit/dirt stuff flood up when I was doing lots of work in this area - I think this stuff arose as it's early conditioning and when you start digging around in these "strata" this stuff rises to the top. I can't say this changed me in any way - I've never been that neurotic about bodily functions - but it's interesting - shocking in a lot of ways to find out that this stuff is there.
 
  
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