Breathing can be the key to unlock old traumas

What if you could access your unconscious and re-program your traumas?

Would you like to go through it and get a fresh start for unresolved business?

Well, according to some therapists, breathing can be the way. The only way, I may say.

Anthony Dunkley, founder of “Alchemy of Breath”, gave us an interview to clarify some crucial aspects of this practice which is quickly gaining more adepts all around the world.

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1. What is the "Alchemy of Breath" and what is its purpose?

The Alchemy of Breath is a brand, but it’s more a belief and hope for humanity. When we look at the sickness in the world, on the world stage, we see the violence and the dysfunction of humanity being played out. The Alchemy of Breath is a belief that by turning inside ourselves as individuals and tending to our own inner ecology, psychology, spirit, heart, and body, that we tend to our own healing process. As result of that we become the truest version of who we are. 

So, what we are seeing are practitioners of the Alchemy of Breath draw large crowds of people who come to breathwork to do exactly that; to use the breath as a way forwards for connecting body and spirit, the psyche and the spirit and for aligning them all together, so, the sub-conscious, the conscious and the super-conscience are aligned. When this happens, this is where miracles live, miracles of awareness, but physical miracles. Now, outside the experience of the Alchemy of Breath we call them miracles, but inside the experience we understand that when we breathe we are actually going home, embracing a new modal, so the purpose of this practice is to become who we are, less protected by our fears and more loving to ourselves, more compassionate to ourselves and to those around us.  And now a lot of other things that it does too, you know, it makes us healthier, it oxygenates us, it makes us more alert, more present, happier, more grateful, more appreciative of the tenderness of the human heart.

2. What kind of techniques do you use in the “Alchemy of Breath”?

Well, we advocate all techniques, we think that anything that make us more aware of our breath is a good thing. So, although in our introductory session we breathe through the mouth with a circular, connected breath. That’s the one we use the most because it’s the quickest way for people to understand how powerful the breath can be. It takes only 10 or 11 breaths to realise that something is different! 

At first, it’s not comfortable, it’s even a little disturbing. But, of course, if we’re going to leave the comfort zone of the cocoon that we’ve built for ourselves, it means becoming uncomfortable! But it also leads to a greater realm of awareness. 

There are other breath types that we use; to calm the system, lower blood pressure, to increase heart rate variability (HRV), which is the response of the heart to relaxation or activity; for anger management, anxiety, stress, purging out the system, preparing for an athletic performance or the exertion of physical energy. 

There is breath that can be used for treating asthma, and another that is for raising the immune system. 

Some breathworkers may claim: “Mine is the best”, but we believe they are all good. We recommend our students to go study all types they can! 

Some of these practices come from thousands of years ago from the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian tradition. I’ve had experience with chants in Brazil, in the Amazon, always using breath - to be able to sing you have to be very conscious of your breath. This goes back to thousands of years as a practice.   

3. How can those techniques help people to get awareness?

Imagine a piece of string laying on the table in front of you. At one end you put “body”, which is this thing we live in, and at the opposite extreme of the string you put Spirit, or “total awareness”. Our body, on the left is dense, so dense that you can see it. Spirit, at the other end, is “total awareness”, the most subtle form of energy that exists. In our society we have practices, ways of reaching spirit, ways of devotion, worship, prayer and so on. 

What happens when we breath is (the word “inspire” means ‘to bring in spirit’), it’s like taking that piece of string and joining the two opposite ends.

What was far apart (body and spirit) it is now unified and, at this point the circuitry moves again. If you believe the world is dualistic: left and right, hot and cold, up and down, fat and thin, happy and unhappy, hate and love, we are always somewhere on this continuum between two poles. This is the human experience of duality. 

But when we join these two opposites together the circuitry can bd restored. All of a sudden a huge amount of data can travel, things that have been stuck in the body or in the mind like attitudes, opinions, points of view, feelings which have been stuck in the body or compressed by traumatic incidents such as accidents, abuse or the birth process itself, they can all begin to shift and to move, they don’t have to be stuck anymore. 

That’s why looks like a miracle from the outside, because its so sudden, this new understanding. This is the practice of awareness. We suddenly become more aware of things we have forgotten or pushed away. Sometimes during a breath session, some people are visited by dead ancestors or relatives, sometimes they see themselves living another life or feel penetrated by God, even in a sexual sense I’ve seen that happen, women felt they were made love to by God himself. 

These might seem fantastical things, but actually, the more we stay in the breath, the more we inhabit this level of awareness that allows us to view the world differently. 

So, would I rather become increasingly engaged with what is going on between North Korea and the president of the USA, or could it be more productive to tend to my own ‘inner garden’, in which sits the spring of eternal wisdom? 

The more I do this work, the more people are attracted to me for being true to my inner self. They in turn, as they develop their own practice, will experience the same thing. They also become surrounded by people who are attracted to authenticity in a phoney world. Our breath family is already growing by over 500 people a week! We hope that in a year or two that will be three or four thousand in a week.  This is not about religion, or about handing over my connection to spirit to a priest, but taking responsibility for it myself, and as a result changing my world from inside out. 

4. How is a breath session? What are people supposed to feel over it?

There are sensations on every level, physical, psychological, and spiritual. One of the first feelings that we get when we start an Alchemy of Breath session - and a lot of people say this - is “I don’t know if I really wanna do this!” There can be resistance and it’s kind of interesting because when we feel resistance, we think there is something wrong, it is something negative that we need to push away. But what we say in the Alchemy of Breath is: “Good, feel the resistance! Feel it, allow yourself to feel it! And breath at the same time, keep breathing!” Our purpose is tolerant to fee and breathe at the same time. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is, but it is also challenging. 

You may feel initially a dryness on your throat because you are not used to breathing through your mouth, but if keep with it your throat will begin to lubricate, it will learn to lubricate, so it actually pauses. The first few times, I had my bottle of water next to me, I was thinking: “I’ll be all right I’ve got my water”, but I never even drank it because it just interrupts and you want to stay doing what you are doing. So, that’s the first physical sensation and then, sometimes we get a tightness of the skin, it pulls back a little bit about the face, or you might feel tingling around the face or somewhere in the body, and you may notice that sometimes your fingers will curl and go into a claw like position. This is called tetany, caused because of the carbo dioxide level in your blood in lowering as you raise your oxygen level. The more you bring in the oxygen by breathing, the more the carbon dioxide level decreases, and, of course, when you come back from the session everything goes back to normal. 

Sometimes it can be painful, sometimes it can hurt the fingers or the hands. I’ve seen even people’s whole body stiffen. What we want to know is what the body has to say. My partner who is naturopath says, one of her quotes that I use is that: “God uses your body to talk to you and if we learn how to listen to your body, we can get a tremendous amount of information in there”, 

The body is an archive. Our body archive contains a record of every single experience we’ve ever had in our lives, not just the brain but the body too, especially traumatic ones. Traumatic memories are stored in our body and eventually they can become chronic illness or disease. The reason these traumas get lodged in our body is because we stop breathing when we are traumatized. 

When we breathe into the body sensation we are balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. This allows the completion of the healing of old trauma. Actually in the medical world if you have an accident or something, your body wants to shake or to move, they will probably give you something to stop that because there are fearful that you may haemorrhage, you may break a bone, you may do more damage to yourself. But now we know that after a trauma the body wants to have this involuntary shaking and trembling because so it can discharge the trauma. So, if we are going to learn to listen to our body, we can understand that there are somethings that the body wants to shout to us - like the obvious pain we have, the headache, the migraines, the backaches, that’s what the body is doing, it’s shouting to us saying: “Hey, you’re not taking care of me, you need to listen to me more carefully in order to take care of me”. 

But there are more subtle messages too, that don’t shout, they whisper. The Alchemy of Breath is about developing the capability to listen to the whisper and to use questions, so we can understand what it is the body wants to tell us. If we learnt listen more effectively, then the body doesn’t need to shout anymore to get our attention.

The questions we would use, for example, if you were breathing and you had your hands on the claw position, I would say: “If there was something that you need to let go of in your life what might that be?” Or “if your body had a message for you to receive right now, what might that be?” 

We use this specific type of questioning that opens the mind into unconditional inquiry. We need to fool the left brain which wants to say: “oh, yeah, I now thats happening, that’s because I fell over and I bruised myself and I hurt my leg”. But if we are gonna listen to what the body wants to say we have to use all of our brain, not just what we already know. We need to stretch our awareness, create more alertness and aptitude to process the information. 

This way we can get different answers, we can begin to understand that the tightness in my belly might be because I was hit at some point in my life, all I need to do is breathe. II don’t have to remember the details, I can just bring the breath back to where was that I lost it and, so, this is the great healing of breathwork, we are re-joining the breath, we are bringing it back to where we left it behind. Does that make sense?

5. Does awareness help people to improve the accuracy of their felt senses?

It does, it enlarges your felt sense and what I mean when I say that is “where am I in all of this that surrounds me”? Our self-awareness grows. 

So, when you were talking to me, asking me the question you said: “It’s an extra question”, and a part of me, my ‘little boy’ (inner child) says: “Oh, God, what if I don’t know the answer”. II know he is in my tummy because that’s where he suffered most as a little boy. I can understand exactly from where that’s coming from in me and I can answer you that way, I can say: “That makes my inner child feel nervous because he might not know what to say”. 

Of course, I have an adult mind too and I’ve talked so much about the Alchemy of Breath which is my passion in life. I love questions and you can give me as many as you like, I’ll stay on here for 24h and talk about it! But what I can do as a result of my practice is know where I am truthfully in relation to what’s going on around me. Because everything around me makes me feel things, I have feelings about that and if I can go back from where my feelings come from and react towards the world from that place, surely, I am being more authentic. So, I am not going to pretend that I am the body builder, I can muscle my way through this, I am not going to pretend that I am the guru and I know more than you, so, you are less of a person that I am. I am not gonna pretend, I get to be me. And the more that I do that, the more I understand that I am good enough. I don’t have to pretend to be anything other than who I am. And that’s one of the things that happens when you maintain a breathing practice, you begin to accept yourself, love yourself, increase the compassion that we so desperately need in the world.       

6. How does happen the releasing of traumas through breathing?

Well, it’s a great question and a very important one. Breath and trauma. It brings about the quickest healing moment, if we can marry the breath back with the trauma. I said before that one of the things that happens when we are traumatized is that we lose the breath - and the movement too - we freeze. That’s the freeze fight or flight syndrome. We go into fighting back or we run away and that’s when the trauma gets embedded in the body. 

How does the breath actually work with trauma? Know this, breath is the only symptom that I know of that you can manipulate and have a reverse effect on the cause, the initial cause. If you look at something like a pimple or a boil on your skin, we put creams on it, we go to the doctors, to the dermatologist or whatever it might be. Yet the symptom is actually showing something inside the body wants to come out. It’s not the pimple itself that’s the problem, it’s just the messenger!  Creams and potions may make the pimple go away, but they don’t address the cause of the pimple that lies underneath. 

Here’s an example. When you are stressed, you breathe a much shorter breath. You may even pant.  But truth is, if you breathe a long slow breath, you can’t stay stressed. 

Trauma is an extreme example of stress. You actually stop breathing. Likewise if you bring the breath back to it you will heal the trauma. AsI said earlier, this happens because the breath is activating the parasympathetic system and making it harmonize with the sympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is the part of our bodily function that we don’t have to think about, it happens all the time.  The sympathetic nervous system is the one that can directly control. 

Breath is the only bodily function that you can make happen consciously. You can actually choose to make it happen, and so, as a result when we lend awareness to it we can bring about this balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic. This is immediately healing.

7. How do people know their traumas were released, once you are a practitioner?

I’m not sure all of the trauma is released. We don’t yet know how to measure it. We are only just beginning to understand in the world of psychology and psychiatry how huge the subject “trauma” is. This is a new dawn of discovery. We’ve opened the door to an enormous territory that we know little about yet. 

Because trauma in the past has never been seen as the issue, the issue in the past has been the behaviour that occurs as a result of trauma. When you look at the statistics you get an idea. They say that 90% of child abusers were abused as children themselves. Truth is, when we are a victim of abuse, unless we are able to become the master of our victimhood, we are more likely to hurt someone else - because we have not resolved what happened to us. 

Here’s an exampe: You go out in your car in the morning and you find your window is broken, your stereo and your laptop has been taken. Argh!. You drive away with the window down and you’re angry with the world! It’s like unfair, “I’m wounded, I’m hurt!.” There is someone in front of you, you can’t see, there is a woman driving, the lights turn green and she’s in front of you and she’s not moving and you get angry and you start to honk and say: “Come on already! I’m late, my stuff has been stolen, come on! Get out of my way! Move, move!”. Of course, your impatience is born from your victimhood because you have been wounded, been hurt. But this poor old lady is just an old lady driving her car and she’s slower than you and she’s innocent. Now someone shouts at her and honks at her as to overtake her, and she gets damaged too! So, we do this, this is what we do in the world! We keep passing it on and making it worse for the next person. 

One thing recently discovered about trauma is that when your old trauma gets triggered or activated - say you are sexually abused and a man shows you abusive behaviour as an adult - it actually compounds the original trauma, it makes it worse. Previously it was believed that as we were exposed to the ‘triggers’ we got more accustomed to them, and there was less effect on the psyche. But no, it actually makes it worse. 

When you think about it all of humanity is walking around right now in a traumatized state. When you understand their behaviour is dictated by trauma and then you understand why we have presidents and prime-ministers talking in terms of killing thousands of people. This top e of hostility has become normal!  And it’s because they are all traumatized, but too weak to admit it. In fact we are all trying to pretend we are ok, undisturbed by some awful things that happened to us.

So, how do you get rid of trauma? Before you can release it, you need to accept you have it. 

Here’s the good news, if you breathe you don’t need to remember any of it. You can trust the body knows what it’s doing. There is a great book written by a man called Bessel Van de Kock and it’s called “The Body knows the Score”. His work has advanced our understanding of trauma tremendously.

You actually know trauma is being healed by noticing what is different. One of the traps of the traumas are cyclic thoughts, the thoughts that go round and round. You keep chewing on the same realities because you are in the same box. Breathwork lifts the lid on the box, you get to look at what is outside your “normal” box of awareness. 

We live in boxes, we drive in boxes, we give gifts in boxes, think in boxes, and now we get to step outside that box. One of the quickest ways out of the box you live in what is to notice what is different. If you make a choice: “I want to notice what is different”, it will start happening, a bit like deciding to remember your creams, and then all of a sudden you can. 

When you begin to notice what is different, you have an avenue to follow that takes you into another place.  Thats what we do with breathwork, because as we begin to bring in the oxygen, when we oxygenate the blood stream and we bring in more spiritual and psychological awareness, we do notice differently. I guess we then get to ask the question: “If I am noticing differently, does it mean that it was there all the time and I just didn’t notice it before?” The answer is probably yes!

8. Which is the most powerful breath technique in your opinion? Why?

Power is an interesting term and a relative one. One of the most powerful techniques of breathwork that I know is the “Holotropic Breathwork”, which was pioneered in the 1960’s by Stanislav Grof. He was engaged by the US government to do research with LSD, with acid, and then later he continued his research with the breath in order to create altered states of awareness. His breath practice still exists today, there’s a Holotropic breath work movement that still exists today, in fact Stanislav is a delightful man and will be, I sure, remembered as one of the most significant psychiatrists in the last century, if not this one. He has introduced the concept of breathing to the word of conventional psychiatry as a result of his extensive research over almost six decades. Holotropic breath work is similar to the connected breath we use, through the mouth, although the exhale is a little bit more forced and inhale is more natural. We focus more on the inhale and let the exhale ‘fall away’. 

“Holotropic Breathwork” can be quite a dramatic experience, I would say a more yang experience, more forceful experience than the Alchemy of Breath. The session lasts longer, up to two, or even two and a half hours. 

I can’t say it’s stronger because in my experience, as I said initially, powerful is a relative word. You can break a rock with a hammer, but the rain can wear down a rock too. One is very forceful and the other is very gentle. So, I’ve chosen the breath pattern that we use because it’s more Yin, but my experience says the power of the experience can be just as strong. 

I love “holotropic breathwork” and we incorporate some aspects of it in our own work - we are very careful about what music we chose, we actually take a step further as we use binaural bits for our sessions which is a subliminal vibration, that harmonizes the mind with the frequency of the universe, the cosmos or other frequencies that we play with for healing. This is a fundamental of sound healing or sound medicine.  There are a lot of other things I like about Holotropic breath like drawing something at the end of a session. iThis can be more meaningful than simply writing notes, as each time you look at it in the future it may speak to you differently. It is less ‘literal’. I use both writing and drawing as. Believe the combination offers the most to the breather.      

   

9. For how long have you been doing the free webinar? How has it started?

This webinar story is incredible to me, I’m as surprised as anybody! It started because of the Bali Spirit Festival, where I initiated breathwork. As then organiser I wanted to introduce many different types of breathwork, and invited different teachers form all over the world. This was the first time the public could experiment with different techniques. One time I thought: “I want to try interview all of us and broadcast it over the Internet”, and it was, I think, three years ago. When I saw the screen with 75 people watching I was intrigued. The feedback was fantastic. It was a big, complicated thing to do, with cameras, microphones, lighting - a very, very complicated thing to do! But it worked, and I always knew that in some way or another, the internet would be crucial here. 

When I started teaching practitioners, we have teacher trainings, and I used the internet. I found out that the course work that I’ve designed for the teacher training is even more powerful on the Internet. It’s more powerful because you breathe in your own space, but you have the energy of the group that is supporting you. Something magical happens. I really didn’t really expect it to be so powerful. I opened it up to the public, and now have students from all over the world connected with each other at the same time.  Its quite extraordinary. We have now completed out first year and over 4000 people have breathed with us this way. People have kept coming back after every session and saying things like: “Oh, I could feel Rosa in her breath session and I am in Greece and she’s in Australia” and someone would say something after the session: “I’m convinced I’ve saw the statue and it had a light coming out of it”,  and someone  in another country would say: “Oh, my God, I saw exactly the same thing!” Many say that their lives have completely changes as a result of this work overt the internet. 

I began to understand that the Internet is a paradox, it gives us a curious access to intimacy that we couldn’t achieve in any other way. And to be fair, it also denies intimacy, you know, people would spend all their time on their device looking at Facebook instead of making love, or being with their beloved or eating with their children, or whatever it might be. 

But if we use it responsibly, what could we actually accomplish?   

10. 10.What should people do if they are interested in taking part in the webinar?

They simply need to go to our website www.alchemyofbreath.com, and they will see on the top line of the menu the link which says “webinars”, just click on it. It’s free to join, you can come to as many as you like. At the end of each webinar we put people into break-out rooms so they get to meet each other.

People from different countries get to say hello and to start new friendships and relationships. I think one of the most beautiful things about this is that there is no need to pretend, this is about really honouring who we are in the deepest sense and we get to meet other people from that same place.

How special that is, how wonderful is to feel that we belong and can be vulnerable and strong at the same time!

11. Would like to do any other consideration?

Well, there are videos on my website again, there are videos people can watch about the breath and ideas and things to do and if people want to start their own practice. There is also a selection of audio files they can download for long breathwork, short ones, relaxing breaths, invigorating breaths, there are six or seven up there and many more to come.  Please, go and have a look, and also, we are regularly doing online live sources, such as The Hero’s Journey, a guided journey to help people grow to three fullest potential. It is a really exciting work, and it’s spreading fast.