Soulshaping by Jeff Brown

Author:Jeff Brown [Brown, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55643-950-6
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services
Published: 2010-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Throwing Momma from the Brain

I went home and did one hour of Bioenergetics every morning, but after a few weeks I began to neglect it. It was still very difficult to integrate new ways of being into my home life.

In search of deeper pastures, I signed up for an eight-day retreat with Jack Kornfield and Stanislav Grof called “Insight and Opening,” a combination of Insight Meditation (vipassana) and Holotropic Breathwork.

On the first morning, Kornfield invited us to meditate. I looked around the room and saw members of the group through a bioenergetic lens. I saw armored bodies, trapped vitality, unexpressed sadness and anger. I saw people trying to shift out of their bodies into the safe haven of the mind. Was this meditation, or medication?

With Lowen, I had entered a meditative state only after energizing my body and releasing emotional holdings. Could it happen any other way? Can we really be in the moment if the physical and emotional bodies are tied in knots? Shouldn’t we empty the vessel first?

I stopped judging and tried to meditate. Of course, I couldn’t turn off my own monkey mind: endless past regrets, tireless future-tripping.

I imagine the monkey mind in almost militant form. Boxcar after boxcar of helmeted monkey soldiers stop at our station. They all have the same agenda: to distract us from settling into the moment. Although they would appear to be an enemy of the sacred, this is not really the case. Sentries at the gate to survival, this army of distraction developed to protect us. Focusing on a single point of awareness has been too dangerous for humankind with food to gather, enemies to watch for, perils everywhere.

Unfortunately, the soldier monkey outlives its usefulness. Long after dangers have passed, he still jumps onto our mental screen and distracts us from reality.

On the second morning of this workshop, I touched into my own unexpressed sadness and anger. Now I understood—it was actually me who was the sitting time bomb. Not everyone needed to move their body before they could sit and meditate. I did.

The next day I had my chance. It was the first of two Holotropic Breathwork sessions. I put on my blindfold and intensified my breath. After some time, my inner world felt weightless. I saw a cavern and I entered it. There was a fire up ahead, a fire of essential light. I walked toward it and sat down. Across from me appeared a man. He looked just like me, except his eyes were peaceful. I reached through the fire to touch his hands. We stayed like this for a moment. He felt so familiar.

Then I looked away, hungry for diversion. I wasn’t used to being so alive to myself. I shallowed my breath and fell back to Mother Earth as I knew it. I lay with my eyes blindfolded for a long time, inwardly berating myself. Why couldn’t I stay in the fire longer?

Before the final breathwork, I asked Dr. Grof what to do when I stopped myself from going deeper.

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