POBI Intention and Culture Statement
The intention for the Power of Breath Institute’s trainings and workshops is to provide safe, loving and educational environments within which participants can collaboratively share, experience and develop new skills and techniques for helping themselves and others in healing settings. The primary form within which we seek to support each other is in the formation of Sacred Circles of Empowerment, held carefully within a “Culture of Loving Connection”.
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Breathwork and the Importance of Relational Mutuality
Relationality is the state or condition of being relational, and pertains to the way in which two or more things may be linked or associated. In Somatic Breath Healing, we consider relationality to be the energetic, consciousness-infused interconnection between practitioner and client, which not only gets amplified through conscious breathing, but also encompasses the multilevel mutuality that put the individuals together in the first place. It embraces the full range of the body, mind and spirit of the therapeutic relationship, but also includes the shared causality of the how and why the interconnection is happening.
– What does it mean to live with integrity? How do you live your life from a place of honesty, sincerity, and uprightness? What qualities must you embrace in order to live correctly and, as the native peoples would say, “walk in beauty”?
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All Choice Comes From Love – CHOICE is the ability to be free to live in each moment with full awareness. It offers direction, empowerment and self-awareness. To choose is to realize the essence of LOVE that lives in every moment. It is as much the result of inner inspiration as it is from outer assessment. Born out of duality, all choice is based upon a desire to grow and to understand the connection between inner and outer experience. All choice flows from the initial inspiration of Divine Oneness to know itself. All choice comes from LOVE.
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Breathing Like a Butterfly: The Heart of Spiritual Practice – In order to teach mastery, one must lead a masterful life. In order to breathe deeply, one must master breathing. Are you as fully in command of your inhale and exhale as you could be? Watch for the flow of energy and ask for the way to be shown to you. A butterfly opens its wings and closes them. That is all. BE patient. Witness. Then practice.
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Discernment vs. Judgment – When you judge someone, you hurt. You hurt out loud. You hurt yourself and the thing or person you are judging. When you judge, it is usually because you feel emotional about someone or something, what they represent or what you feel they have done to you. The feelings you have literally propel the thoughts into action. They get charged and want to go somewhere. “Hey slowpoke, get the h… out of the way, will ya!” Every time you think, speak or yell out a fiery judgment to the world, even if in the slightest way, reality stands at attention, then it moves. Judgments effect the reality around you, and usually not in a positive way.
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Forgiveness is the Doorway to Freedom through The Song of a Loving Heart – Although much has been written and said about forgiveness, when I think of forgiveness, I think of three fundamental qualities; forgiveness as: 1) an attitude, 2) an acceptance, and 3) an action. Although it does not really matter what order these come in, we might conceive of them as comprising a triangle, as in the following illustration:
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I AM THAT I AM: The First Breath– “I Am that I Am.” As you speak this proclamation you reconnect with the Sacred Circle of Life, you voice a powerful prayer of your unique existence, which is the essence of Divine Breath. With this first tender movement of awareness, you breathe for that which inspires you, for that which gives you life. You become pure ceremony re-enacting the greatness and emptiness of All That Is. You breathe from the deepest stillness, from the darkest void. You enter as the “Word of God”, a bare speck of divine sound uttered in deafening silence. You are spoken into being. Woven through earth and time into a human form of biology, you are a love song, a divine whim, hurled out from profound immobility into eons and eons of change and evolution.
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Life Mastery– What is Life Mastery? What does it look like? How do you feel when you are living a masterful life? Is it a path, a destination, or simply an illusory dream that can never be realized in our lives? Although, I have asked, studied, listened and spoken about mastery most of my life, one beautiful summer solstice morning, quite innocently, I decide to ask my Inner Knowing about this very simple yet elusive topic. Here is what I heard…
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Therapeutic Breathwork – Therapeutic Breathwork is the healing intervention and focused application of conscious, connected breathing, guided by the Spirit of Breath and held within the sacred container of a therapeutic relationship.
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Twins of Oak and Lake – How do I begin to describe the blessing, the grace, the diversity, the complexity, the enthusiasm, the love – and the sleeplessness (!) – of the Global Inspiration conference 2004? How could I begin to capture or put into a single line of words the multi-dimensional interweave of such a gathering? The truth is: I cannot. However, perhaps I can at least attempt to tell my story…
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We’re the Ones – The golden sun burst through the clouds and a long, long a period of waiting was over. As the late morning mist lifted around the smokiness of a roaring bonfire, the faces of eight individuals squinted over the flames at each other and realized the same thing: the Sacred Council of Elders was together again! A blessed circle of souls had returned to sit across the fire from each other, to laugh and cry together, to share the harvest of their long journeys and to hold precious the Earth Breath Child that was gently awakening in their arms again.
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