Oct '23 in Unshakable Man Breathwork
My Breathwork Experience
This Jim, checking in---
This morning (Tuesday), Chris Wilson texted me and invited me to join him in some online breath work. I have done this several times since last April's retreat. Chris is a good, experienced guide, and I feel quite safe in his hands. Guided breathwork can be intense, as it compels your frontal brain cortex--where your emotional armor resides--to take a break and allow you to see and experience what's underneath. I have found looking under the hood not always to be easy--fragments of past memories, feelings of guilt, shame, even fury from incidents in my past. When I first experienced this, I was profoundly shaken at how much emotional "stuff" was circulating underneath my conscious self.
Having now lived a fairly long life--I'm in my late sixties--I have had plenty of time to build up a thick coating of emotional armor. And let's face it....armor is sometimes very necessary in order to basically survive and help others in their lives. My armor helped keep me gainfully employed for four decades in the cutthroat corporate world. It also allowed me to be the rock my mother needed me to be as my father spiraled into alcoholism and mental illness. It also helped me to cope when seemingly everyone around me was dying of AIDS in the 1980's and 90's. Never, ever let them see you cry.
But that same armor can also be suffocating. We men just love to bottle up our feelings so we can look "strong" or "tough". Armor will do that for you. But I've discovered as you age, cracks develop in even the thickest of armor. Seemingly innocuous events or something harmless someone says can trigger ugly memories and even uglier emotions from things that happened long ago and had hopefully been forgotten. My somewhat contented(?) retirement has been plagued by these triggers, as old demons seemed to want to claw their way back into my consciousness. I have witnessed many people on their deathbeds being consumed by such demons, and I didn't want to be one of them. This is the main reason I was drawn to The Unshakable Man movement.
Breathwork has given me a way to face some unpleasant stuff, but it has also been emotionally liberating. But can it provide permanent healing? I haven't been doing this long enough to know. But I have come to recognize that The Unshakable Man movement also offers other tools that I hope will also help in this process--somatic meditation ("the practice"), the profound emotional experience of the retreats, and the strong sense of non-judgmental community it offers. I don't expect my demons to be completely neutralized; but what I would like is a means to become reconciled to them, as part of becoming a more complete and whole human being. Not an increasingly bitter old man stuck in the past.
I intend to continue this journey in this group. Maybe I will see some of you on similar paths.
This is Jim, checking in.
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My Breathwork Experience
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