Breathwork for Personal Transformation
This article is about two of my favourite subjects: breathwork and a concept that was defined by Carl Gustav Jung: “individuation”. I will start by explaining what this concept means, followed by creating the link between both topics.
The unconscious & individuation
Art by Nicolas Skorupka
Neglecting the development of our psyche, the unconscious part of us can lead to involuntary, compulsive behavior, self-sabotage, neurosis, or even autoimmune diseases (as Dr. Gabor Mate explains in his book “When the body says no”). There is a force in our psyche to fulfill the blueprint of who we truly are, it seeks to bring unconscious parts of us to the surface to grow, to create more balance, and become more whole.
Carl Gustav Jung called this drive individuation. Individuation includes awareness, inner healing, and integration of unconscious parts in order to create less division between our unconsciousness and consciousness. It's a self-regulating and natural process.
There is this analogy of our bodies. It grows and develops on its own, without our conscious awareness. But we can have a more proactive attitude towards it by training our body and giving it the food it needs. This way we lower the risk of challenging health conditions. And the same way we can also proactively take care of our psyche and to strive for more smooth development.
Also Abraham Maslow pointed out something quite similar. When Maslow studied people who exceeded in life. He found out that the most flourishing and healthy people were those who were motivated for self-actualization (the peak in the hierarchy of needs).
He defined self-actualization as the following:
"an ongoing actualization of potentials, capacities, and talents, as a fulfillment of a mission, as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person's own intrinsic nature, and as an unceasing trend toward unity.”
If everyone is striving to do so it will not only transform ourselves but the society we live in.
Breathwork is one tool that assists and promotes that process, by letting our breath guide us to unconscious realms of our psyche and bring to the surface the pearls that will help us to evolve.
Breathwork
Art by Nicolas Skorupka
How can breathwork help us in the process of becoming more whole?
Through breathwork we are changing our brainwaves to a frequency that allows us to bypass our default mode network. The default mode network is responsible for our logical thinking and our ego construct. This way we access parts of the unconscious. The greatest mystery of being a living human being.
Here we are able to witness ourselves beyond the conditionings, we see the force that makes us unique in this world, we experience suppressed emotions, our innate creativity, intuition, forgotten experiences, visions and way more. We become a Seelenwanderer.
Turning inwards
The power of breathwork is not only the breath technique, it's also the fact that we turn inwards for one hour or more and isolate ourselves from the outer world. This is something that is not happening that often in our daily life. We are so distracted by our phones, books, striving for our goals, work or other things that we don’t take the time to just be with ourselves.
And as an accelerator, we add the power of breath.
This is where the magic is happening. This is where the two circles are meeting. Turning inwards and breath. Turning inwards, we isolate ourselves from the outside, to dive into our body, mind, and spirit. We witness what wants to be seen, heard, and expressed.
Let’s move on.
We had a deep dive into the body, into the nervous system, and into our psyche. Now it’s time to move on and to integrate. What is it that we want to transform? What are the pearls that we discovered on our journey, brought to the surface and that want to be placed in our life? Our intuition might have told us something. It might be something that we already knew, heard so many times but never took action on. Or a feeling that made it really clear that something in us feels hurt, emotions that want to be seen and cared for.
For some things, the experience itself already has a healing and transformative power, but for other insights, integration is asked for. If we want to make a change in our personal lives but also on a cultural and systematic level this is what is needed: integration.
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”