Other Tools of Transformation
Here are some other tools of transformation that are part of the Choose Again methodology for psychological and spiritual transformation.
Gratitude
If I work one-on-one with someone who’s depressed, and I say to that person, “Go home tonight and write down ten things you’re grateful for,” invariably their response is: “I can’t think of one thing I’m grateful for.” But the truth is, anyone can. Initially, however, someone can be in so much pain that they feel they’ve got nothing to be grateful for.
In our residential healing practice, everyone at the communal dinner gets a chance to list the things they were grateful for that day. This nightly practice also helps people to notice, during the day, the people and events who are enriching their lives. It’s exciting to watch what happens when you acknowledge what you’re grateful for. Things begin to shift immediately.
True gratitude is simply recognizing that we’re all One. Many people who come to us for healing don’t recognize this at first, but over the course of their work, they come to understand it in a very profound way.
Meditation
Meditation doesn’t necessarily mean sitting in the lotus position and saying “Ommmmm.” In its true form, it means watching our thoughts at all times. When I watch and monitor my thoughts, I learn how to reframe the ones that cause me distress. If I don’t catch my thoughts they tend to get out of control quickly — and when this happens, it gets harder to recognize their source.
In addition to this overarching form of meditation, there are other types that we practice. One exercise involves slowly counting backward from the number 27, silently, to oneself. This calms the mind. When you do it, you’re not thinking about the fact that you didn’t pay your taxes, you’re not thinking about terrorists, you’re not thinking about that annoying new coworker... you’re simply counting. A variation on this practice is to count backward with your breathing: Breathe in for a count of five, then hold for a count of five. Breathe out for a count of five, then you hold for a count of five. And you keep doing that. You can do it while you’re driving, while you’re at a traffic light, while you’re at the grocery store. It’s a really useful, simple, and practical meditation that helps to quiet and center the mind.
Holotropic Breathwork is a breathing technique introduced in the West by Dr. Stan Grof. Dr. Grof is a leading, innovative and brilliant psychiatrist and healer who used ayahuasca, mushrooms, and peyote in his practice to allow his clients to bypass their normal ego defenses. When these substances became illegal for use in therapeutic sessions, Stan Grof realized that Prana breathing might induce similar states.
The key to this breathing is to allow it to be continuous, with no break at the top or bottom of the breath. There are a variety of physical reactions that people have reported, from tingling in the hands and feet, to nausea, and even tetany, a form of involuntary muscle contraction in the hands. All these symptoms pass if one continues the breath. In this altered state, one often has access to various previously inaccessible parts of one’s psyche. Once these deeply buried memories come to the surface the client often experiences a profound release.
This is a healing modality that we use frequently. I’ll give you an example from my own life — something that came up after I had spent about a year turning my life around, when I was in my fifties. As you might recall, I was incarcerated in a POW camp when I was a young boy. At this point on my path, I thought I’d gotten my entire camp experience out of my system. I felt no hatred toward the camp guards; I had no lingering animosity about the experience itself. I really didn’t feel anything around it. Thus I thought it was completely resolved.
But in fact, every time the subject of the camp came up in workshops or in other conversations, my throat would constrict. It became pretty clear that there was something still tied to that experience that I hadn’t looked at yet.
And so I decided to apply Holotropic breathwork to this issue and within five minutes I started to howl like a wounded bull. What became clear to me was that I felt responsible for all the suffering I’d seen in the camps; I thought it was all my fault. With more breathing, I realized that I felt responsible for all the camps in the world — and then, I was responsible for the entire second World War! I was carrying around so much irrational guilt about the first three years of my life that could not have been addressed by normal cognitive approaches. I cannot imagine a therapist saying to me: “Your problem is that you feel guilty for WWII” without me walking out of the room shaking my head.
Yet, there it was: a deeply held belief in guilt which I had acted out through anger and substance abuse for fifty years. This one breathing changed my life forever!
With Holotropic Breathing, similar astounding breakthroughs have been experienced here at our center and at workshops we conduct around the world.
Exercise and Physical Catharsis
In a typical day at our residential center in Costa Rica, we have an extended healing circle in the morning that lasts for a couple of hours. These sessions can be pretty intense. After a hearty lunch, we typically encourage everyone to go on a long hike together, or we may play soccer.
It’s very important to move the body in order to process the thoughts of the mind. Recently scientists have determined that undertaking bilateral activity helps to process trauma. In a normal brain, the events in our lives are stored as memories. A traumatic event, however, which is loaded with negative emotion, is apt to operate as if on a playback loop, and in so doing, remain omnipresent in one’s consciousness. When we take a walk, go for a swim, play tennis, or do jumping jacks, both parts of the brain are activated because both sides of the body are in motion. Scientists have found that this engagement allows traumatic memories to become “unstuck” and properly stored in long-term memory, and thus no longer active in one’s daily awareness.
In the work that we do we’ve long used the activities of sport to aid in the processing of trauma, so it’s interesting but hardly surprising that science now corroborates our practice.