Finding Your Way — Part 2

The Many Faces of Heroic Journeys….

The very first time I experienced this Holotropic-like breathwork, the music began, I started doing connected circular breathing, and I rapidly became very agitated. I was miserable… frustrated, angry and simultaneously hopeless, and shortly I was thrashing and rocking side to side. One of the sitters who considered himself adept at doing body work on people breathing came over and started pressing on my heart. I rocked hard to the right and swung back to the left, knocking him several feet back and onto the floor. It felt really satisfying.

A couple weeks later I was breathing again, and I quickly returned to that same space – thrashing… angry… frustrated… hopeless. At some point a light bulb went on and I became an infant imprisoned in my little bed. In the era in which I was born, mothers were told they needed to train their babies to be fed on a schedule. In practice, that meant if I woke up in my crib and cried when it wasn’t time to be fed, she would ignore my cries and leave me alone in that room at the end of the hall. There, I’d cry louder and louder, screaming in anger and rage. But beneath all that noise lurked a profound sense of helplessness for there was nothing that child could do to change any of it.

This was a revelation, and every couple of weeks when it was my turn to breathe, I would have another. Each time, I went to the same place — rocking angry helpless frustrated — and then another insight would come. In the next one, I realized that this patten created the template for all of my relationships with women. I would be attracted and drawn to a partner who, in some fundamental ways, wouldn’t show up, and then I would twist myself into knots to become the person I thought she needed me to be to get her love.

For one, I’d become the most competent, wise, or liberated man… for another, the provider or the most sensitive and attentive lover… And of course it would never last. In the beginning it seemed to work – we were “in love” – each finding “the one” who would meet all our needs and never leave. But all the effort to get approval and please someone else was work; it was tireless and exhausting, and after a certain amount of time together the cracks in the foundation would start to emerge I (secretly) couldn’t wait for her to go away. And – having placed all my emotional eggs in her basket — I had no real resources of my own, and that core, underlying neediness is not all that attractive a quality.

This pattern continued, and eventually I found myself in another breathwork journey where everything changed. The music started, I began to do the circular breathing, and once again I was thrashing and rocking like before. I was there in it, familiar with what was happening though I couldn’t stop it, but I was also just tired of it. I longed for, maybe even asked for, something different, and at some point I heard a voice that seemed to be coming from somewhere outside me. Perhaps it was emerging from some place outside of any self that I had yet to know, but this voice said to me, “Sparrow where do you go to find your deepest spiritual experiences?”

Interesting question… At that point I had undertaken something like 11 vision quests — one each year since 1980 — and I immediately thought of them. “Of course, on your vision quests” the voice replied, “where you’re all alone and you don’t get fed.” There it was… This voice carried me to the threshold of a much bigger space that began to open in the middle of my journey. Soon I was laughing, tears running down my face. I saw that a deep core wound and my chosen spiritual path were like two fingers intertwined, two sides of one coin. Peace and contentment pervaded a horizonless space that was no longer either-or. I savored this new sense of tranquility for a good while before trying to get back into the breathing, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I have never forgotten that journey.

Sometimes the way out is through. This story may seem like it was birthed in childhood, but Joseph Campbell, speaking about the Call to Adventure and the Heroic Journey, states that refusing the call is when regret, anxiety, disillusionment, hopelessness, and depression take root.

Find the things you want to hide and avoid… find and run toward them immediately! I have done breathwork many times — perhaps 30 or so — since the journey I just described. And I have never once found myself in that crib again…

~ Aho!