Peter’s Story
Section Two - Episode Three
“Breath Express”
Continuing on with the version of the story written in October-November 1998,
for self-therapy purposes.....
“Within a few weeks of leaving the “training group of the well-known American practitioner”, I attended a workshop that, eventually, truly did change me in many ways. The workshop was called “Breath Express”.....
Breath-Express (sometimes called “BX” for short), was probably one of the most intensive workshops of its type ever run anywhere in the world. It was very loosely based on the therapy work originally done by the disciples of Osho (also known as Raj Neesh) in Poona, India, and later in Oregon. Some of the group processes were based on work done in American drug addiction clinics. However, the bulk of the “BX” group-therapy “processes” were home-grown in that they were developed and refined by the people who facilitated the BX workshops, working experientially over a series of the workshops, each time refining the work in the light of the results obtained.
I did “BX” for the first time at Easter, 1994. The workshop began on Friday evening and finished around 5pm Sunday without a break. And I mean literally without a break. Continuous, with virtually no sleep. Sleep deprivation was part of the process, to help break down resistance.
I could write a whole book about my experiences in the fourteen workshops that I attended, over a period of twelve months. Yes.... your read it right..... fourteen of the most intensive workshops of their type in the world, in twelve months! I became part of the core group of 12 to 20 people who attended every workshop and helped to facilitate them. I made some very close friends, some of whom are still close friends today. To ask whether it was life-changing for me is like asking the question “Is the Pope a Catholic?”
How can I condense into a few paragraphs, something that totally changed my life? With mere words, I cannot bring to you the real feeling and energy of the experience itself. And the words that I use have a different meaning to everyone who reads them. I can but hope that through these words you may catch a glimpse of the reality.
Within hours of the start of my first “BX” workshop, I went into a spontaneous re-birthing type experience concerning my unresolved issues from the “Cynthia experience”. We were in our small family group, and the other members of my group were massaging me. I suddenly felt very strange, and my whole body went numb. I became vaguely aware that the music playing in the background was the same music that Cynthia and I had shared as “our special music”. When the energy finally lifted from my body, I staggered over to the nearest of the very large canvas-covered cushions, picked up the large piece of plastic pipe, and beat the shit out of the cushion, screaming obscenities at Cynthia. I was to spend much of the weekend beating this cushion, screaming out my agony.
One of the BX group-therapy processes was the “Death Process”, where we were given pen and paper to write a “completion letter” to someone from our past. We were then led into a room set up like a funeral parlour, with all the staff dressed in black, somber music playing, all the props of a real funeral. We were invited to come forward one at a time and read our completion letter out loud. The fear and agony I went through in doing this was intense, yet on looking back now I realise that what I said in my letter to Cynthia was quite innocuous, yet very powerful for me at the time. A very important part of my letting go process.
Dance was used extensively in the BX workshops. Dancing is a wonderful form of body-centered therapy, with the bonus of being a healthy activity and fun to do. To begin with, I found the dancing very difficult, especially when I was required to dance on my own in front of everyone. I was told that I needed to loosen up my pelvis, and I had no idea how to do this! But after a few workshops, as I began to relax and just go with the flow, I found that I was really enjoying the dancing. And now (1998), four years later, my massage therapist tells me that I have the loosest pelvis that he has ever worked on!
There was a more advanced workshop for graduates of “Breath Express”, called “The Full Stop Never Comes”, usually referred to in its shortened name of “Full Stop”. I did this more advanced workshop just three weeks after doing Breath Express, thinking “Wow, if this is even more advanced than BX, what will it be like?” Yes, it did push me beyond my former limits, but, looking back on it now, it was no big deal, and I cannot recall anything specific that stands out.
The next workshop in the series was the next “Breath Express”, at Queen's Birthday Weekend, June 1994. (Note: in New Zealand, the official birthday of the Queen is celebrated as a holiday on the first Monday in June). I was by now an “old hand”, or so I thought! A graduate of both “Breath Express” and “Full Stop”. I eagerly volunteered to be on the staff for the weekend, and to be part of a new group of “trainees” (ie. trainee therapists), to help the workshop participants in doing the workshop “processes”. I really thought that I was well on my way to the full healing of all of my unresolved “issues”, but I was about to have this illusion shattered! This particular workshop of June 1994 was where the “Breath Express” series reached its peak, there were over seventy people there for the weekend, and it was an awesome experience.
Us “trainees” were paired up in pairs to act as “parents” in the family groups. I was paired with a woman who we shall call Cathy, who I knew from the previous BX workshop. Cathy was a very full-on, no-nonsense woman in her thirties who had a rather overpowering energy. I was actually quite afraid of her, of her up-front outspokenness, and I was both attracted and repelled by her overpowering sexuality.
In most of these workshops, the small group that I worked in was a microcosm or reflection of the issues that were of importance to me in my real life. A chance to experience and work through issues that I needed to work on. This workshop was no exception. Our little family of Cathy and I and our four “children” (two young men and two young women) was very dysfunctional, right from the start. At the very beginning, there was an incident where a young woman was timidly going around all the family groups unable to decide which one to join. When she decided to join our family, one of our “sons” reacted strongly and told her to “f.... off! I don't want you here!”. She burst into tears, and we had our first family crisis (they knew each other outside in the “real” world, and the energy between them was not good).
Half way through the weekend, just as I thought I might manage to tiptoe my way through the workshop with no major incidents, we were asked during a break if anyone had any issues they needed to resolve with their partners? Yes, you guessed it, Cathy had some issues with me! They sat the two of us on chairs facing each other, with the other trainees in a circle around us (no escape route!), and invited us to do our thing. Cathy let me have it, right between the eyes, with how useless and dysfunctional I was, “A bloody useless father, I am doing it all on my own, etc, etc, etc.”. Exactly the same as what Jeanette had often said to me in real life!
I had no answer, I had no idea how to handle this! My worst nightmare, a re-run of the real-life agony that I had experienced with both Jeanette and Cynthia! I staggered back into our family group with my tail between my legs.
And guess what happened next? No sooner had Cathy and I rejoined our “children”, when they too turned on me (without knowing what Cathy had said to me) and told me that I was a “Bloody useless father, just like my real father, etc, etc.” This coming from two young men who were roughly the same age as my own sons, was very powerful stuff for me, just what I needed, although at the time my only wish was for a chasm to appear in the floor for me to willingly fall into! My misery and despair knew no bounds.
But then a miracle occurred. I somehow made it through the Funeral Process, which just happened to be next on the program. At the end of the Funeral Process, it was usual for the family groups to come together and support each other in any way appropriate in the expressing of their grief, etc.
I felt like absolute shit, with all of this agonizing stuff bottled up deep inside me and no way to resolve it. Our family members looked at each other, and came closely together in a tight group, in a group hug. One of the women started crying, and then the others, and suddenly it happened for me. All of the pent-up frustration and garbage that I had been suppressing for all those years exploded into torrents of tears and uncontrollable sobs.
It was the first time that I had ever been able to cry properly since early childhood. I was brought up in an era when the “Good Kiwi Bloke” definitely did not express his emotions in any way! He suppressed them, and never, ever, let them show! “Big boys don't cry!” It took extreme circumstances to break down my deeply ingrained resistance, my programming ran really deep.
The years of school-yard bullying (see later in the story), and the parental and teacher indoctrination of the male stiff-upper-lip, had deeply programmed me to accept whatever was dished out to me in silent agony. Suddenly, my programming crumbled, and my pain came flooding out of me in the form of cleansing tears, torrents of them, a river of tears.
We must have stayed together in that crying session for hours, hugging each other tightly, the six of us in our little family group, sobbing out and releasing our agony. And we must have used up several boxes of tissues! During all of this, my thoughts went over all of my many frustrations, resentments, unresolved grief, etc. Issues from my childhood, unresolved feelings towards former partners, feelings of guilt and inadequacy towards my sons, my parents, etc. My tears washed clean the energy of all of this “stuff” that I had been carrying for many years.
Eventually, hours later, when the next food break came, we were still at it. Everyone else had finished and was in the next room eating, and I was still there crying my eyes out. I just could not stop! But the feeling of release and lightness once it was finally finished! And the feeling of love and closeness with the people who had shared this experience with me!
This was a major turning point for me. Writing these words now (1998) brings tears to my eyes. The cleansing power of a few tears is wonderful, yet most of us in our “stiff upper lip” paradigm just continue to suppress as much as we can for fear of being judged if we allow our true feelings to show.
In several subsequent workshops, I had similar experiences of tearful cathartic release, and it became a joyous experience, an experience to look forward to and to enjoy in the knowledge that I was letting go of so much garbage. I remember lying on the floor a few months later during the Auckland Breath Express (I was an old hand at this by then), and experiencing a great joy even as the tears flowed uncontrollably. Then, suddenly, it was finished for me. I had let go of a whole layer of pain, sadness, guilt, etc. I was left with a feeling of being at peace with myself and with the world.
There were many, many more wonderful healing experiences for me in these dozen or so workshops (all in the period of a little under a year), enough to fill a whole book. I am so grateful that I was able to experience these workshops. I believe that they were the most powerful group-therapy workshops of their type ever held in New Zealand, possibly anywhere in the world. For me, doing these workshops was a unique window of opportunity to advance my personal healing at a very fast rate, and a continuation of the process that I had been pursuing.
Towards the end of the series of workshops, I met the next major influence in my life, Meagan.....
Click here to continue on with the next episode of this section of this (1998 version) of the story......
“Meagan”
