Anxiety: How Rebirthing Can Help Erase It
By Anita M. Coolidge
ANXIETY: HOW REBIRTHING CAN HELP ERASE IT
Most of us experience varying levels of anxiety for common things, like standing on a high bridge and looking down, or standing in front of an audience to give a speech, or learning how to ride a bike or drive a car. There are also those moments for most of us when, for little or no apparent reason, we are thrown into terror, an episode we might call an anxiety attack. And, of course, some people have an underlying level of anxiety coloring virtually their every waking moment, not a pleasant existence to be sure.
For a while in my 30s I experienced anxiety attacks, moments when a level of fear would come up and I would have to lie down or I felt like I was fainting. A couple of times I called the fire department because I thought I was having a heart attack. The calming officers would knock on the door, would sit with me for a bit, reassuring me that everything was all right, and I would get through it. I didn’t have any particular thoughts or memories or images. It was just the feeling of fear in me that eventually waned.
In my quest for making my inner life more stable, I explored hypnotherapy, movement therapy, massage therapy, and finally rebirthing, which I was drawn to for the credo of Sondra Ray and the Loving Relationships Training, “Thought is creative.” But it is the breath that is really the core of rebirthing.
I remember my astonishment when I did my first group rebirth at one of the weekend trainings: that familiar feeling of an anxiety attack came over me as I breathed. Since I was being supported by trained rebirthers, I let myself surrender to the breath and realized I got to parts of myself I never would have been able to without that process. Somehow, the breath led me to feelings I didn’t even know I had, and in the process of breathing they were released. Peace would come over me at the end of a session, and the anxiety went away.
Now, after over 20 years of rebirthing others and being rebirthed myself, I have come to some conclusions. One thing seems absolutely true: the fear we feel in an anxiety attack is the fear of feeling something, even though in reality, in the here and now, we are absolutely safe. Sounds too simple, doesn’t it? And yet, in rebirthing sessions, as we allow the feelings to surface, perhaps see the original occurrences that generated those feelings, and change any decisions we made during what was probably a traumatic experience, we come out of the rebirthing session without the anxiety. The breath seems to recover those feelings that probably got stuffed when we – guess what? – stopped breathing!!
I have come to believe that an anxiety attack is our unconscious mind trying to release an old experience. We may even know consciously what it is – or not – it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we allow it to happen. Indeed, it helps to feel safe enough to “go there” by having an experienced rebirther guiding the process, but once practiced a few times, it is eventually possible to begin processing your mind and emotions on your own.
Another thing I have concluded is that the source of the emotion can have occurred to us last week, when we were children, when we were in the womb, or in past lives. The truth is in us, and with the connected, circular pattern of the rebirthing breath, we can access it so that we can change it: after all, the only place the past experience still exists is in our mind and our energy field. When we change that, our present reality changes.
One particularly potent example of extreme anxiety in my own life happened when I was renting the lower portion of a house for myself and my 10-year-old daughter. At the time my income was adequate but irregular. The landlady gave me an ultimatum, however, that I would HAVE to get a regular job because it was making her too nervous. The request was a reasonable one, but the level of my fear could suggest that I had just been asked to, well, stand on a high bridge and look down. Realizing there must be something else going on, I decided to rebirth myself.
In the rebirth I immediately went to what seemed to be a past life in Germany (I had had glimpses of concentration camps before) where it seemed that I was motherless. I had the thought that my mother had died at my birth, and that I was on the street at about eight years old fending for myself. In the scenario, I found myself going to my father who was apparently a guard in the camps. Wanting to transform the experience, I used the device of shedding light from heaven on the scene, at which point I railed against my father for being so mean. In the image he asked for forgiveness, and we left the camp! (Interestingly, there were others who chose not to come with us, but that’s another story.) At this point in the session, my anxiety turned around and I felt safe.
The next day, the landlady thought I had actually gotten a job because I was so relaxed and feeling good. No, I had only rebirthed, and it was true that the anxiety had gone. On the second day afterwards, I decided to pursue some temp work, and called an agency someone had recommended to me. Without even going in for an interview, I was promptly placed in a temporary job!! Not only did I get an immediate assignment, but, out of all the possibilities in the City of Seattle, I was placed at Jewish Family and Child Service helping prepare their budget for the next year!! Considering my recent rebirthing venture into my apparent past life in the camps, and that money was the issue, it was pretty synchronous, not to mention the fact that (I repeat) a huge amount of anxiety was lifted from me, even BEFORE I got the job.
A client of mine presented a much more tenacious and thoroughgoing history of anxiety. “Deer in headlights” was, as she related it, her usual M.O. As an adult she had routinely taken Paxil and other relaxants, but was always aware of an underlying anxiety. Nevertheless, she had accomplished a great deal as a metallurgy engineer and more recently as a personal coach and speaker, using her scientific background to apply to human potential. Even as a young teen, she was incredibly effective as surrogate mother to her younger sister and brothers when her mother died. Her level of accomplishment, however, didn’t obliterate a lingering anxiety.
In her rebirthing sessions, there was a succession of sessions that returned to incidents she consciously or unconsciously remembered where her father was physically and verbally abusive to her mother. Anxiety was a familiar feeling when she (a) wasn’t sure if she would have a mother to take care of her or (b) if she herself would be the next target. All of the sessions did quite a lot to relieve her anxiety, and she is now able to go long periods of time without taking Paxil.
Probably the most profound realization, however, and an image we have worked with more than once, was that while she was in the womb, there was an enormous earthquake in Montana, a place where earthquakes RARELY happen. Her mother was naturally terrified. It stands to reason that my client would have experienced the earthquake as well, both physically (through the chemical release in her mother’s body around fear) and emotionally. There was obviously no place for her to go. And since the unconscious mind is literal, it would stand to reason that “it” would be under the impression that anxiety and life go together; drop the anxiety, one could die. In other words, because she experienced the fear in the time when her very body was forming in the womb, anxiety became a part of it. The way this has translated into her life is that things will be going along very well, and something comes along to turn her world upside down. Now that we have worked with her decisions and her energy field during that memory, she has transformed a lot of it, and she is continuing up a spiral of success. She has also done a lot of yoga and other mind transforming techniques, all of which have helped, but the key has seemed to be the breath, the release of the emotions, and the transformation of the memories.
These are only two stories that illustrate the power of rebirthing in getting to the source of anxiety and clearing it. And almost universally, whether a person is specifically dealing with anxiety or not, the first words spoken by a rebirthee at the end of a session are, “I feel peace.”
Anita Coolidge
760.723.9141
www.wingsofbreath.dreamhost.com
This article was posted by Anita Coolidge
