William Blake wrote: "There is a crack in everything that
God has made." For me, this crack -- this place where
something new and more meaningful can enter our lives -- became
especially visible in 1990, when I found myself physically,
emotionally, and spiritually exhausted, with a constant, sharp
pain on the right side of my rib cage. I had just gone through
the enormous stress of selling my public relations agency to a
well-known English firm, and had worked to maximize the sale
price of the company for two years under the direction of the new
owners. Though I had had chronic abdominal discomfort for many
years, and indeed had been diagnosed with "colitis"
some years before, this pain was different. I went to doctors,
massage therapists, and various body-work practitioners to put an
end to it, but to no avail. It was during this period that I met
Gilles Marin, a student of Taoist master Mantak Chia, and a
teacher and practitioner of Chi Nei Tsang (CNT), a Taoist healing
practice using internal-organ chi massage and work with breathing
to clear unhealthy tensions and energies from our organism.
When Gilles first put his hands into my belly and began to
massage my inner organs and tissues, and when he began to ask me
to breathe into parts of myself that I had never experienced
through my breath, I had no idea of the incredible journey of
discovery that I was beginning. Though Gilles told me that CNT
was part of a larger system of healing and spiritual practices
called the "Healing Tao," founded by Master Chia, my
immediate concern was simply to get rid of the pain. I had my own
spiritual practices; what I needed was healing.
Healing ... a word I had not pondered very deeply in my life. But
as Gilles began to work more intensively with me, and as it
became increasingly clear that the healing process depended in
large part on my own inner awareness, I began to understand why
the expressions "to heal" and "to make whole"
have the same roots. Though the physical pain disappeared after
several sessions, and though I began to feel more alive, a
deeper, psychic pain began to emerge -- the pain of recognizing
that in spite of all my efforts over many years toward
self-knowledge and self-transformation, I had managed to open
myself to only a small portion of the vast scale of the physical,
emotional, and spiritual energies available to us at every
moment. As Gilles continued working on me, and as my breath began
to penetrate deeper into myself, I began to sense layer after
layer of tension, anger, fear, and sadness resonating in my
abdomen below the level of my so-called waking consciousness, and
consuming the energies I needed not only for health, but also for
a real engagement with life. And this deepening sensation at the
very center of my being, painful as it was, brought with it an
opening not only in the tissues of my belly, but also in my most
intimate attitudes toward myself, a welcoming of hitherto
unconscious fragments of myself into a new sense of discovery,
wholeness, and inner growth.
I quickly realized that Chi Nei Tsang -- with its penetration
into my physical and emotional energies through touch and
breathwork, provided a direct, healing pathway into myself, and
as I learned more about it through its action on me I soon found
myself taking classes from Gilles and even beginning to work on
my friends. I also found myself taking classes in healing
practices and chi kung, many of which involved special breathing
practices, from various Healing Tao teachers, including Master
Chia. After more than a year of CNT classes and many hours of
clinical practice, I was tested by Master Chia and certified by
him to do CNT professionally. And after many Healing Tao classes
and retreats, as well as intensive work on myself, I also became
certified by Master Chia to teach some of the Healing Tao
practices. Since then I have done CNT work on both my own clients
and at a Chinese medicine clinic in San Francisco, and have
taught ongoing Healing Tao classes and workshops, with a large
emphasis on breathing.
As a result of my work with the Healing Tao, as well as with
other teachings, such as the Gurdjieff Work and Advaita Vedanta,
two facts have become clear to me with regard to the relationship
of breath to health and inner growth. First, that our poor
breathing habits have arisen not only out of our psychosomatic
"ignorance," our lack of organic awareness, but also
out of our unconscious need for a buffering mechanism to keep us
from sensing and feeling the reality of our own deep-rooted fears
and contradictions. There is absolutely no doubt that superficial
breathing ensures a superficial experience of ourselves. Second,
that if we were able to breathe "naturally" for even a
small percentage of the more than 15,000 breaths we take during
each waking day we would be taking a huge step not only toward
preventing many of the physical and psychological problems that
have become endemic to modern life, but also toward supporting
our own inner growth -- the growth of awareness of who and what
we really are, of our own essential being. It is my hope that the
ideas and practices explored in this book will help make this
possible.
Return to The Tao of Natural Breathing Overview
06/22/07