This Too Will Have Been a Joy to Have Been Remembered: A Journey of Holotropic Breathwork
by Isobel Nimtz
I sat on my twin bed at the lodge in Pawlet in December of 2019, looking through the window at the wintry landscape. A blizzard had blown in the day before, just in time for a group of people to heed a call to drive into rural Vermont, looking for… something. As for me, I only knew that there was a mystery unfolding that I had barely perceived before—a shadow, a whisper–that was pulling me in new and perplexing directions; more than just forward and backward but up and down, building and crumbling, sideways at times, and maybe toward all points at once.
“Look at me,” I wrote in my journal. “I’m alone, out doing something I’m interested in!” I had risen from a delicious sleep. My three-year-old daughter was at home with my partner and it had been a rare moment that I had experienced such a sense of centeredness, of unchallenged focus, and of me in quite a while. “This morning there is no one but myself vying for my attention. I need not tend to anyone but myself. I feel an awful lot of power here that has drawn us together in this storm. Still, I sit this morning and remind myself to lay my expectations down, to be in each moment. I feel a sense of calm—relief from the shifting anxieties of yesterday’s poor driving conditions and last-minute discord at home. I will forget those. Today has all the potential in the world.”
Oh how right I was. Struggling to coherently describe my biography to the group that day, my heart was pounding. I was devastated by the attention of these people, my mind was a sieve—I forgot everything I’d ever experienced—and my voice betrayed me, shaking with fear and profound discomfort. Why? Because I had been playing out the systemic cultural programming for so long, every day reinforcing the armor I felt was necessary for protection—bits of mail comprised of cynicism, hopelessness, and disillusionment—which I wove into my prison suit. But, I was breaking out, I was quaking like a muscle pushed to its failure point but I did not fail, and with trembling voice I spoke my truth: I want to know why I do the things I do, and I am trying to remember magic—the magic that died during my childhood existential crisis—magic that I sensed I would find a graspable portion of in this room, with these 10 strangers, in my heart, in my life, in my light that was hidden so well under a bushel, as they say.
My first experience of breathing was foundational—it was about safety. It contained both the feeling of incredible physical and emotional safety and also a sucking vulnerability that arose and was extremely challenging. I felt at once right where I needed to be but also wanted to run screaming all the way home. Perhaps one could not exist without the other. As the wisdom goes, “never pass up a chance for death and dismemberment!”
If one is held in incontrovertible safety, one may freely go wherever their inner wisdom leads and should the need arise, one may simply ask for help and find that they certainly are not in peril, but in a room. They are in a container of mutual respect, curiosity, and tenderness, holding us all on this journey, with knowledgeable helpers who are gentle and wise and who know how to deepen experience, which is the key to a self-guided resolution.
I went where my self wanted to go—at times laughing hysterically, at one point swinging bouncily on a cosmic swing, and at another, weeping over the plight of nurses everywhere who work so hard and care so much and are martyrs for the sickness of the world. My hands twisted in tetany for a time. When Elizabeth checked in with me toward the end of the timelessness that I was on the mat, she suggested a technique that allowed me to exaggerate the tenseness and rigidity in my hands and forearms. Balanced against all of my fear and self-consciousness, I agreed, and struggled with this mightily. When I relaxed, my entire existence spilled out as though my structure had disappeared and I had become a wave, my hands held and the feeling of care and unity pervading my being.
“How do you feel right now?” Elizabeth asked, quietly, from somewhere in the darkness, her soft hand holding mine.
“I feel safe,” I replied, though she could not know how deep and profound that felt experience was. It was more than the thought that I am safe, it was the full body sense of safety in my blood and bones, but also in the core of myself as a process.
“I think you should try to remember this feeling,” she said softly.
At the same moment, it is almost 5 years later, and I have breathed many more times. The last of which went something like this:
I was in the woods, crouching stealthily, pulling the branches back. I was exploring the forest. I dipped between the branches and beheld the tent that my daughter and I were sleeping in. I was both the creature in the darkness and the darkness all around. I was part of the forest: observing, curious, just an in-the-dark thing of no particular shape or creed, a thing whose home was there amongst the stars and their reflection in the lake, there with the happy clovers, reishi, lady slippers, mushrooms and dark. I was both this forest shadow and the more traditional concept of myself: a mother in a tent with her daughter snuggled up with her, with an air mattress slowly losing air, with thoughts of did we put the food away? What’s happening with the fire? Oh no! No coffee in the morning, the bottle I had prepared had smashed, heartbreakingly. Beyond the tent and the smoldering fire, the lake was seemingly full of stars. My dark self moved in shadows and swam in that place of stars—she did not strive to fulfill others’ needs.
And I flashed to my daughter, the day of her first dance recital. I had just finished putting the requisite makeup on her innocent face when she went to get something upstairs. She tripped up the stairs in her slippery stocking-feet and hit her shin. She was crying on the steps, and I went up to her. I looked into her eyes, dark with mascara and welling with tears, and they were my eyes. It hit me that she is me. And likewise, I am my mom. We all seem to be at different points in our lives, but we might not be, we might all be happening at once in the same point. Death, the unifier, the revelator! Well, don’t worry about that, don’t worry about losing them or losing yourself even, because they are you. My mother is in me when I’m gardening, writing, when I’m making a crisp fold. And there on the steps, it is proved as much as anything can be, I am in my daughter’s eyes.
Though I had very little context in which to put it, the night before my first breathing experience I had witnessed Lenny’s lecture, the first one you hear, the one about Plato and the rise of the psychedelic movements, the aim of which is an attempt to grab us by the lapels and confront us (as I did with my father the night I finally asked him, “Is there a Santa Claus? You TELL me RIGHT NOW!”) with what I came to know as the paradigm of Newton and Descartes. I had been dismantling my programming before this, but the task of sizing up the vastness of the misunderstanding we are all engaged in was and continues to be made ever so much more colossal as the philosophy of Plato, Whitehead, and Grof gain traction in my mind.
The last time the world was seen as alive, full of spirit, and organized by a creative principle, it seemed, was ancient Greece! The mechanistic, capitalist Spartan mindset has taken over, and centuries of indoctrination have leached existence of its interconnectedness. A travesty! As philosophical and also mathematical models suggest and prove and describe how we are indeed connected to each other and to our environment in a constellation of jewels, the repercussions of this teaching is what you see before you today. But let’s not…let’s not describe the horrors, but implore each other to be the creative spirit, let the daily lives of the Ancient Grecians inspire us to be alive in the alive world, and among each other, to ask the big unanswerable questions, to experience poetry in a footfall, in the glance of a stranger passing on the street, in the incredible sky that tirelessly sings the masterpiece in which we live.
And on I go, because I seek. And because I know that I don’t know much, but I do know I am a process, and I am accompanied well along my journey. Still convalescing from my amnesia, the way is veiled… It is not until “after a long period of attendance on instruction in the subject itself and of close companionship, when, suddenly, like a blaze kindled by a leaping spark, it is generated in the soul and at once becomes self-sustaining.”––Plato, Letter 7.
I facilitate this work now as I learn more about this wild and tender practice. I am learning to stay low and ask questions, to never assume but to trust my intuition, to encourage others to “give it a voice” and take back their power to create their reality.
When I speak now, my voice is steady. My thoughts flow…for the most part. My heart is a vortex of energy and blood, a worthy ally. I have not missed an opportunity to be dismembered, and have, without fail, made it safely to the other side. I have built a modicum of trust for myself, and love. I have unraveled a few tight knots, knowing now that pulling harder just makes them tighter; it is in allowing for slack that they let go. I’m perplexed by paradox, grounded by community, encouraged to ride the waves.
