AFRICA KEYNOTE PRESENTATION KENYA 2023 - part 1: the stages of healing
Part one: The Four Stages of Healing.
As I begin the integration process from the last 11 days here on Kenyan soil (there are just two of us left here at Brackenhurst Conference Centre now and it feels so quiet!), I want to attempt to share the profoundly life changing impact of this trip. My life has been immeasurably changed by this experience and I remain forever grateful for having had the opportunity to be here. Travel widens ones horizons and gives perspective in life and that’s important.
From the moment my feet touched down on this land, I began to feel my heart open in new ways. Those who know me know I’m not typically a crier, but I honestly haven’t stopped since I got here and the tears still flow! This morning I felt such deep sadness to be leaving here, and despite loving and appreciating my home land and community; this country and her people are hard to let go of - it’s going to take some time…
When I first received the invitation to be a speaker at the Global Inspiration Conference 2023, I was in the midst of so much personal turmoil in my own life I could not imagine saying yes to anything beyond my limited life perspective at the time. I was supporting my son through major surgery and simultaneously navigating many significant changes in my life, yet whilst by brain mind said no, my heart screamed YES! and so it came to pass.
On a personal level, I’ll attempt to write more once I’ve landed and integrated in the UK as it’s still very much moving through me. The deep deep healing I received here is something I will be eternally grateful for.
On a practical level, many people asked for a copy of my keynote presentation which was entitled: Breath: The Gift of Life - Why We Do What We Do and Why Ethical Practice Matters. This subject is something of great importance to me and lies at the heart of my work and training programs.
Eldema Latap Academy School, Nairobi, Kenya
On day one we got the opportunity to visit a Kenyan slum (the words of this culture, not my own) school to take conscious breathing into the classroom as part of the IBF (International Breathwork Foundation) initiative spearheaded by JoAnn Lowell and team; an initiative formed to supportive the establishment of better wellbeing practices in schools all over the world.
It was here my heart cracked open in the welcome we received and the truly humbling experience to listen to the teacher’s stories, to witness the challenges of food poverty, social inequality, stress and displacement from the home, yet to also feel the joy and generosity of the pupils and staff towards our work. I recognised with a significant level of discomfort just how privileged many of us (not all) are in the west by comparison.
In our practices, whether they be in schools, in one to one or groupwork breathing sessions or in the delivery of breathwork training, ethics and integrity belong to us not only as individuals but need to be implemented as a collective too and frankly we have to do better. As breathwork facilitators, we are either part of the problem or part of the solution, and I choose to be an intentional part of the solution.
Breathing Peace Into The Heart Of Africa - photo by Lauren Chelec Carfritz
So let’s start at the beginning with the four stages of HEALING, re-worked from the four stages of learning.
Starting with the recognition of what many of us journey through to find healing for ourselves, it’s important to understand this process so that we also understand the potential for setting someone back in their opening to trust as they/we start to heal.
We often hear the word ‘re-traumatised’ used but what exactly does that mean? For me, to be re-trauamtised is to shut down my willingness to trust as a result of the mis-managed or poorly handled vulnerability which can arise in any kind of situation (not just breathwork) where we are willing to open up to our most tender aspects.
In the process, we may start with:
Unconscious incompetence - we can’t heal what we don’t recognise. In this phase we will typically be subconsciously acting out our repeating patterns in life, often feeling deeply unfulfilled, anxious and isolated and hiding the things we feel shame, guilt, remorse or fear around. Despite our best attempts to paper over these repeating patterns, there they are, making themselves know to us in every moment and wreaking havoc in many aspects of our lives whether that be personal, relational, professional, or other.
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain these things inflict, but the long term distortions they induce which affects the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and their response to it. We create meaning from our unconscious interpretation of these early events.” ~ Gabor Maté
Then comes the moment where we just can’t continue in these patterns and we seek help. We begin moving towards:
2. Conscious incompetence - we become the witness, of our own behaviour and acknowledge that we can’t go on in the same way, that it’s slowly destroying us and that something needs to change. We begin to do the work required to start intentionally changing our lives. This part of the journey is where we may tussle with our resistance, feeling super exposed and raw and this is typically where our ego will fight back. We want the safety of the old but paradoxically know we have to find the courage to change. This is where inner child work is often the most fundamental piece of the healing process.
Next we move to:
3. Conscious competence - I liken this to the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo starts to be able to bend time and stop bullets - Morpheus comments “He’s starting to believe!” This stage is where we finally begin to see the fruits of our commitment to healing and realise how far we’ve come.
We all need to feel safe to properly meet these vulnerable edges of our character structures yet so often in healing work (here we are talking about breathwork in particular) that part is missing if it’s not deeply embedded in the practice, the training and the individual holding space.
Polyvagal theory teaches us about ventral vagal safety - the sense of ease that arises from belonging, connection and safety; our needs are met and we can relax. From there we move to healthy sympathetic nervous system activation as an appropriate response to danger, but the problem is that many of us get stuck in this sympathetic stress response, experiencing the world as a place that does not feel safe to us. We may fight back, run away or fawn. Fawning can offer another way to feel safe, to belong or to find acceptance, but it originates from inauthentic self expression which creates problems for us as we literally betray ourselves and our personal truth.
As breathwork facilitators we are supporting this healing process to begin, or to continue to be met for the purposes of the reparation of our distorted core beliefs. I believe that we cannot support others to venture to the places that we cannot first find in ourselves, and so every breathwork training program should have an inbuilt infrastructure focussing on self awareness as the first and foremost requirement.
The power to heal lives and breathes in the heart! It lives in the soul’s evolution, so as we walk ourselves home to our final reckoning, how can we do better, be better, and love ourselves and each other more in a world that values competition, productivity and the ego more than it does connection and community? Through awareness, acceptance, knowledge, integrity and compassion. We get to love and welcome it all as part of this human existence, and we build resilience through commitment to cultivating our practices and to the healing journey.
This is where we finally move to:
4. Unconscious Competence - here we get to live, breathe and be our full radiant self, trusting in the flow of life, adjusting our thoughts and responses when required and shining our light out into the world as we become the wisdom keepers of our own beautiful, terrible, painful, ecstatic, exquisite lives. Our knowledge is integrated and we no longer have to ‘effort’ to deliver our wisdom, hiding underneath a deep ‘imposter syndrome’ that somehow we aren’t enough. Instead we fully accept ourselves and our gifts and others may also benefit from that lived, integrated, self-trusting experience.
We realise that we had two choices - SINK or SWIM and we chose to swim and thrive! We are humble enough to know what we don’t know and can’t do, and self aware enough to recognise our own limits AND our own value. We have become the living embodiment of our life stories and we are able to take that into service to others.
Photo of Sisonke Papu, Mbutch Mjingoma, Lucy Wilde and Nathalia Westmacott.
In the above part of my transcribed presentation, I have started by sharing how I addressed the stages we must all go through on the road to healing.
In part two of this blog series, I will address ethical practice and the key issues which lie at the forefront of breathwork facilitation. I will speak to why it matters that as we support others in the navigation of these stages, typically in the earlier stages of their journey, we must tread gently, wisely and in a trauma informed, grounded and professional way in order to ensure that we are not doing harm to anyone who comes to us for healing.
Breathwork remains a largely unregulated field of work but thanks to the hard work of many organisations worldwide, this is now changing. I believe we have a duty to call out malpractice and put in place better protocols and standards that we can all adhere to, and so in part two I will speak to what some of those key issues may be, and address the ways in which we can do better and be better as a community of practice.
Asante Africa!
