WHY WE INTEGRATE CEREMONY INTO OUR TRAINING PROGRAM
Why we include teachings on ritual and ceremony, and ancestral healing as a core part of our Seven Directions® Breathwork training - Some words on our values and what we stand for.
Thank you for considering or choosing Seven Directions® Breathwork Training Program.
If you are here (or you’ve already signed up), you will have perhaps be looking at our training because it holds resonance for you. We trust that choice would have been made in part because of the focus on the principles highlighted on our website relating to our training values and ethos, and the why and how our lived experiences - past, present and future, link to the practice of our healing work, of which breathwork is a large part.
Breathwork is a practice we can use for improving health and wellbeing, expending consciousness and cultivating awareness of how our breath connects us to a greater sense of purpose in our lives, but healing in not mono-focussed and so we see breathwork as simply one aspect of that healing work.
A student recently asked us why we include these monthly ceremonial sessions and what relevance they have to breathwork training - to our training in particular.
The reason we include a monthly focus on ways of understanding ourselves through the wider lens of ritual, ceremony and intentional rites of passage is to strengthen our links to our communities, our ancestry, and our relationship with the earth and nature. We believe that everything is connected! However, in many ways healing has devolved into a hyper-individualised journey into ‘self’, sometimes at the expense of how and why it matters to bring this into our wider communities and our world. Bringing conscious awareness to these greater connections supports us to step out of ‘self’ obsession, into the wider global perspective which we feel is so badly needed at this time of immense change.
Transformation requires courage, resolve and commitment to make it happen, and we see active listening and authentic relating as being core parts of making this change possible. If we cannot bring all ourselves to the table, what parts remain hidden and how does this limit us individually and collectively? We also include dialogue around what inclusivity and diversity really mean so that we can ensure we aren’t just paying ‘lip service’ to the wider implications in committing to seeing collective healing as a global necessity.
Faculty member Sisonke Papu hosts monthly ceremonies throughout or programs.
When a breather comes to a session they come bringing with them all of their personal life experiences before that moment. Each person carries the lived experiences of the people, communities, and beliefs of those who shaped them - parents and caregivers, education establishments, workplaces, partnerships, ancestors, current family and more.
Bringing these experiences to our conscious awareness supports our understanding of how and why trauma or challenge may be experienced by a person as they move through life, where it may get stuck in the system, and how to compassionately move towards those parts of ourselves to bring back wholeness and therefore expand our human potential in our lives.
When we focus solely on the practice; the science, the anatomy & physiology etc, we move away from the spirit and soul of a person’s life, away from the global perspective. That said, these aspects of our work at Seven Directions® are fundamentally important to us because if we are inviting folk to move towards their most tender and vulnerable edges, we need to know how to do that in safe and ethical ways in order to avoid further re-traumatisation. This is really important to understand!
When unwilling to look at old patterns in our lives or to contemplate the wider implications of this work, we begin to become myopic in our outlook and may simultaneously either knowingly or unknowingly begin to protect those ingrained ways of ‘reacting’ to the world, protecting ourselves from further disharmony but inadvertently actually reinforcing them.
Our training seeks to support the repair of what we consider to be a fundamental separation or disconnection from our authentic, embodied experience of being human and to ensure that there is a clear link between the personal and the collective.
In many ways, traditions such as those brought to the program by Sisonke, Maya, Timmie and other faculty team members are Universal, and yet have have often become marginalised through the diaspora of so many people, cultures and traditions on this Earth. Greedy land and resource grabs and a colonial sense of entitlement have taken people from their roots and practices. Religious dogma and fanaticism have de-valued ideas and beliefs different to their own, and so we witness in the macrocosm what we now feel in the microcosm - separation and segregation.
To this end, we have invited Sisonke’s monthly sessions (Timmie in Canada) and other lectures woven through the training to be very much a part of what we bring because they hold a strong focus on these core experiences which shape us. We actively seek to include our relationship to self, to others, and to the planet which is fundamentally why we do this work - to move away from hyper-individualised ways of healing work and move them back into the collective. This is the dance between intero and exteroception. We also seek to work towards collective conscious repair of the legacies of colonialism and capitalism, choosing to return to the heart and to move towards the restoration of balance on this abundant earth.
Whichever culture we lean into and learn from will not always be relatable to each member of the collective. We’ve all lived different lives in different cultural, racial and social containers, and so we trust that these core guiding principles, taught so beautifully by those we invite into our program will be received in the spirit of open hearted curiosity, being led by those who have direct lived experience of the practices and traditions being shared.
We are very aware of cultural appropriation and tokenism as the less attractive parts of western healing practices, and so how do we bring this into our container with sensitive, informed awareness? We bring in the lived experience (as mentioned above) of those who have been forever on the wrong side of history in shaping the stories of this planet and her people. We ask and we listen in the spirit of humility and reparation.
As students or prospective students of our program having read our website, curriculum, and teaching platform values, goals and principles, we assume that this matters to you too.
We invite you to see these sessions as a fundamentally important part of our work.
How will you invite expanded awareness of the breather/s on the mat?
How will you begin to invite all of the person and their histories into the space?
How will you avoid assumption, recognise privilege and power dynamics, and begin (or continue) to value the experiences of each person who comes to work with you, without overlaying your own values and experiences onto the breather on the mat?
How will you avoid appropriation?
This is also in part why we commit to working the Presence Process as part of our training. Before looking to others we need to build a strong awareness of what exists and moves in our own psyches, and we need to take personal responsibility through radical self awareness. These monthly ceremony sessions and teachings are brought in to work alongside the Presence Process to remind us of both the personal and the collective as frames of reference.
WE are the people who are making the changes we want to see in this world - it starts with our own self awareness and ripples out from there.
As a further aspect of our work, we actively seek to improve on inclusivity and diversity by welcoming the lived experiences of those who hold different wisdom to our own and build these values into our infrastructure. We do not exist in an echo chamber of our own experiences (though it can often feel like that), instead we seek to be part of that proactive movement for change. We are always open to doing more, to being better.
The more we listen and learn from one another, the stronger the sense of our interconnectedness grows, and the more resilient our collective responsibility and call to action becomes. We have been separated from each other, from ourselves, from our Earth and from our roots for too long - it’s time to call ourselves home.
If you are contemplating our program, we hope this helps give you a clearer idea of what our program fundamentally represents. Do reach out if you have further questions.
Thank you for reading and honouring this part of our training.
