How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

My breathing, I have often touched on in my blogs over the years. It was dramatically disturbed / affected in the neurotic / conscious, protracted birth trauma caused by my mother. I was locked in the birth canal for 48 hours. Therefore, many of my act outs and subsequent therapeutic treatment experiences have come to focus on my breathing.

For several years, existed a repeated pattern, during my birth primal, that I fell into a deep anesthesia. This was aggravated gradually that I hyperventilated fiercely and suddenly not breathing at all. This condition lasted a good while and I struggled desperately to get air but without success. Suddenly, I gave up and felt myself drowning / dying. Consciousness returned weakly and slowly. I had been through a primal instead of an epileptic seizure. The feeling of anesthetic pressure released slowly. I experienced a total relief and liberation, first physically and shortly afterward emotionally. My breathing was relaxed and parasympathetic.

During more than 20 years, I made early each morning push-ups (2 x 125) at my fingertips with my feet on a table (my way of freediving). During each of the two pushup series, I held my breath. Besides Carbamazepine (Tegretol), these act outs were my way of keeping up my ego and reduce my anxiety of my problems and then especially the epileptic threat. I used my abdominal muscles in combination with my pushups to displace anxiety and tension associated with a stressful and demanding work career. This defense tied to my breathing, which I had developed over many years with great willpower and discipline, was certainly the heaviest reason that my two years at the Primal Institute in LA did not lead to faster visible results.

The physical defense, I felt instinctively and contacted the Rolfing Institute at my regular visits in Boulder, Col. In my files I still have the following statements by Ida Rolf:

“Physical individuality is shaped by the forces of life - how we were born, when we learned to move, our goals, experiences, accidents, mental and emotional sets. All of these leave a record in our mental and our physical memories. The two are in many ways similar - bodies, as well as minds, bear witness to the puzzlements, accidents, unfinished business of our lives.”

“The more you watch people change in front of your eyes, the more sure you are about how people can get stuck in childish incidents, or birth incidents, or for all I know pre-birth incidents. You see it right in front of your eyes. And then change happen through Rolfing, and it begins to be possible for a body to take on what we consider appropriate adult form. Then the person continues on psychologically, and develops.”

During 5 weeks, I received a treatment at the Rolfing Institute. I got a deep tissue massage to restore the body's natural posture and structural integration, which certainly, in time, would have a different, very profound, pleasant and fascinating effect on me physically and mentally. The treatment took place just weeks before moving back to Sweden from LA. Immediately when I came to Sweden effects of Rolfing started to show. January 1980, I experienced for the first time how a potential Gand Mal seizure developed into a birth primal. Thanks to my time in the Primal Institute, having understood the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse I could grasp and handle what was happening to me. Not to forget the Primal Retreats in the 80ies.

The rest is happy history. With the single exception that Dr. Janov, who is well acquainted with the potential of Rolfing, is not for it. He wrote in an email to me on the 10/12 of 2010, when I told him that I started the second series of Rolfing treatments: "Rolfing May help but I am not for it because it pushes the muscles to release tension without proper connection to the brain. The brain should first give instructions and then the muscles release as a result of a memory or imprint. It is mindless and I am not for that”.

Dr. Ida Rolf apparently saw it the other way around.

Personally, I speak for both in combination. I am an excellent example myself and I have friends who have shared my experience.

Saxophone and breathing.

My new "act out", to learn to play the saxophone, reminds me of the many emotions that affected my life, consciously or unconsciously. Breathing is a critical factor in the Woodwind Instruments. Being able to keep the tone even and beautiful over several beats would not work with shallow breathing.

Thanks to The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse and Ida Rolf's deep tissue massage / Structural Integration I hope one day being able to handle the saxophone for my own satisfaction. Probably at the price of a number of new repressed feelings popping up!

Jan Johnsson

Arthur JanovFebruary 8, 2016 at 10:38 PM

 Jan, most interesting. art