Today we ran our 9th webinar breathwork, and broke another record. 67 breathers from all over the world, from Florida to Sydney! Pablo Castro joined us at 3 am Florida time. Amazing!
I am realizing that this community wants to happen so much that we will be arranging more webinars and devising more ways to build our family of breathers. This time at the end of the Sunday Live Breathwork Webinar, we put the breathers into ‘breakout rooms’ of up to four people so they could meet and greet in a more intimate way. When we breathe together and open to those deeper parts of ourselves, that allows us to show up with others in presence. May the community grow…
This brings up a point that I would love to clarify, that I mentioned in the webinar on Sunday. More and more these days we hear the word ‘tribe’ being used as an expression of belonging to a group. Perhaps it’s because of a childhood where I felt like an outsider, when I hear the word tribe I actually feel a little fearful. It triggers me because I used to feel ‘left out’ of the group, in some way not good enough to join.
I looked up the word in the Apple dictionary, and here is what I found:
‘a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader: indigenous Indian tribes | the Celtic tribes of Europe.’
Notice the third word – division. When I read this I felt a rush of relief, and validation of the trepidatious sensation when I hear people eagerly use the word. The problem is that when we identify with a group or a following, we tend to forget that we may unconsciously exclude other people. Are we unconsciously creating division instead of the unity we really seek?
Have you ever felt left out, to not good enough to belong?
I know from breathing thousands of people, that one of our biggest issues as humans is a limiting core belief that there is no room for us. We may do many things to prove to ourselves and others that we are worthy, but often underneath we still carry a lingering core belief that undermines our confidence, and limits our possibility too.
This is why I keep choosing the word community. Before we fall into the trap of using a different word to mean the same thing, let’s take a moment to feel into the reality of ‘coming-into-unity’ and what it might mean. What if community is a moment? What if in each moment we have the choice to come into unity, or do the opposite – to choose duality instead?
I know when I used to think of community the first thought that came to mind was a structure or form that would serve as a container for community. It might be land with houses. It might take some other form instead. But I had never considered it as a moment until I started breathing as a practice. Now it seems more familiar to me this way, as I see it happen again and again. After each breath session we do together, whether it’s in a group or on a webinar, the sense of coming-into-unity soars. It never fails to amaze me that as we breathe into our own inner healing, the coming together of our inner bits and pieces, the re-pairing of the broken parts of our past, that this inner journey makes us more available, more authentically present with others too.
Perhaps if we viewed community as a living organism of the collective consciousness, this would be a good start? I am sure this is what prayer was designed for, to unite us in service of a greater being, and those of you that have breathed know that this starts inside each one of us, and then extends to those around us. I often refer to each cycle of connected breath as a prayer. I see it as a prayer for unity, a focused step towards meeting each other through our individual self-awareness.
By Anthony Abbagano
