You’ve probably heard me say this before – our Shadow is the underlying assumption we made about reality when we were very young. Faced with an emotional situation we were not capable of handling, we came to certain conclusions about what is safe to believe, what is safe to be and not be, or what is safe to do and not do.

Some of these assumptions have proven very beneficial – like not running your finger along a knife’s edge or putting your hand into fire. And there are other beliefs that do not serve us – they actually limit us and limit what is possible for our life. But we don’t think to question them, because they became the lens or perception that we use to view everything from – it’s our platform, our point of view.

What complicates matters further is that questioning these assumptions feels unsafe. They were put in place to keep us safe, so it feels almost dangerous to question these beliefs. As a result, we are walking around with a view of reality that may not be serving us well. We move through life, bumping up against our assumptions – some we may become aware of and eventually release.

At a certain point, we eventually hit our deepest, most cherished beliefs about what we think is true. These are the most difficult to release. We are brought to this point by life itself, because our higher-order desires – like the desire for a soulmate partner, or fulfilling career & financial prosperity, or perfect health – cannot be achieved with the thinking of our limited Shadow self.

This is when you, my clients, come to me. Either you’ve been bumping up against the same limit over and over, or some intense life event takes place that rocks your world and causes you to question your beliefs.

You’re always asking me “I understand how I put this programming in place, but how do I release it?” I am one of the few coaches that works with you through the emotions stored in your body. I believe the body IS our unconscious mind, and it is in the body that this programming is stored, in the form of beliefs held in place by strong emotions. This is why it’s so difficult to simply “change your mind,” “change your thinking,” or “change your beliefs.”

I recently had some fortunate synchronicities that led to my taking 3 separate seminars with Dr. Sue Morter. She is a brilliant Energy teacher, healer, yoga master, author & speaker. She is a trained chiropractor, and her father was also a well-known chiropractor who created the B.E.S.T. – Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique.

Dr. Sue shares my belief that the answer to shifting our beliefs – and therefore our reality – lies in our body. I am just in the beginning stages of understanding the brilliance of Dr. Sue’s teachings, but one of the practices I’ve picked up from her seminars is what she calls “Central Channel Breathing.”

It goes like this:
Imagine when you take in a deep breath, that it is starting above your head, and flowing down through your Central Channel – the channel of what are known as our “chakras” or energy centers, as depicted in the chart below:

As you exhale the breath, you send it down your remaining chakras and through the floor to the Earth Itself. And then you alternate and take in the next deep breath from below, starting from the Earth Itself, and send it up your Central Channel, exhaling above your head.

There is more detail to this process that I won’t get into here. The way I have worked with it with my clients is, when we identify where an emotional blockage is felt in the body, we take this Central Channel breath into that emotional blockage to move it, shift it, and eventually dissolve it.

The breath is a powerful healer. Dr. Sue says that our breath is who we truly are – our breath is Spirit Itself – and as we breathe, we bring more Spirit into ourselves, into our bodies, into our lives. There have been scientific studies that show many diseases being healed simply by introducing more oxygen (breath) into the system. And I was impressed when Dr. Sue shared with us that the only treatment for illness she EVER received growing up were the B.E.S.T. and deep breathing techniques!

There are many ways to release your Shadow programming – you’ve heard me speak about many of the different modalities I use – and doing deep breathing is one of these powerful tools. I hope this article helped you! Let me know what you think or how this worked for you by leaving your comment below or on my Facebook page here.