I have not posted anything in a long time, because during the last 12 months my focus has been on learning and integrating. Since that first three day weekend in May of last year with Brian Ridgway, I have continued to dive into his extraordinarily powerful Spellbreaking work. And boy, it’s been a really incredible year for me. Even though my life and my work already felt quite wonderful, so often I was amazed by what I had still been carrying with me. So often I sat in such gratitude over what had just lifted.
The whole year has been a deeply moving confirmation: Yes, there really always is more freedom, more of our power and more of life’s goodness available.
Now I am extra excited, because I just signed up for Brian’s full certification program. I had been vacillating for a long time whether I needed or wanted this training or not, because I had seen how quickly the power and principles of spellbreaking were already naturally flowing into my work. And as a result I have seen so many of my clients allowing profound openings and breakthroughs to happen as well. I say “allowing” very intentionally, because this work, more than any other modality I have used, showed me so clearly:
The depth of healing I am able to facilitate, greatly depends on the other person’s ability to see and allow an expansion of what they thought was possible.
Cornerstones of Spellbreaking
Today I want to share some of the fundamental principles and power of this work with you, and one essential tool you can begin using right away.
The first cornerstone: We create our own reality.
Why is this awareness the key to our ability to heal or transform something in our life? Because only when we are willing to consider that we have been creating an experience can we recognize that we also have the power to change it. The more we are willing to take responsibility for what we are experiencing, the more we can shift what feels out of alignment into something that reflects more of our true self.
You may recall I wrote about the question if we create our reality last year. If you’d like to revisit that article please go here: Substack Article “One Radical Question”
The second cornerstone: When something we want doesn’t happen, it is always because we also don’t want it.
More precisely: there are too many of our inner children who don’t want it. They are sure it’s not safe to let it happen. And even though we have kept them hidden, we have also given them so much of our power, that they always win.
From the outside this most often shows up as:
self sabotage
other people standing in our way
recurring “bad luck”
illness
or outside circumstances that work against us.
The third cornerstone: When something we don’t want keeps happening, it’s always because we are also holding on to it.
Here our inner children are convinced they need the very thing we are trying to get rid of. They are sure that without it they won’t be safe, won’t be loved, won’t fit in or are unable to survive.
What I’ve found so intriguing about this work is how quickly it helps us to get in touch with our inner children. It helped me to recognize that our unwanted emotions are usually our inner children calling for help.
The fourth cornerstone: Our breath and our emotions can take us into the spaciousness of the present moment where we can access a deeper truth.
In order to be able to sense what our inner children are afraid of, and in order to break the spell they are under, we need to help our thinking mind to quiet down its frantic habit of constantly trying to figure everything out. We want to slip into the slowness and eternal spaciousness of the present moment, and enter a deeper state of being - by becoming fully present. This is the only place where we can hear our inner children and remember who we truly are. And the breath is what takes us there.
The Power of the Breath!
Even though I learned early on about the importance of using the breath in a healing process, it was only during this past year that it became clear to me how fundamentally our breath is interwoven with our pain.
When we were little, every time we felt intense or overwhelming emotions that were not welcome, we learned that we needed to keep them under control. We learned to prevent them from being noticed or to stop ourselves from feeling them. And how did we do that? We held our breath or stifled our breathing! In other words:
We learned from the very beginning to reduce our breath to suppress the expression of our true self. It became so automatic we don’t even notice we’re still doing it!
So, how can we now use our breath to help us heal?
Here are the markers of breathing yourself back into the freedom of being who you really are.
Straighten your spine all the way to the top of your head. You can sit, stand or lay down on a flat surface.
Breathe more deeply than usual, and as deeply as you are comfortable.
Let your inhale and exhale be naturally even without pausing in between.
Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. (Your tongue is naturally up against the roof of your mouth on the in-breath and naturally down on your out-breath.)
Breathe all the way into your belly. (Keep your shoulders relaxed.) Your belly moves out on the in-breath and in on the out-breath. You can put a hand there to feel the movements.
And finally: Use your facial muscles to put a slight smile on your face. (It signals your brain to change its chemistry.)
What happens next?
As you deepen your breath, you will be able to feel your emotions more strongly. And you will likely notice that a strong emotion is accompanied by a particular sensation somewhere in your body. This is usually where you have tried to bury that emotion.
So now you are doing the opposite of what you taught yourself as a child: Instead of trying not to feel by holding your breath, you are deliberately using the breath to invite the very emotion that you’ve wanted to avoid for most of your life.
In order to help your body digest the backlog of this emotion you have stuffed away, there is one more crucial step:
Separate the raw emotion from the story.
Most emotions we have given names to are really an emotion plus a particular story. So whatever emotion you are feeling, it will have one of these three raw emotions at its core:
Anger
Fear
Sadness
For example: Rage is anger with a particular story. While resentment contains anger along with a different story. Anxiety is fear with a particular story. Whereas Panic is fear with a different story. Grief is sadness with its particular story. Disappointment can either hold sadness or anger or both at its core attached to yet a different story.
The more you allow yourself to feel this raw core emotion, the more you will be able to let go of the story.
And just as important: as you breathe space into the physical sensation and welcome this raw emotion, you are also enabling your body to finally digest it. Our bodies are designed to naturally digest and transmute our emotions and recycle their energy and power back into our being.
What our bodies can not do is digest the story.
And our mind can’t digest our story either. It is designed to engage with the story to figure out a solution. It just never can! There really is no solution to a spell, because the spell is based on a lie, a misperception or illusion. You have bought into something that isn’t true! Which means the only thing that can happen is for the whole story to fall away.
What is happening for your inner children?
Up until now they have experienced that you have either barely endured their emotions, pushed them away, shut them down or distracted yourself from them.
Now you are essentially saying to them at last: Come here and sit with me. I hear you. I am so sorry I have ignored you for so long. I welcome what you are feeling. You are safe here with me. I will breathe and feel all of it with you until you feel better.
As you continue to welcome and allow yourself to feel the emotion while you keep breathing, the intensity of it will eventually diminish and the quality of the sensation will too.
Being fully present
In this state of being fully present we can discover what old distorted conviction has been running our life. When we question it to hear the truth, we break the spell we have been under.
In this state we can listen to our body and our being and wake up to our individual way of knowing that we don’t need to fix ourselves in order to be loved, that there is nothing we need to prove to anybody. We can essentially realize that we are perfectly ok just the way we are, and that in fact there was never anything wrong with us to begin with.
Start to free yourself!
A full Spellbreak contains all the steps that lead you to this inquiry. The breath however is the most essential part of it, and I want to invite you to use it. Even on its own, practiced with this awareness, it is extraordinarily powerful. Each time you use this breath, it will:
Please let me know if you have any questions. - And I would love to hear what you notice!
May we all become ever more free to be who we truly are!
Much love,
Tomma
If you are curious how to invite your inner children to reveal what they are afraid of, and to help your mind move in a healing direction away from your old stories, you could watch the recording of a workshop I offered last summer. Inner Children / ManifestationWorkshop
