Hello Everyone,

The days are getting longer here on the tropic of cancer. The sun is rising further to the north every day. Life is soft and sweet and warm in the southern Baja. I hear that we moved our clocks ahead last week, but I haven’t worn a watch in almost five months. It has been so wonderful to relax and flow with the natural rhythms of life here; and it’s also been wonderful to be free and flowing with those who have been coming and going. It’s been a time for doing nothing, and yet so much has happened since November. 

Welcome to the April 2008 Breath and Breathing Report…At the moment, I’m sitting in a hammock looking out at the orchard. It’s almost sunset. The sky is doing a light show behind the Sierra Laguna Mountains. The plum trees and the mango trees are budding their little green fruits. We’ll be feasting on them in July.  

One of the guava trees has been raining fruit for almost a month. Maybe tomorrow we’ll collect whatever the birds haven’t already claimed. We have to wade through an acre of waist high brush to get to them… but wow, what tasty delights! And now another even bigger tree is about to start giving us its fruit. A tag team guava fest! The trees must be celebrating because they’ve been getting water after several years of no irrigation. 

The avocado trees gave us fruit (is avocado a fruit?) right into March. One of the trees was already flowering new fruit, while we were still picking ripe ones from last season. Very unusual, we are told! We also harvested about ten kilos of very sweet limes after uncovering several young and old “lemon dulce” trees in the second five acres.

One of the hummingbirds just hovered by my ear and pulled on my hair again. That’s the third time. I think he’s the guy that was born on the edge of the campsite over the winter. He brought a girlfriend home recently… Maybe he’s looking for nesting materials. Maybe he’s picking bugs out of my hair… Maybe I need a haircut.

In any case, it’s another glorious day here. It’s quiet and peaceful, yet buzzing with life. (We have two bee hives now, and they are chock full of honey!) It’s a good time to look back over the past few months, and to thank everyone who has visited since I got here. 

Thank you to the breathwork students, teachers and practitioners who took part in the first Breath and Breathing Training here in the Baja. Thank you all for your love and your inspiration; and for your help on the farm and in the gardens: Luba and Diana from Russia; Kina, Angela and Giles from England; Josh, Julie, Will, and Maya from the USA; Lesia from the Ukraine; Virginia from Lithuania; Catherine from France; and René from Estonia; and to Wendy and Kim two local breathworkers and long time Cabo residents.

We’ve made many new friends here: winter residents, seasonal campers, tourists and pilgrims. They heard about our prana gardens and came to breathe with us.  Thank you Arinna, Jeanette, Lynn, Catherine, Michelle, Harry, Scott, Miriam, Nancy and Anne. Thank you John, Simon, David, Reed, Robert, Levi, Max, Roberto, Steve and Edith, Rik, Harry, Heime, Barbarita, Thank you to the wonderful group from Yandara Yoga Institute: Bolo, April, Robert, Jessica, Melissa, Shane, Lydia. 
 
Thank you to our neighbors and the local villagers who have been so kind and generous. They’ve helped with plants and supplies, ideas and advice, tools and equipment, repairs and maintenance, with music and laughter, with home cooking and hard work. Thank you Kimo, Edgardo, Layo, Lito, Ernesto, Jose Luis and Olivia, Lupé and Olga, Guillermo, Aidé, Catarino, Flavio, Oscar, Clemente, Bennie, Stephanie, Mary Carmen and Cesar, Pancho, Charlene and Enrique, Santiago and Kim, Melisa, Betha, Alehandra, Laura, Miguel... (I promise to learn more Spanish!) 

A special thanks to Gabriel Howearth (I call him “Angel Gabriel my Garden Guru”), to his wife Kitzia and their son Nick, and to Mohave our friend from up north; and of course thanks to my full time worker Trino. Thank you all for helping me to discover my green thumb. Without you guys I’d be shopping for fruits and vegetables in the grocery store instead of grazing for them in my back yard!

To all of you who wanted to visit, but could only bless me with the spirit of your presence… I saw you dancing in the garden and I felt you breathing with us! Thank you Dalia, Alex, Jane, Andrius, Skirma, Ananda, Indira, John, Gaia, Jenya, Ruta, Michael, Aclima, Bil, Talvi, Sergei, Julia, Ivonne, Rebe, Andrei, Natalia, Frank, Tania, Paul, Bob, Rita, Paul, Debra, Serena, Claudia, Fred, Stephan, Solve, Tiina, Oleg… oh God, too many to mention! This is your eternal home. The Prana Gardens await you forever!

Thank you to the Baja Bio Sana co-founders who visited in February, and who made the purchase of this land possible: Andrew, Will, Lee, Angela, Fernando, Bruce and Ambaya.

By the way, we are 8 founders to date—each having contributed $15,000 USD to form the NPO and to purchase the two parcels of land. We intend to complete the circle at 13, and so we are ready to invite the next five founders. They will make it possible to do the initial earthworks, develop the basic infrastructure and dig the well, and construct the main buildings. 

We’d like to invite a seasoned organic farmer, and also a good computer web media wiz. You can read the initial founders invitation and the early ground reports on the website. I’d especially like to invite family and friends, and spiritual breathers, but my job now is to get out of the way and say yes to whoever is called here by the land itself, whoever feels drawn to the vision, whoever is ready to live the dream. 

Aaaahhhh…! I just got a whiff of the orange blossoms. You know, no matter how hot it gets here, there is always plenty of shade and a breeze somewhere on the farm. There is an amazing system of micro-climates here. The air that comes down from the mountains meets the air that comes over from the sea, and it turns and swirls and dances around us.

A moment ago, I saw a woodpecker with the brightest red head I’ve ever seen... but it turns out that she was just carrying a cherry tomato home from the garden! We haven’t been able to keep up with the tomato crop, so it’s good to see the locals feeding on them!

After an initial free for all, the wild pigs and the rabbits decided to let our gardens be. I think sitting up all night and talking to them helped. But maybe they got tired of listening to that donkey in the hills who goes on and on with his strange loud calls late in the night.
The coyotes like to call these hills home. Maybe they scared them off. 

I wouldn’t mind seeing the moles move on. Those little buggers have been pretty busy. They ate up most of the radish plants that we were letting go to seed. And now they are working on the carrots and the lettuce and the broccoli! They also love nibbling on the tender roots of the young trees. 

I am grateful to have a good fence around the farm. It may not keep out the moles, but it does keep out the donkeys, horses, and cows that roam as free here as the birds and bees and butterflies. 

I recently learned that Mexico is the number one country in the world in biodiversity. I believe it. I camped in a place up in the arroyo where a palm tree, a pine tree, and an oak tree were growing side by side... One more reason this is the perfect place to create our little Garden of Eden. It’s like natural “Noah’s Ark!”

For those of you who love birds, here’s a list of some of them we’ve seen nesting and feeding around here so far: 

turkey vulture, crested caracara, raven, magpie jay, curassow, verdin, black phoebe, gnatcatchers, small fly catchers, cardinal, scott’s oriole, hooded oriole, gila woodpecker, gilded flicker, xanthus hummingbird, costas hummingbird, cactus wren, white winged dove, inca dove, red tailed hawk, kestrel, falcon, northern harrier, cooper’s hawk, house finch, elf owl, large owls (great horned and others), blue jay, swifts, black and white warbler, california quail, belted kingfish, coots, great blue heron, great egret, swallows, loggerhead shrike, road runners, vermilion fly catchers, canyon wrens. On the coast, we see frigate birds, blue footed boobies, pelicans, gulls, black oyster catchers, and more…

The “Prana Gardens”

I started several gardens as a meditation, to learn, and in order to produce seeds and move us toward food self-sufficiency. The first garden was a traditional Mexican layout, about 50 straight rows, 8 to 12 feet long. We planted tomatoes, string beans, basil, corn, squash, peas, radish, peppers, watermelon, cantaloupe, and more.

The second garden is called the “snake heart” or “river heart” garden. It’s about four feet wide and a hundred feet long. It winds like a river or a snake, and at each bend there are heart shaped beds about six feet in diameter—five of them in all. The garden represents the awakening of “kundalini” energy and the flow of love. 

In that garden we planted: Cilantro, Purple and White Cauliflower, Eggplant, Beets, Red Ursa and White Kale, Parsnip, Carrots, Broccoli, Beans, several types of Lettuce, Onion, Spinach, Radish, Cabbage, Cucumbers, Bok Choy, Sugar Peas, Sunflower, Calendula, Nasturtium, and Tomatias (Yellow Husk Tomatoes).

The third garden was planted at Christmas. It is shaped like an arrow. It is 75 feet long, pointed due north on the compass. The herbs we planted reflect the balance of Aryuvedic foods. The shape of the garden symbolizes focus and movement toward “The One.” 

At the base of the arrow and in the feathers, we planted Spilanthes, Brahmi, Chives, Onion, Basil, Fennel, Peppers, Garlic, Ginger, Cilantro, Turmeric, Peppermint, Parsley, Lemongrass, Marjoram, Chamomile and Arugula. Planted along the length of the shaft are corn, peas and tomatoes. At the tip and on the points of the arrow are Cava Cava and Kale, Carrots, Beets, Spinach, Broccoli, Persian Garden Cress, Asian Greens, Mustard Greens, Giant Leaf Yukima, Tatsoi, Mizuna, Shingiki, a variety of Lettuce, and we planted Aloe Vera, Sunflower, Calendula, Zinnia, and Marigolds.

The most recent garden includes some of the above as well as agave, calypso beans, lab-lab, Hibiscus, Crotalaria, Hicama, and several ground cover and nitrogen fixing plants. We also planted gourds to make spoons, cups and bowls, and Christmas ornaments. We planted more fruit trees in the orchard: fig, leechee, memé, guayabana, pomegranate, citrus grandé, orange, grapefruit, and lemon. We planted grapes, papaya, passion fruit, and more guava trees. 

Recently we’ve been planting “carisso” and bamboo, and a lot of palo de arco. (This is a native tree that grows very fast, and the wood is very tough. It is used to make everything from fences to furniture, to walls and roofs. And the bark is medicinal.) We also planted some sugar cane and the first bananas. And I’ve been planting flowers about: lavender, bougainvillea, poppy (giant peony mix), cosmos (summer dreams), amaranthus, and a mix of perennial wild flowers. 

Soon, I will really go bananas! We prepared a place for a big banana circle—actually three concentric circles—21, 45, and 77 feet in diameter. We will plant more than a dozen varieties there. After the bananas, I’m thinking palm trees, coconuts and dates.

We’ve carved out more walking paths, and we cleared new camp sites, quiet places to stroll, sit, meditate, read, commune with nature, breathe, or just be. 

We also built a traditional Mexican shade palapa. It is six sided, and about twenty feet across; the roof is made from palm leaves. It is nestled under the big guamuchial trees. Now it’s serving as a work, storage, and sitting area; and we are drying seeds and herbs in it. With walls, it might make a nice little house, but I am still enjoying living in a tent and sleeping under the stars. Oh, we also built a two-seater latrine (compost toilet). 

The mountains in our back yard often call us to enjoy the hot springs as well as the cool streams, pools and waterfalls. It all starts with only a twenty minute hike. The price of land has doubled here in the last year. This region is in the midst of a genuine real-estate boom. We are lucky and blessed to have found this property when we did.

It is a very magical place that holds something special for everyone who visits (regardless of why they “think” they came!) For example, Giles who came from London to do the practitioner training, met Arinna who was vacationing from Canada; and now they are married!

Kina who also came for the practitioner program, decided to buy eight acres next door to build his “Creative Arts Retreat.” Kina has been a source of tremendous positive energy, inspiration, and forward movement. He’s a former pro footballer and tennis coach—truly unstoppable. He’s a world traveler who’s done a lot personal growth work. Now he’s a “life coach” walking his talk and living his vision. I celebrate www.kinafreedom.com. 

Maya Laura, another amazing practitioner who just finished a month here, will return again in November to organize a program around her favorite passion: medicinal herbs and sacred plants. If you’d like to lead a program of some kind next season, let me know.


Training:

At the moment, I am planning the Fall 2008—Spring 2009 season. Conscious Breathing in nature will certainly be central on the agenda. However, my intention now is to work with a limited number of serious apprentice/practitioners this year—10 or 12 at the most. 

And so if you intend do any breathwork training with me over the next year, then you need to contact me and register as soon as possible. I’ll be living here in the gardens for nine or ten months of the year, and traveling for only two or three months. 


Travel:

I will be traveling soon. I want to spend three or four weeks in the USA. Ill start with Santa Barbara: arriving April 24. Contact Ivonne Delaflor: 805 695 8440. 

After that, I plan to visit Sedona, Amarillo, Boston, West Palm Beach, Cancun and Mexico City. 

I’ll also be traveling in August and September. I’d like to visit Italy, France, Ireland, Russia, Bashkortostan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Ukraine.

The focus and themes of the upcoming seminars and trainings are: “Feeling Good No Matter What,” “Creating Your Own Path,” “Playing at Life,” “Toward the One,”


 
Practitioner Notes:

Emotions as the Movement of Life-Energy in Breathwork.

Life naturally moves toward what it needs for existence, and it moves away from what threatens it. It moves toward what is satisfying and away from what is distressing. It moves toward pleasure and away from pain; toward delight and away from suffering.

A key aspect of Rebirthing-Breathwork is to “keep the breath moving.” Movement is the most basic and inclusive life expression. Human emotion is a natural expression of this basic movement. Breathing is the movement of life energy, and this movement naturally results in the activation of thoughts, feelings and sensations, and emotions. 

Sitting in nature, I can see raw emotional energy expressed as movement in the simplest plants and creatures, life forms. Everything can be seen to move in relation to earth, air, water, and light, and in relation to all other living things. This energy/movement/emotion expresses on the most basic level as a “generalized undifferentiated excitement.”

As life evolves, emotions evolve, and this generalized undifferentiated excitement splits into the basic emotions (energy movements) of stress and delight. The birds are such beautiful examples of creatures playing out these pure natural emotions.

As we move up the evolutionary scale, these primal states further differentiate into all of the complex and distinct emotions that we experience as adult humans. 

This emotional evolution often plays out in reverse during a breathing session, as the person “regresses” back toward a purely natural state of being. Various distinct and sophisticated emotions seem to dissolve into generally positive or negative feelings. 

Beyond that, they merge once more into the original state of generalized undifferentiated excitement. This primal experience is one of all-inclusive vibrational energy. It’s when all your thoughts, feelings and sensations, and emotions come together and express as pure ecstatic vibration. I call it our energy body. Some people relate it to dissolving the ego. In the early rebirthing days, we called it “the energy experience.” 

Another developmental pattern that is easily observed in humans is: the movement from action to awareness (from movement to thinking), and the movement from awareness to action (from thinking to movement). 

This pattern can also be observed during a breathing session, when spasms, tetany, or spontaneous movements take over the body, and the person feels that the experience is beyond the control of their ego and out of the grasp of their analytical mind. They don’t understand what is happening, and they are unable to prevent or control the various natural spontaneous movements. 

In breathwork, we can track the developmental sequence: from moving to sensing to feeling to thinking; and back again from thinking to feeling to sensing to moving. 

Anyone who has ever done positive affirmations during a breathing session, for example, has experienced the resulting changes on the feeling level. And anyone who has ever experienced the blissful feelings of breath, movement, or sound, knows the effect it has on consciousness, on the quality of their thoughts and attitudes.

Many of you know that I have been steering breathwork out of the box of psychotherapy and counseling, and even away from all emotional and psychological processing work. Emotional, psychological and physical healing is a natural bi-product of spiritual work. And so we don’t have to go digging for anything, or make breathwork about that stuff.

To many people, it seems that I have taken a 180 degree turn. It seems that I have re-canted much of what I taught and practiced religiously for the first 50 years of my life, and also what I preached and practiced for the first 20 years as a breathworker. But don’t get me wrong: I am still excited by the prospect and the process of helping people to heal deep emotional issues and problems. 

I support every good counselor and therapist and doctor. What a beautiful way to be of loving service to another human being. I’ve been passionately at work treating and curing, helping and healing for most of my adult life. And in fact, it continues to take place around me here on the farm. And so maybe it’s more like a 360 degree turn! 

It’s important to realize that emotions don’t mean anything about us (except that we are alive). And there are no feelings that you “should” have, and no feelings that you “shouldn’t” have. And in breathwork (as well as in life), the key is to simply observe our emotions and to fully feel the energy of them—to breathe and relax into, through, and out of them. 

I learned a lot about emotions from Bruno Geba, my first conscious breathing teacher. And what he taught me has proven itself true time and time again over the years. Sitting here in nature, observing life in the gardens, and observing life in the people who have come and gone… It all reminded me so much of what Bruno taught. And so here in a nutshell is what I got:

Emotions can be categorized by type, direction, and intensity.

1.) Type:  comfort emotions, and crisis emotions
2.) Direction:  movement toward, or movement away from
3.) Intensity:  low, elevated, and high.

With low intensity emotions, the organism is generally placid. We are at ease, relaxed, tranquil, asleep, quiet, calm, peaceful, satisfied, content, complacent, or serene.

Elevated intensity means we are aroused, and arousal can take two forms: vitality and anxiety. Vitality emotions give us feelings of being elated, energetic, vigorous, joyful, happy, playful, lively, lusty, or vivacious. Anxiety emotions are feelings of being upset, uneasy, nervous, restless, worried, apprehensive, annoyed, irritated, dissatisfied, or frustrated.

High intensity emotions express as agitation, and take two forms: fear or aggression. 
Fear expresses as being afraid, withdrawn, scared, frightened, terrified, horrified, stunned, stupefied, shocked, paralyzed, autistic, catatonic, filled with dread. Aggression is expressed as being angry, mad, cross, irate, infuriated, seething, livid, raging, raving, furious, cruel, brutal, or vicious.

From these three intensity levels, five basic emotional/energetic states are produced. (Direction is expressed in various movements depending on the situation):

1. Placidity: the organism doesn’t move on its own: it goes with the flow of the situation.
2. Vitality: the organism participates thru cooperation and support (movement is toward the situation).
3. Anxiety: the organism hesitates, vacillates, or is driven (movement is unstable: often both to and from the situation simultaneously).
4. Fear: organism flees or withdraws (movement is away from the situation, either running away from, or withdrawing within).
5. Aggression: the organism threatens or attacks (movement is against the situation or the self).

Emotions derived from feelings of ease are the “comfort emotions.” They are process oriented. Emotions derived from feelings of dis-ease are the “crisis emotions.” They are goal oriented. The link between crisis emotions and disease is unarguable. People who live with crisis emotions are generally unhealthy, unbalanced, and unhappy. People who live in comfort emotions are generally creative, happy, and healthy. 
 
When we practice breathwork—when we do spiritual breathing, we center ourselves in comfort emotions that range from restful ease and tranquility, to joy, elation and ecstasy. 
Through breathwork we enter a state of pure natural aliveness and free flowing comfort emotions. We achieve a balance and a harmony between “living life” and “being lived.” We fall (or rise) into what can be called a “transcendent” state.

				  Type			Direction		Intensity

CRISIS EMOTIONS 	  Aggression		against		high	
(Goal Oriented)		  Fear			away from		high
				  Anxiety		to and from		elevated		
COMFORT EMOTIONS 	  Placidity		with			low
(Process Oriented)		  Vitality		toward		elevated/high

 
Breathing Practice: 

The Exercise that we have been having fun with lately is “Two Phase Breathing.” 

We assume that you have already practiced the basic breath-energy exercises, have done a few connected breathing (rebirthing-breathwork) sessions, and have done some chi kung or yogic breathing (abdominal control). We assume you have worked most of the bugs and blind spots out of your breathing mechanism. If you haven’t, then this exercise may accelerate that process. And we realize that it may be challenging to learn this exercise without hands-on, one-on-one coaching.

Some people understand two-phase breathing as connecting the rebirthing breath (active inhale and passive exhale) with the chi kung breath (active exhale and passive inhale). For others, it’s about merging opposites or going from “flip to flop.” (From pain to pleasure, confusion to certainty, anger to peace, sadness to gratitude, fear to love.) 

In practice it’s about mastering the reflex points and the neutral points in the breathing cycle. In practice it means exploring the difference between letting the body breathe and making the body breathe—between “being breathed” and “doing the breathing.”

Question: After a big inhale, when your lungs are completely expanded and full of air, what is the one and only thing that can naturally happen to the breath when you relax and let go? Answer: A reflexive exhale.

Question: What is the one and only thing that can naturally happen to the breath when you have squeezed all the air that you can out of your lungs, and then you relax and let go? Answer: A reflexive inhale.

What does that imply about the forces and dynamics that one naturally encounters around those reflex points? What does it mean to hold or blow or push or pull, or “do” anything with the breath at those reflexive points? And how does that contrast with the forces and dynamics that one experiences at the “neutral points” in the breathing cycle? 

Imagine that the full breathing cycle is represented on a clock. The point of complete fullness (after a long strong active inhale) is 12 o’clock. The point of emptiness (after a long strong active exhale) is 6 o’clock. These are reflex points, where dynamic forces are acting on the system, pushing or pulling on the breath. The “neutral points” are 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock. At these points, there are no physically energetic forces pulling or pushing on the organism or the breath. 

Question: What time of breath is it when the yogi encounters the “breathless state?”
Answer: About ten past nine, or around three fifteen!

Have fun! Be well. Good luck with your practice. 
And may life’s blessings fall upon you!
Dan