Since 1991, thousands of people have experienced the joy and health benefits of Full Wave Breathing. Here is one person's story of how Full Wave Breathing changed their life.

CASE IN POINT:
Art's Metamorphosis

Art, a 57-year-old adult child of alcoholic parents, had a long history of emotional repression and addictive patterns involving work, sex and tobacco. These lifelong habits grew out of his unconscious search for love and approval. Unable to form intimate relationships or express deep feelings, devoid of joy in his work, Art felt spiritually bankrupt.

Art's mother is a recovering alcoholic who drank until her son was ten. He has no memories of his first five years, and remembers the next five as being filled with repercussions from his mother's drinking. She was too busy recovering from her hangovers to have any love and affection for Art.

"The first ten years of my life were the last ten years of her drinking," Art says. "She told me once about an incident that occurred after she had quit drinking and been in a twelve-step program for a year or two. I came home from school one day and she put her arms around me and said, 'I love you, Artie. I love you so much.' She says I looked up at her in surprise and said, 'You do?'"

Art begin smoking at eleven or twelve, and for most of his life continued to smoke about a pack-and-a-half a day. He tried to quit a couple of times, but never managed more than a day until he tried the Patch. Even then, he quit completely for only two months.

Like many children of alcoholics, Art did not want to follow in his mother's footsteps. Art learned behavior patterns and coping skills growing up in an alcoholic home. Some of this became clear to him when he first attended Adult Child of Alcoholic (ACOA) meetings.

He read a book that identified ten ACOA traits, "and seven of them," he says, "were dead on me, two of them were possible, and only one in ten was a miss." He realized for the first time that his experiences were not unique, but were in fact quite common. "I wasn't aware until then that when you're raised in an alcoholic environment you tend to develop certain kinds of skills to survive. If you don't become aware of them, you just keep using them, even when they may not work for you any more."

Soon, Art realized that his battery of coping skills made for very poor marriage skills. He married a woman who, like him, was a frequent drinker, and poured himself into his work to avoid the marriage problems. He also engaged in extramarital affairs during twenty years of his thirty-year marriage.

Art and his wife divorced in 1991 after which he decided to see a counselor who specialized in addictive behaviors. He learned that the isolation of a child hungry for parental love stayed with him through his relationships. During his two years of treatment he came to see that in his marriage, "we were both frequent drinkers and we both had behaved as alcoholics."

He also realized that he had been living his life for his wife and children. He and his family were invested in "this image we had of ourselves as this outstanding and unique and fabulous family. Now that bubble was going to burst for all of us." Most of the time Art was simply accumulating money and investing it. He had no sense of purpose in his life. Instead what he wanted was good health, love and intimacy, and work that was joyous to perform.

Art was searching for the missing elements in his life when he met a Full Wave Breath facilitator. He told her the three conclusions he had reached about himself: that he had no sense of a spiritual connection, that he had been stuffing his emotions, and that he had closed himself off from intimacy. She suggested that he try a Full Wave Breathing session which he did two weeks later. During that first experience he "realized that here was something I could put to work to make the changes I was looking for. It was so important for me that I broke down and cried in that session about some of the tragedies I had experienced in my life. What a fantastic feeling that was, to start letting go!" He had never cried before about any of it.

During the next eight weeks, Art had nine sessions. In order to learn to apply the Full Wave Breath as well as other tools himself, Art enrolled in the IBI's Professional Training himself and received his certification.

Art noticed rapid changes in his attitude and behavior as the training and his breathwork sessions progressed. He was calmer about things, and the stress he had felt for years abated. He says, "Full Wave Breathing allowed me to experience full honesty with myself and with someone else." He was changing from a scarred, lonely divorcee into a man who was willing to allow love for the first time.

His friends and colleagues remarked on the changes in him almost immediately. When Art went to work on the Monday following his first session people were asking him, "What happened to you? You look different-lighter or brighter."

According to Art, "My life had changed and was never going to be the same. I didn't even know what I meant. Yet, I knew it was true. My life was going to be different."

Art made a number of rapid lifestyle changes. By the time he appeared at the second weekend of Professional Training, he had stopped eating meat and eliminated caffeine, alcohol and nicotine from his life.

"Full Wave Breathing," he says, "was the key to reclaiming myself. I was able to make decisions that were for my good, and follow through with those decisions." He retired from the computer industry which gave him new found freedom. "I wanted to live my life for me, and without the breathwork, I would not have given myself the chance to do something that is joyous." Art now guides group and private breathwork sessions with his partner, who also became a Full Wave Breathing facilitator.