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:
Henry's Transformation

Henry, an engineering manager, saw that his life was falling apart in his late forties. He separated from his wife and moved out of state. A few months later he suffered a complete mental breakdown, experiencing severe depression and thoughts of suicide.

As a child, Henry had found it difficult to express his feelings. He had learned that in his family that it was risky to show them. Henry's childhood home environment was emotionally and physically violent. His father beat his mother and tormented her emotionally. He abused his children in the same way. "I had to be extremely alert," Henry says. "He was a rage-aholic. I knew the gun was going to go off in my face at any moment, but I never knew when." Henry learned to survive by becoming defensive-- emotionally, physically and mentally.

In this tense family environment, withholding feelings was an important survival behavior. Henry learned to be stoic from his mother, herself an incest survivor. As she told Henry recently, she felt terrible abandonment as a child and in her marriages. Henry's own feelings of abandonment may have been exacerbated by the fact that his father felt so jealous of the attention Henry got as a newborn that "he basically forced my mother to hand me over to a wet nurse." Henry never did experience the tenderness from her that he wanted.

With pressure from both parents to be alert, to perform up to high expectations and to keep his feelings to himself, Henry spent his childhood trying to be "a classic super kid." If he did everything right, he might win some measure of his mother's love. If he did anything wrong, he earned her indifference or criticism, and there was always the possibility of a beating from his father.

Another way he learned to survive was by converting his fear into anger. He believes his father practiced the same behavior. Whenever something happened that was not what his father expected or wanted, he would get angry. His explosive rages occurred when he felt threatened. Henry likens this behavior to his own. "When something would go awry for me, my first and strongest reaction was anger. That was the only emotion I felt comfortable expressing."

Henry's survival skills-his "perfect" behavior and stuffing his entire feelings-carried over unnoticed into adulthood. So did his fears. He continued to experience fear of being judged, fear of people, and especially fear of being in front of an audience. He found making oral presentations at work especially traumatic because "I was putting myself at risk in front of other people, and I was always very fearful about the possible outcome," he recalls.

Henry named his assortment of psychological affects codependency. "It's the only serious illness I have ever had," says Henry. "I was always in control, always stuffing my feelings, taking care of everyone else first, being the super achiever, the super husband and super father-absolutely alone within myself because I couldn't let these feelings out. I was afraid to admit I had feelings, let alone express them."

Problems in Henry's marriage led to divorce. He moved out-of-state for job reasons. Nine months after settling anew he underwent a major depression that he calls his "crash and burn" period. He contemplated suicide. "Finally I realized that I was not in control here and needed help," he says.

Surrendering control and asking for help were new experiences for Henry. He believes that his willingness to surrender was vital for his recovery and subsequent spiritual awakening. He went to a family therapy counselor who described his behavior as codependent, his marriage as abusive, and his emotional state as repressed.

He learned that he had repeated some of his parents' behaviors in his own marriage. While he wasn't physically abusive or abused, he expected perfect behavior from himself and his spouse. As a "caretaker" for his wife and his children, he disguised his controlling behavior as nurturing.

Henry and his therapist embarked on inner child work to resolve the pain and trauma of childhood and to create healthier adult behavior patterns. Henry attended co-dependency meetings and entered a co counseling group.

After five months of private sessions, his therapist told him that he was OK. They agreed that he just needed to keep using the basic twelve-step tools, and he stopped going to therapy. "The counseling and group experiences showed me the origins of my behavior and how I got to be the way I was." Henry now says, "It was principally mental work." It stopped short of changing behavior. "Eventually we just ran out of the domain of her experience."

During a sailing vacation with the new woman in his life, Henry says, "a very arrogant side of my personality emerged," which caused a break in the year-old relationship. "It shocked me to see the work that I still had left to do." He was acting out deep feelings and old behavior patterns that he had thought were gone. In desperation, he resumed counseling, but wanted something more. Four months later he had his first session of Full Wave Breathing.

He felt an incredible release of stress in his very first session. He says he found himself expressing deep anger and hurt from childhood, followed by empathy for the injured child he had been. He felt as if he were being "held in an angel's arms." This experience ushered in a deeper sense of spiritual connection that grew more profound as he continued sessions.

He did five breath sessions during the next five weeks. He enrolled in the IBI Professional Training, which provided him with twelve breath sessions over the course of the training period and the transformational tools he needed to restructure his life.

Full Wave Breathing enabled Henry to accept his feelings. While his therapy had given him intellectual understanding of his behavioral patterns, the breathwork gave him the emotional and spiritual permission to feel.

Once his feelings started flowing, Henry noticed the potency of his anger. "Even the smallest things provoked it, like not being able to find my car keys. It would pass very quickly, but it was there, and for about four months I had this heightened awareness of it." This was the behavior pattern he had learned from his father-to become enraged when he felt unsafe.

Full Wave Breathing enabled Henry to integrate his angry feelings and resolve them. The anger, for example, has left him. While breathwork didn't shift him completely out of the mental realm and solely into feelings, it did give him balance and equilibrium. His episodes of anger or fear or resentment became fewer. "I could see more rapidly what was going on and process the feelings very quickly as they came up."

Soon he was using Full Wave Breathing whenever uncomfortable feelings came up. Henry went from a thirty-year smoking habit to two packs a day to two cigarettes a day, and then stopped smoking completely. His blood pressure dropped slightly from 110/76 to 110/64.

Today Henry feels incredibly at ease around other people, and his fear of being judged is almost gone. His friendships are deeper than ever before because he feels "no need to nurture them the way I would have in the past. They're effortless." He doesn't need to control people or events in his life anymore, and has no attachment to the outcomes of his actions. This is a dramatic about-face from his earlier orientation. "Full Wave Breathing got me out of my mind and into my heart," he says, "and that was where I needed to experience."

For Henry, "The single most amazing thing about Full Wave Breathing is that the changes are just extremely rapid." He believes many people are looking for something to help them in their lives because "the classical techniques are not doing anything for them. This will. I'm having a great time and it's so effortless."