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:
Marilyn's Deliverance

Marilyn was reared in a strict home environment where she, her brother and sister were discouraged from expressing their feelings. Marilyn experienced both of her parents as emotionally unavailable. Her alcoholic father started sexually abusing her when she was three years old.

In adolescence, she sunk into period of substance abuse, depression, and unsuccessful relationships. She felt sad, angry, confused and withdrawn. Her mother, a diagnosed manic-depressive under psychiatric care for eight years, recommended that Marilyn see a psychiatrist. Marilyn underwent four months of Freudian analysis and then quit.

At twenty, Marilyn saw another psychotherapist for another four months. By then, she says, "I was in complete denial about the depression. The therapist would ask me questions like: Are you sleeping at night? Do you have mood swings? I knew what she was aiming for, because I was used to dealing with my mother's depression. So I would answer no--even though the answer was yes to all of them--and then I would stop going. The truth was that I felt awful."

Despite several more brief forays into therapy, prompted each time by lingering feelings of sadness, mental and emotional confusion, and low self-esteem, she did not receive a clinical diagnosis of depression for years.

Meanwhile Marilyn's drug use had increased to four times a week by the time she was seventeen. That year she moved out of her parents' house. To cope with her feelings of loneliness after leaving home, Marilyn says she did what she had seen her parents do: she drank.

Marilyn married her first husband when she was twenty-one, and had a child immediately. Divorced less than a year later, she soon began another relationship, living with her partner for five years before marrying him. With her second husband Marilyn drank and used cocaine five days a week, and smoked two-to-three packs of cigarettes a day. She wanted to do coke every day, but she couldn't afford it. Her regular cocaine use continued for five years, as did her heavy drinking and smoking marijuana.

Her second husband divorced her. She lost custody of her daughter and lost a business she had partnered in that same year. In her words, she "hit rock bottom." She had noticed the effects of alcohol poisoning in her face and her eyes, which were full of broken capillaries.

Deterred by the high cost of private counseling, she decided to try AA meetings instead. "I hated every minute of it," she says. "I didn't feel very comfortable telling my life story, and I didn't feel comfortable saying I was an alcoholic. The people weren't very nice either. I just felt it wasn't for me."

However, Marilyn did stop drinking. She also quit using cocaine, but she continued to smoke marijuana.

Marilyn began to practice meditation and intentionally spent free time alone at home. She experienced what she refers to as "my spiritual awakening, some incredible experiences of inner vision and peacefulness."

She got a job in a bookstore specializing in books about spiritual practices and became an avid reader. That year she met the man who would become her third husband. "And that was when everything went downhill again."

Marilyn's new partner was married. "That's how bad I felt about myself," she says, "putting myself in a relationship like that. Even after all the meditation, I was in incredible pain emotionally. I started drinking again." They both drank heavily through the period of his divorce, and married.

She says, "We were fighting and drinking all the time. He was working, I wasn't. I was home all day by myself and just drank. I didn't know what else to do." During this time of low self-esteem Marilyn had a strong desire to do something for herself. She reached two decisions: to quit smoking and to become a vegetarian.

Marilyn saw a psychiatrist who finally diagnosed her condition as depression, and attributed her drinking to the depression. He prescribed Prozac.

"It wasn't working for me anymore after a few months, but I continued to take it and I continued to drink." She was instructed not to drink by her psychiatrist, who asked her every week if she was still drinking. "I would tell him I was drinking just a couple of glasses of wine a day when I was actually going through a magnum every night and still doing the Prozac."

After four months, Marilyn was still depressed and her sleep patterns were erratic. She was experiencing intense feelings of self-loathing and paranoia. She had extreme mood swings. "I didn't just get angry," she says. "I was enraged."

Marilyn was working in a health food store when a woman who was facilitating a workshop at the holistic bookstore came in for a candy bar. Marilyn remembers the woman explaining something about a process that sounded spiritual. "I don't even remember if she mentioned the breath. I could hear her saying let me make an appointment for you, and every fiber in my body just said, 'Yes! OK, I'll do it!' I didn't even ask her how much it costs. It was just meant to be."

Within six months, Marilyn experienced nineteen sessions of Full Wave Breathing, nearly one session a week. She says that in her first session she released a great deal of the self-loathing that had plagued her throughout her life. After this session, she says, "People at work were looking at me and saying, 'Boy, you're in a good mood today. What's going on?' I had a smile on my face and I wasn't in my negative self mode."

After her second session, Marilyn slept through the night for the first time since she began taking Prozac. She ate lighter foods after her third or fourth session. "I couldn't exist any more on the fast food stuff. I was already a vegetarian, but I was still eating junk, a lot of candy. So I cut out sugar and fat." As a result, she says, "My body just felt better."

After her fourth session, Marilyn stopped taking Prozac. "That was a big step," she says. "Even though it wasn't working for me, at least it was something I could hold onto." She stopped seeing the psychiatrist who had prescribed the Prozac. "I knew the breath was working for me," she says, "and I felt much empowered for the first time in my life. I was finally taking control of my life."

Marilyn stopped drinking and smoking marijuana permanently and began IBI's Professional Training. Her lifelong depression finally disappeared. "I feel at peace," she says, "even when I'm feeling my emotions. I don't make them wrong or right. It's okay to feel anger. It's okay to cry. I'm much kinder to myself and I'm much more allowing."

She reports a blossoming spiritual transformation. She meditates daily for one hour, and now finds that her meditation experience brings her a deeper sense of connection with God than she ever felt before. She has become a more giving person by shifting her focus from trying to make other people feel better to simply "realizing that strengthening my own connection to Source is what service is all about."

Marilyn is presently managing a health food co-op. She is also a certified Full Wave Breathing Facilitator, seeing breathwork clients regularly. These days, she enjoys her work. "With the Full Wave Breathing I'm just doing what I love to do. I feel that way about the co-op too."

The biggest change that Marilyn attributes to the training and Full Wave Breathing is her strong sense of self-worth. "I thought that there was nothing to love," she says. "I love myself now and I really believe that for the first time in my life. If you feel good about yourself, then your life is great!"