[su_spacer size=”5″]SUMMARY
Being bullied led Cyrus on a transformative path of healing. After traditional Psychotherapy didn’t help, he discovered a variety of solutions that allowed him to heal and connect with others.
He shares his feelings of being separate, different, and alone. And he offers the solutions that worked for him. He traveled to India and discovered a wide variety of healing solutions.
In this interview he shares:
- How the body reacts to traumatic experiences
- His holistic approach to healing
- Methods that completely transform and heal these traumas
- The thoughts, emotions, and experience of healing bullying
Fully free, fully connected is my state of being now. Just this freedom to look at the world and think I’m lucky to be alive. Whatever I want to do, I can do. No fear of going somewhere new. No fear of meeting people new. It’s a complete transformation.
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Sebastiaan: Welcome to episode 70 of Social Anxiety Solutions – Your journey to social confidence. My name is Sebastiaan van der Schrier and I’m an ex social anxiety disorder sufferer. Thanks to energy psychology in the help of some brilliant therapists I’ve been able to become free of anxiety. I’m comfortable and relaxed in social situations. And on this show, I interview different kinds of experts a lot of the time. It used to be every week and these experts are researchers, psychotherapists, healers, coaches, psychologists and they’re both from Western traditional psychology as well as the new and emerging field of Eastern energy psychology.
And so, each week will put new tools into your toolkit to enhance your social confidence. And this week I’m interviewing my buddy Cyrus and we, we will be talking about a variety of topics, but we’ll be covering bullying. Maybe in a bit more detail because this month depending on when you’re listening to this, it is bullying solutions month. So, without further ado, this is my friend Cyrus. So, Cyrus can say, yeah, something interesting about himself.
Cyrus: Sure. Hi Sebastian, firstly I’m happy to be here. And yeah, I’ve trained in a variety of modalities Eastern and Western psychology and trained in Gestalt therapy. I’ve worked with a variety of other new-age mediums transformational breathing, biodynamic breathing. I’ve studied somatic experience bioenergetics and in many healing modalities reiki and a number of other things. And all of that actually was driven by kind of a topic of the day actually Sebastiaan.
Sebastiaan: And we, we were improvising a little bit with this microphone that we have to pass along because we had some technical difficulties or we’re trying to work with it. So, yeah, thanks for being here and I thought we’d kick it off with a what a question within the, the theme of the day.
And so, what, what is your experience with bullying in your life and maybe a bit of how that fell to you? Because a lot of people that are listening to this they have experienced this, or they know people that have experienced this. I’ve experienced a little bit of it myself. Like what was that like for you? And yeah, what were the thoughts that you were having, what were the feelings that you were having so people can relate a bit?
Cyrus: Yeah, it’s interesting. Bullying was quite theme of my formative years, right the way back to my earliest memories I can remember these feelings of being separate to everyone else, being different, being alone. My bullying career, my first experience of bullying I was like seven or eight years old at school and the effects of that were this feeling that there was something wrong with me because it didn’t come from one person, it came from a variety of different people. Some of which were the teachers as well.
And so, I was left with a feeling that there was something wrong. And then as time went by that feeling transformed. When I was in my teen years and still being bullied it started to dawn on me that actually there wasn’t so much wrong with me, it was the way that the outside world viewed me. The labels that they put on me. And yeah, this the feeling was that there was something in just and there was an acknowledgment there was lots of things wrong with me too but nothing in alignment with the level of energy that I was feeling and its way that was coming towards me from the outside world.
Sebastiaan: I think I have to lift my finger when I want to say something. Can you maybe say a bit about what the bullying was about? Like what did they bully you for? Yeah, cool. Yeah.
Cyrus: So, actually were in black and white so maybe it’s not so visible but I’m quite dark-skinned. I grew up in London in the 70s and at that particular point in time England was very economically depressed and the general message of the government, the politicians was the… or certainly the not there’s so much government but the politicians that were not in power was the reason of all this economic depression is the immigrants, is blame it on the immigrants.
And so, there was a very definite anti Asian feeling in the UK at that time and it was summed up in the term Paki. And that was a term that sure Pakistan but actually related to anyone from the kind of subcontinent that had brown skin, Beach Sri Lankan or Indian or Bangladeshi or Pakistani or me who I’m Persian origin. My surname is Irani so I’m over Iranian descent. And so, for me it was I didn’t really have a haven amongst the other kids that were being bullied because Union kids and the black kids and seemed to have a few numbers of their own. I was the only Zoroastrian which is my religion, very ancient Persian Knights. Like almost nobody’s ever heard of it. Even my religious started slightly digressing, my religious education teacher at school when I said what my religion was, told me, “That’s not a religion Cyrus. I think you’re mistaking it for Rastafarian”.
But actually, yeah. And so, I have a strange religion and a strange name and a strange country thing, so I was very, very separate. And there was a definite feeling of separation and the blame from the outside was the problem, was these immigrants. So, there was this real anger and it wasn’t just from the children. As we all know in our adult lives children are a mirror of the families they live within. And so, yeah, it was a really strong feeling of there being a group negative energy and that the bullying was a just form of that energetic feeling.
Sebastiaan: Yeah, did they call you names or anything particular or…?
Cyrus: Yeah. Yeah, it was packy and yeah, I mean some of the names I can’t really say you know, when every single name I was called it was with derogatory, everything, there were lots of things that are aimed at my body parts, you know. Big, big nose and anything that was psychologically wounding. And it was very wounding. And yeah, the effects on my being were… I became totally untrusting. Untrusting of everything external at me. And it’s interesting because that filter systems something that’s very difficult to manifest. Oh, to breakdown as you get older.
And that’s still something I’m trying to be construct. Now is those initial few seconds if I’m not aware, I noticed that same distrust my, my fight-or-flight systems just on the edge. And throughout my whole youth I felt that kind of energy that was just on the edge of flipping into defense mechanism.
Sebastiaan: Yeah, I can relate to that a little bit in the sense that I was you know, nothing like racism or like that. I was actually on the other side where in the beginning where I was really young where I was kind of the bully and I talked about that in another video. That’s more because it kind of gives you a superior kind of feeling and, and that kind of stuff. And you know, there are reasons for why someone has that. Well, you know, for why someone is a bully in the first place.
But yeah, eventually the tables were turned on me and I know I was teased. And actually, my teacher kicked it off. Like she, she humiliated me for having big ears. They’re actually not that bad, they’re not that bad. I think my head was smaller at the time, but it was, it was really humiliating to me at the time and I became like bright red. And from then on people had something on me. They could talk about ears or bring up ears and you know, it would make me flush. And before that they couldn’t do anything because I’m the strongest, I’ll beat you up.
But you know, if the whole class is against you and I read that same distrust that you were talking about I had that as well. As like wow, everyone is secretly out to get me. Secretly plotting against me, hoping that I’ll feel and trip over my feet and so, they can you know launch in on me. And that distrust you know, the same for me. I’m a long, long time, he’ll addressing that kind of stuff. It’s a… It actually is it’s quite a damaging thing to you know, bully something and someone and to go through the experience of it. Yeah.
Cyrus: It’s, it’s psychological warfare as you said.
Sebastiaan: Right.
Cyrus: There’s, there’s even in the moment if it doesn’t exist, there’s an awareness to any given moment if one of the perpetrators, one of the bullies has a feeling of deflation in their being. Something negative comes into their field then I’m a target for them to be able to be strong again. And it’s all about power.
Sebastiaan: Yeah.
Cyrus: So, it’s all about having a power over somebody. And yes, that’s and that’s an unpredictable thing. So, there was no predictability. So, they could be periods of long periods of time where I wasn’t being bullied but there was still that same awareness of a threat, a perceived threat.
Sebastiaan: Yeah.
Cyrus: And that’s super draining on… Like as an adult I understand like on the adrenal system you’re on the edge of this fight-or-flight thing. For your health that’s terrible. It stops the natural flow of life force of energy of Chi through the body of the meridians because the body’s contracted all the time and quite literally bringing energy filed into this strong and hard. And that keeps the whole world away. It keeps me as that person separate. And that’s all for we’re social creatures. We want to be long, we want to feel like we have our tribe, we have a safe place somewhere that’s secure and that was a feeling that I only really started to encounter in my adult life.
Sebastiaan: Yeah. Exactly what you said just like and add on to that. The, the experience of the bullying and you know, preaching to the acquire just mainly for you this for the… for the listener is like when that bullying happens and in the moment the emotions from that experience that they, they kind of become locked inside of you and they become stuck. And then as you go through life people circumstances and events and thoughts and feelings, did they trigger that experience? They trigger the feelings from back then and you often if you were bullied at age 7 you know, you can be 27 and you can relive the feelings of that seven-year-old and you get to feel like that all over again.
And the perception that you picked up at age seven, you know, there’s something wrong with me or people can’t be trusted. That can be in your, in your awareness. It’s, it’s a belief that is actually operating you know, subconsciously. So, you’re filtering social situations through these lenses that, “Hey, people can’t be trusted” which, which leads to social anxiety because now it’s not safe to be yourself. Because if you are yourself you know, you’re not being smart because you know, the default truth is that people can’t be trusted. And if you’re just… so you need to adjust the way you are, and you should, you know, come across in this way and not in that way and bla-bla-bla-bla-bla. That’s why often bullying is, is a you know, the kind of kick-starts the social anxiety problem. Yeah.
Cyrus: Yeah, I totally agree with that like what you were saying about the energy becoming stuck in the body. That’s the actual anatomy of trauma where there’s a situation that happens energy is released in the body to protect to fight off, run fight or flight or freeze. And then that energy that is created in the body that we don’t dissipate as human beings, that’s a different podcast possibly.
Sebastiaan: Along the story.
Cyrus: Yeah, along the story. But because we don’t dissipate that energy what happens it gets trapped in the body and that’s a physical memory and a mental memory. It’s like two lodges of as two registers on a situation in the ledger. And as you said everything that starts to come into our energy field it will go through those programs. The programming is checking is that relevant to that. And what happens over time is our capacity to say yes to life, diminishes the more and more of these programs that are running is really said or as you said the filters are there that we put reality through. And we come out of there as there’s that situation again, I better prepare.
Sebastiaan: Yeah.
Cyrus: And we start to be dominated by experiences that are based on something that happened a very long time ago. Through the filters of our mind we create that relative, reality in each and every moment and that something comes in to stimulate that particular memory. It’s a terrible thing to experience.
Sebastiaan: And, and so, you end up reliving your past over and over and over and over and over, you know.
Cyrus: Absolutely.
Sebastiaan: Right.
Cyrus: And from a… again from an anatomy of trauma point of view, the body doesn’t have a memory of past or future or present. It only has the present moment. And so, as you tell a story from your childhood that you’re super excited about half way to restore you’re super excited and your body’s back in that situation. You tell a story about something that happened it was terrible in your life and halfway through it you can feel your stroke hanging up and can fill your bellies and your heart beating. And so, the body reacts to memory as if it’s happening now and physiologically again that creates health problems, it creates mental problems because there is no separation between body – mind. It’s one vessel. The same things happening on a mental level has a physical reaction. Something has a physical stimulus, create some mental patterns. So, we create all of these blockages and they build up and up and up and they eventually suffocate us.
Sebastiaan: Yeah.
Cyrus: That’s not nice.
Sebastiaan: Right. But there’s good news and that is there are, there are actually quite a bit of solutions for that. And that’s also for a big part what this podcast is about. And the mainstream solutions that are out there are in need of an update and being very nice. But what I’m curious about is what are the kind of techniques that you used in order to kind of start to break up and dissolve these traumatic experiences and that energy that was locked in your system and that kind of stuff? What did you find was very effective for you?
Cyrus: Let me start with what was not so effective. So, my, my routine to all of it was as soon as I had a proper job and good money, I decided to start soon to see a psychotherapist because at that point in time I didn’t live in the New Age community, I live in now there’s all these New Age techniques. There was you had a mental issue, you had an issue you went to see a psychologist. When see my doctor he told me to go and see a psychologist too. So, I ended up finding a psychotherapist and going to see them for six years.
Sebastiaan: Oh, wow.
Cyrus: A great expense. And wow, at the end of those six years I really knew my stories and had such a familiar feeling with them but if I was to gauge my six-year experience on the amount of healing that went on in my being, it was… I won’t say there was none of it, but it was a very, very small amount considering an amount of time and money I put into my healing. And in the end, I stopped because of that. There was no significant change in you know, I understood my story really well and I knew that my psychologist was super impact empathic and I could relax there. But as soon as I stepped out in the wild world, the wide world again there was that same kind of anxiety about it around me.
And so, off I went from the UK and I would started traveling the world and I went to India. And India is a magical mystical place of was such a huge spectrum of different, different offerings and I started to try as many of them as possible. And some of the things that had the biggest impact on my healing were modalities that really didn’t focus so much on the story but focused on the physical impacts of that story. Just like to deal with the physical body as opposed to the mental body. And through… Yeah, through those journeys I found that there was some of the modalities I tried had almost immediate relief. A real feeling that something had been released. And lots of those releases took the form of some weird physical releasing, that if I’d been told about this prior to finding the spiritual world I would have thought I’m not gonna do that. It’s a load of crazy people doing some mumbo-jumbo.
Because the some of the techniques were very unusual and the results were often crazy. And it was… My body starting to release this stored-up energy to protect myself. When that started to come out, it came out in the form of movement of tremor of crying convulsive crying for hours. I did anger processes where I was in a Center in India called the Osho Multiversity and they have a padded workshop space, so you can literally punch the walls. And yeah, I did processes in there that lasted six hours with wild music plan and this energy release. And it’s give them… It’s an interesting fact. But as soon as the physical body and as soon as the human being feels safe, that there’s a safe space for it and that we point ourselves to the possibility of a healing, the intelligence of the human body which keeps us breathing and growing and all these amazing functions wants to do one thing and that’s to heal itself. And that process will happen every time we’re in that space that’s safe.
And a lot of the therapies I did were workshops that had a variety of different modalities in them. And I’ve done workshops involved a lot of active meditations where you got in touch with the story, the feeling, whatever it was that’s that thing that’s the core of your trauma and to focus on it to feel it. To feel what it feels like in the body and to start to understand the dynamic of that relationship and to feel the effects of the paralysis that come from that and then to start to work through it. To start to move through it, to scream through it, to breathe through it.
And so again back to the kind of anatomy of trauma, the breath is a huge part of our, our life. You know we can go weeks without food days, without water and yet a few moments without breath and yet very rarely do we focus on the quality of breath as anything. And with when it comes to situations where we’re scared, almost invariably the breath stops or becomes short. And so, through a lot of different breathing techniques I learnt to rather than be paralyzed to find a way of breathing through that. And what happens is the energy that’s locked in the body again starts to be released.
And so, for me the two things I mentioned in my bio which were somatic experience. In somatic experience is a modality where we observe the bodies one whole vessel. And so, as the story is being told which your practitioner will be listening to your story but really observing what’s going on in your body because the body tells so much and seeing what happens and where is activated and where’s locked, where that energy is trapped and then using various techniques to see if we can access that energy and let it be released. And with the energy release, the story starts getting released. It’s an amazingly unusual thing to experience.
Sebastiaan: Is that from Peter Levine?
Cyrus: Yeah, that’s from Peter Levine. And then there’s a variety of different breath techniques I work with. I work with transformational breathing and holotropic breathing and biodynamic breath and trauma release. Which is all these long name things, and these have been super key tools in the toolbox that I use as a therapist with other things. And yeah…
Sebastiaan: Okay. Can you maybe a… I… Well, we… What we’ve changed some sessions and I’ve experienced the breath work and it is a wild ride. I’ll tell you that, it’s a wild ride. And it is amazing and it’s very effective. And you know, you go into a different world when you do that kind of breathing and that you know, what was your initial experience with that breathing? Breathing or that kind of breath work? Like what got you into it? And maybe it’s a wrong question. Like what was your experience with it? Like for, for the people watching or listening to this? Like how can we get them curious enough about it to give it a go so to speak?
Cyrus: So, the breath is a vehicle with which fear, and trauma sets in the body. Something comes in this is a very gross description of this you can just get the idea of the kind of mechanics and that energy gets trapped somewhere. And then the breath can be vehicle to release that. So, if we can access that same pathway going in and find its exit then we can start to release that. So, the question of “How somebody that’s never experienced breath therapy can start to get an understanding of what it is?”
Sebastiaan: How did you experience it?
Cyrus: Well, I found… I was in India and a place called Hampi. And Hampi is like this kind of lunar environment, it’s like nothing on earth. It’s a unique place. These huge boulders and rocks over this huge landscape but not very high. They just go over on for hundreds of kilometers and it’s like being on the surface of the Moon. Nice to go and walk in there at sunrise. And one morning in sunrise I could hear this screaming. And so, I followed it. It was like the Pied Piper playing a tune. I was drawn to this. And I came around this rock and in this kind of little open cave space was someone the girl lying on the floor and a guy sitting next to her and she was releasing this what sounded like a demon. And he had all of these cushions around her. They had like 15 cushions with them and she was beating on this, on the cushions and screaming and her body was convulsing, and this person was sitting there a little bit like the Buddha, breathing deeply, breathing deeply and encouraging her to try and stay present and try and breathe. Every time her breath got stuck he was encouraging her to breathe through this. And it felt a little bit like watching an exorcism.
Sebastiaan: Right.
Cyrus: That something inside this being was coming out and it… I don’t know. It felt and smelt dark and twisted but I could see some lightness coming into her as this was releasing. And I stayed and watched and then as they were walking off and wasn’t watching like watching. I was watching from a distance. And as I walked off I started to walk down and I was standing walking next to them and they’d stop speaking and I just started speaking to the guy and asked him if I could speak and he said, “Yeah, no problem”. And I asked what he was doing, and he said, “Two minutes of explanation. I’m giving a breath session called holotropic breathing and transformational breathing. A combination between these two things”. Which I’d never heard of. And I was looking at big blank he put his hand on my shoulder, he went, “When he come tomorrow morning and I’ll give you a session”. And so, that was my route in. And so, I went in this Dutch…
Sebastiaan: Were you afraid? I mean that’s like what some people point.
Cyrus: I was super curious and super scared as well. The curiosity was what said yes and then as the day went on and the night came, and I thought I was waking up next morning it turned into a lot of anxiety. But something inside me knew that it was… I saw some liberation in this being in. And over dinner that night in the guest house I was staying, and I saw the girl and I spoke to her about experience. And she spoke about transformation had happened in her just in the space of 45 minutes of lying down. And she too had spent quite a few years in therapy and voiced the same kind of experience as I did.
And this kind of was the strength I needed not to let the anxiety take over the following morning when I almost thought about not going, but I went. And it was I was told to stand up and look this guy in the eyes and start shaking a little bit just moving the body and breathing. And he was talking about what we were about to do. But rather than sitting down we were moving, shaking. And every so often he’d take my intention to a different part of my body and start getting me to breathe in to in an explain a little bit more about the process. And at some point, he was having a heavy feeling.
And I was like “Wow. I feel quite open and super energized “. And he’s like that’s just simply the power of oxygen, oxygenating your body. And that opens up the body, it creates space between the cells and it creates Chi – Life force that can start to flow through these blockages. So, this is the preparation we’ve done. We’ve built up some energy in the body.
And then he asked me to tell me what made me curious and then took me on a journey into really going into what my story was. What’s the story? What, how have I been wronged in this world or who did what to me or what am I carrying or what sadness do I have? And got me to speak. And as I started to speak, suddenly my body was in the story of what was happening. So, I started talking about my relationship with my father and bullying at home and then bullying a school and then the effect that had on me with my fear of everybody which meant I’d never had any female contacts except pie-by. Especially, if the ones I had an attraction for somebody. I just couldn’t be there.
And he was observing my body and he just put in his hand and he asked me if he could put his hands on me and straight away pretending with up my arm and then shifted to my chest. And then I started to feel this. Like I couldn’t breathe. And he said breathe and then he laid me down and was just touching various parts of my body where he could see that some of the blockages were lodged and asking me to breathe into his hand. And then I started to cry.
And it had been a long time since I cried at this point in my life. And I’m not sure if I’d ever cried for this reason because there was no reason. And yet there was a huge… My, my nose was dripping with no stuff and I was wailing like a banshee, like a little baby and my arms were all over the place and at one point there was this feeling of “Well, I’m out having an out-of-body experience now”. Because there’s some calm witness to what’s down below. And it’s the rage and anger and separation and persecution and all of the things I’d fell and never had the possibility of releasing suddenly had space to come out. And it was at that point the most profound experience I’d ever had in my life. And at the end of it, I felt like I look around and I knew I was in the same place, but the world looks completely different.
Sebastiaan: Nice. So, there you go. All right. It’s funny. Yeah, it’s, it’s an amazing thing the whole the whole breadth work and the stuff that is out there. I’m just trying to see like someone is listening to this for the first time and they’re like, “Where the hell did I end up? What is this?” But this is actually backed up by a lot of… Like I’m reading a book right now. Let me just quickly pull it out.
Cyrus: Backed up by ton of studies as well. You know, the US military worked with Vietnam War veterans to see what they could do with the trauma that they come back, with this post-traumatic stress disorder and because there have deadly effects on the human body. And they found their findings were pretty much the same. That they were so traumatized that no amount of storytelling about their “what happens” going to help them. And it was an energy an entity that was locked in the physical body. And they, they’ve got a huge budget and their research pretty much tells the same story that in order to really release there needs to be some physical effect and there needs to be a shutdown and some new software installed or the old software revealed again.
Some programs have latched into there and they are taking us around in a groove in a record to have the same experience over and over and again regardless of what the outside world is doing. And for the first time actually after this session I felt like that’s why I said the world felt like it was a new place because that glass is started to come off.
Sebastiaan: Yeah. And that’s, that’s my experience with it as well. Like you feel you know, there’s something has shifted afterwards. You know, it’s not your typical, “A-ha, I have a logical insight. I see things differently now.” I mean I’m not dissing that… I’m dissing it a bit. But I don’t mean to disregard that as something powerful. It is very powerful if you’re a worldview gets shifted and you have an “A-ha moment”. But this is something different. This is where you have an emotional and energetic shift. And at the times that I have done the breathing and they all haven’t done it nearly as much of them, maybe 10 or 15 times, it’s been quite profound. Sometimes more profound than others. But yeah, stuff has released, and you know, I remember the first time I had a big experience with it. We were living in Chiang Mai and this is I don’t know… Six – seven years ago. My buddy Tom… Well, I interviewed him on this podcast as well on the vulnerability. And he’s a MMA fighter… Turned to a spiritual healer. I mean an interesting story.
Anyway, yeah, exactly. This is a six – seven years ago and then we were very interested in healing and getting more interested in spirituality and that kind of stuff. And he found this guy and he did some kind of a… He did bodywork along with you know, deep tissue affirmations and like a mix of all sorts of stuff. And we had a… We had a mastermind email going with a bunch of people and every week we would write you know, we would have a different person contribute to the mastermind. And one week it was Tom’s time to write and he’s like talking about this experience where he went into space and he saw the stars in the moon and nothing is the same anymore. And I’m… And he’s a very intelligent guy and very down-to-earth guy as well. And I’m like, “What the hell happened? What was the guy’s name?” You know, I need to experience this right now asap. Asap.
You know, I was in Bangkok at the time and the guy came over to Bangkok and I had an experience of it, but I had high expectations. I come to see the stars and the moon than everything. So, that was my expectations. It was just a very deep very painful massage and I released stuff, but it was most mostly like a lot of sweating. Like my bed was drenched with sweat afterwards. But I’m like you know, I want to… I’m gonna get the full-on experience. In a couple of weeks later I had another, another massage with him and at the end of it of the really painful massage and by the way the breath work, my experience is it’s not painful. It’s a bit uncomfortable every now and then but not painful. But this this particular thing combined massage with breath work.
And anyway, at the end of the massage, he lights like some incense and he put some nice jungle music on and you know, before I know it, I’m with my legs up in the air and my arms in the air and I’m screaming at the top of my lungs. And then the guy came walking back into the room because he had left the rooms. Like so he said, “You went somewhere, didn’t you?” Like fuck no, you know. And I got off and literally there was like water on the place that I was lying. So much sweat had come out and I felt so peaceful and so relaxed after it. Like something had really shifted and something was really different, you know. I saw things differently now. I had had processed just like a very visceral experience is what it is. Like very grounded and centered and like you know, “Hey, man everything’s good.” It’s almost a bit of a stoned experience in a time that I used to still smoke and not get panic attacks and that kind of stuff. But you know…
Cyrus: It’s interesting what you say because that which as soon as we release start to release that which separates us, which is our belief systems and the stuff that separated us in the first place due to your bullying. As soon as it starts to be released there’s that feeling of connection again. And having done a huge amount of therapy in my life and feeling pretty down free now, that’s my state of being now – Fully free, fully connecting. The crazy kid I should have been when I was a teenager I wasn’t able to be is like part of my state of being of my whole being now, you know. Just is freedom to look at the world and think, “Yay, I’m lucky to be alive. Whatever I want to do, I can do. No fear of going somewhere new, no fear of meeting people new. It’s like a complete transformation”.
And of course, some of it sounds like it’s right out there. But as a human being we’ve got this the world we live in, you know. If you happen to live in the city and go to a job in an office we’re very much stuck in human world. And absolutely we are created by something and we are part of a connected network of things. And we’re not separate from that. And so, when we talk about energy that’s a very proven physical medium and we have, we are energy.
Sebastiaan: Yeah.
Cyrus: We’re a human being and we’ve got jobs and we’ve got kids and we watch TV but we’re energetic beings as well and we’re physical beings. And then the brain that we have that’s developed this mammalian brain and this like neocortex and all these parts of our brains that separates from other animals, let’s create a mental part of our being as well. So, we have an emotional being. We have a physical being. We have an energetic being. We have a spiritual being. And now there’s certain types of photography like I always struggle with this word clearly and thoroughly and clearly in photography. Which is a type of photography that not only photographs a physical body, but it shows the energetic fields.
And on some levels, this is new stuff and then on some levels which is why we talk about spirituality you read the ancient Vedic texts which are 5000 years old and they talk about the same stuff, you know. And so, now, it’s like science Western science and East and mythology philosophy are starting to say the same thing that we have a definite human experience that’s the one that’s all about our thinking that there are other parts of our being that make up this holistic being.
And the recognition of those different aspects of our being led me to realize that I need to heal myself holistically. So, that’s not just my mental being but that’s my physical being, my spiritual being, my emotional being and my energetic being. And true healing comes when we look at the human being as a whole entity, as a whole object and start to address each of those things.
Sebastiaan: Yeah. So, I found the book that’s called, “Meeting the shadow – The hidden power of the dark side of human nature”. That’s just happens to book, to be the book that I’m reading right now but I was recommended to me by my mentor and I’m… I was bringing that up because I wanted to look at the name of the guy who wrote it, Jeremiah Abraham’s. Abraham’s.
Cyrus: He’s a good friend of mine.
Sebastiaan: There you go. Yeah, and he… Like I did one of the group breathwork things. We live here in Bali in Ubud and there’s all sorts of stuff like that going on. Actually, the place where we live Ubud stands for healing, interestingly enough. So, if you ever got here…
Anyway, so, that was a group breathwork workshop and he showed up there and he was talking about how the breath work originally started by this psychologist who used to work with LSD and then LSD got prohibited. Yeah, can you tell the story? Do you know that story or…? Are you in a butcher just as much as me?
Cyrus: We often sound like we… I’d love you to tell the story.
Sebastiaan: All right. Let me… All right, let me butcher it. So, there was this guy, you can look it up on Google, Stangal for Stanislav.
Cyrus: Yeah, Stanislav.
Sebastiaan: Stanislav.
Cyrus: I call him Stan.
Sebastiaan: Well, whatever. Anyway, this guy and you know, I just heard this story once, so you know, I’m just retelling it from having heard it once, not having the best memory. Anyway, so, he told me about this psychologist and he was experimenting with LSD with his, with his clients and he got you know, results with them that was all interesting and then they prohibited… Is that what you said? You know, it was you know, it was prohibited from, from that moment forward. But he still wanted to have more things going on than just talk therapy.
And so, I think his wife or his girlfriend or his partner was very much into yoga, yogic tradition and breath work and that kind of stuff and they started to experiment with that. And you know, that’s kind of how the breath work started or came into being and that kind of stuff but it’s recommended by many psychotherapists and psychologists and that kind of stuff. So, it’s really cool and it’s very easy. And I also kind of want to… Because we’ve told these wild stories you might want to take a little bit of the fear out of it. Actually it’s, you know, let me just ask you. Is it dangerous or are there side effects or is it something you should really be afraid of?
Cyrus: Well, dangerous – no. Side effects in a negative way that could possibly be some it’s definitely there’s some medical states that you don’t really want to do breathe working if you have a bad heart and high blood pressure and there’s a variety of medical conditions that it would be seek good to seek medical advice first as to whether to do it. But if you’re reasonably fit and healthy just twisted in the mind then yeah. It’s a super unlikely chance of you having an experience that isn’t going to be highly liberating. It may be… How can I describe this? Let’s talk about the ganja. I’m sure it’s very, very painful for a snake to shed its skin but it’s absolutely essential for its growth and well-being.
And so, the process itself sometimes like I said before you was sweating, the bed where, people are crying, I was screaming and whacking my hands, the girl was screaming with the top of her voice, the first I can almost see her now. Still have such a profound experience. And so, I can’t say it’s a pleasant experience but it’s about coming out the other side through a transformation. And like I said before the incredible intelligence of the human body cannot be underestimated.
Each of you out there now, if you’re feeling like you’re disconnected, and this story doesn’t sound accessible and it sounds like some mumbo-jumbo just think for a minute how amazing your body is. How it takes care of the functions that the human body needs. You know, you’re breathing and your digestion and a production of cells and the explanation of toxins and all of these other systems, they’re all happening at all time. How you were once this big and now you’re this big. It’s an amazing vehicle, an amazing ship bio mechanical device. And all it wants to do is heal itself and the healing doesn’t always look the way that we would imagine healing to look. But it’s almost invariably the outcome of the process is a healing one, is a one of liberation.
I hear… I run a workshops and spare stuff and in the workshops in the sharing’s at the end, the words are most common are “Free, liberated, transformed”.
Sebastiaan: Connected.
Cyrus: “Open, loving, playful”. And those are qualities that you don’t want to deny yourself. And there are now many therapies out there. I mean Sebastian’s… I’ve been on the flip side of receiving some sessions from Sebastian too. And yeah, I feel myself just going back to some of your sessions and their transformational. And transformational breathing was called transformational breathing for a reason.
Sebastiaan: Right.
Cyrus: You know, because it is truly transformational. And you know, I’d studied acupressure and so when there is when there’s… You were talking before about your session first press, first breath session being with a massage therapist. That’s like where they can see that those energies blockages are in the body. You start getting in there and starting to manipulate them. That’s opening that body up as go out. It’s trying to create space where there is no space. And when they space this movement, when there’s movement and space energy can flow. And we are beings that have all of these meridians that they show in Chinese medicine although noddies as it’s called in the Indian and the Ayurvedic yoga system. And when these get blocked it causes disease. It causes disease, causes anxiety, stress, anxiety, stress, trauma. They’re all varying degrees of the same thing. Your body is and your mind, our core and blocks are not free to experience the present moment as it is.
And once you start to release those things, you go back to being this kind of childlike being that’s fascinated by the world and playful and excited. And yeah…
Sebastiaan: Very nice. Yeah.
Stay tuned for part 2 to this interview coming next week!
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