Glimpses from
the SOURCE Process and Breathwork Training
By Archie Duncanson
What's it like being in an international breathwork training? The Binnie A. Dansby
3-year breathwork program has trainings in Denmark and Britain. When you are a
participant in one of the trainings, you may join any of the weekend or week-long
meetings of the others, so there are usually guests from
the other countries on any given weekend - and some stay for the whole year long!
The training in Denmark has its monthly weekend meetings in Copenhagen, with two
live-in weeks and a long weekend at a manor house in the countryside. We have about 50
participants this year with the majority from Denmark, some from Sweden, and including one
Brit, 2 Americans, one Swiss-Danish-Israeli and one German, all living in Scandinavia.
This makes for an incredibly lively group, with all the languages, backgrounds, travel and
life experiences!
One aspect of this liveliness is language. A language, like an individual, is so much
more complex than it seems when you first meet it. It is so personal, coming to us from
our mothers and fathers and aunties and granddads or whoever else was important to us in
our early lives. It has its meaning for us from the way that they used it and gave meaning
to their speech. The words were not just words but sounds, facial expressions, and other
body language - the whole atmosphere and feeling in the air. Our schoolteachers may have
then given words a little more structure and abstraction, but their scope remains far more
than any narrow definitions to us - they are symbols representing a whole wealth of
sensory experience in our lives. A word brings up, in principle, associations to every
single instance that word has been used during our lifetime! Let us see some examples from
rebirthing.
Our Danish training is conducted in English when we are in the big group with our
teacher, Binnie Dansby. The German training's big group is conducted in both English and
German, with whatever Binnie or a participant says being translated to the other's
language to make sure everyone understands - so you get to hear everything twice, which
sometimes is an advantage! The all-English conversations in Denmark are more spontaneous,
but the German conversations are more calm and considered - everyone has time to think
while the translation is being made. When it is time for coffee break, small groups or
pair work, the room breaks into sounds from many languages - there is a bubbliness and
mental agility of quite astounding proportion. To hear people switching from one language
to another unimpededly gives proof of what wonders the human mind is capable. Some
jokingly say that these trainings are "the best language courses around".
Trying to say something in a foreign language is always a case of simplification, more
or less, while still getting the message across. Depending on your abilities - or the
recipient's - you some times have to speak in headlines, being satisfied to just get the
key words across. This gives a certain freedom from the perfectionism most of us put on
our intellectual lives, and our utterances, in our native language. There is also a
certain uninhibitedness because the sounds do not have the same childhood associations as
the equivalent words in your mother tongue. For example, when children in Swedish school
hear that I am American, they sometimes demonstrate their knowledge of English by telling
me all the obscenities they know! My ears cringe (I am 52 years old!), but to them this is
just Eddie Murphy, reggae, or rock lyrics - they are freer than I am with these words! So
I think expressing deep feelings in a foreign language is often easier, though less
accurate - you get help from not being quite so attached to the words and phrases.
Breathing and affirmations are another matter. Here the language wants to activate
something in the body, or the soul. It is a matter of receiving rather than of giving, of
activating old rather than of creating new. An affirmation during breathing is like an
arrow going into the client and here there is no question in my mind but that mother
tongue has far greater power, whenever it can be used. For one thing, it is the gateway by
association to all childhood memories. I remember being in a group of six people in a hot
tub supporting Rolf, a German living in Sweden, in his first rebirth. He was struggling
and really working at it, and after a while we too were working hard giving him various
affirmations in Swedish trying to help him release. But it wouldn't come, the struggle
was locked up in his chest. Then Tamara said a few words to him in German, in a tender,
motherly voice, and it went straight to his heart - the shell was cracked. And when she
began singing Brahm' s lullaby with German lyrics, he was not the only one to shed tears -
it put me right back in my mother's lap, too.
Of course, there is the occasion when some thing new we learn in a foreign language,
such as a popular song or phrase, is better, and never seems to sound quite the same
translated back to our own language! In our training we have had much discussion over how
to translate the word "innocence " into Danish and Swedish, where the direct
translation would be the equivalent of "unguilty". Since a negative is generally
not good in affirmations, and even though this was the accepted word, we wished to find a
better one. Finally we got help from the German training, which had had the same problem
in German. They had come to solve it by most often using the expression
"pure-hearted" (for example, "Du bist reinherzig, Hans" ). Since
Danish and Swedish are Germanic languages, the same construction worked for us. I even
like it in English - it sounds so nice to say "You are so innocent and pure of heart,
Lisa, and everyone knows it!"
Well, these are some of the joys and puzzles of being in an international training. I
find it enriching, stimulating, challenging and fun. And if we have to work harder at
understanding each other now and then, or making ourselves understood, then we can always
go back to hugging! Most of the time there is that feeling of excitement one gets at an
international train station or airport, of expectancy, of just a little uncertainty, of
adventure in the air. I highly recommend it! And then too, who can resist the charms of a
person of the opposite sex, with their own unique accent? In our trainings, everyone has
an accent!
© January 1994 Archie Duncanson
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