‘Those parts of us that we keep in darkness we don't want to see. So, what do you not want to see about yourself? […]
By working with the darkness with a breath practice like this, you start to clear it out. It starts to become less scary and not have so much of a hold over you. If you're aware of that darkness or what lies in your own shadow, and you are tender and kind and loving towards it, then it loses its power over you. […]
So it's very much like the seasons: you have this darkness and composting over winter and then what's been growing under the surface eventually comes out into the light. So if you're aware of what's growing under the surface, then you can bring what you wish to life, into the light — rather than having it bring itself into the light.’
~Shanti Faiia
Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking with Shanti Faiia, a Breathwork Healer (amongst her many talents and practices) who will be leading a session for us this Wednesday as part of our December theme of ‘Hello Darkness, My Old Friend…’
As she told me her story of how she came into breathwork, I was struck by an undercurrent connecting Shanti’s early years in human rights development work to her work now in healing. While breathwork practices start internally — diving into our shadows while supported by her guidance, — ultimately there are larger, rippling effects that reach out beyond the individual into society:
‘All of these practices are ways for us to open our minds and re-pattern them in ways that allow us to be more effective, more self-responsible, more self-loving, accepting and therefore more effective and potent in the world.’
From this perspective, the ‘re-patterning’ of our minds and behaviors can set in motion the movement from inner to outer change (as it happens, a key part of Perspectiva’s work linking theories of societal change to praxis). Put another way: the more we can free ourselves from what Shanti describes as the ‘drama of our own making’, the more we can then move clearly and powerfully in the world, and bring about shifts in contexts beyond the self.
For anyone coming to this practice for the first time, she describes it as a form of ‘active meditation’ and ‘an opportunity to experience yourself in a different way — to meet yourself, and allow yourself to release anything that's blocking you.’ This version of breathwork that she now guides has been informed from years of training and practice, and can be traced through her own singular pathway: from human rights work in Sri Lanka, to an ayahuasca experience in Brazil, years as a lawyer in New York and London, and then leaving full-time work in law to work as an energy healer and continue to train in a variety of healing modalities.
You can listen to the lightly edited audio version of our conversation (which I recommend, as she is delightful!) or the Q&A text version below. We dive more deeply into Shanti’s story, how she approaches this practice for those coming to it for the first time, as well as a taste of the theme for this Wednesday’s session: how we can meet ourselves in that place of ‘quiet darkness’ at this time of year.
~Leigh Biddlecome, Visiting Curator & Editor, Perspectiva
Register for the session with Shanti this Wednesday 13th December at 6pm UK (7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST):
Listen to the audio recording of our conversation:
Interview with Shanti Faiia —
‘Confronting those parts that we keep in darkness’
LB: Can you tell the story of how you came into breathwork?
SF: In my twenties I was working in international human rights in Sri Lanka and then decided to move back to the UK to finish law school. On my way back, I ended up in Brazil at a two week ayahuasca retreat with my parents and had an experience with plant medicine that I had not read anything about or been interested in myself, but was introduced to because of the research my stepfather was doing for a book of his.
So I had this experience in Brazil, then I moved to the UK, finished law school and started working in a law firm, and I went to a couple more ceremonies in London. And I don't normally share the story in this way, but one of the ceremonies that I attended in 2007 was this real turning point because it was an incredibly difficult experience for me where I, in energetic terms, experienced a soul loss. In shamanic terms you might [say] a death and rebirth within the context of a ceremony like that — and then you're coming back into your experience of life from a completely different perspective after having had that ego death.
I didn't know anything about any of this though, so when that happened to me, I found it extremely traumatic and felt like I came back into my life without knowing who I was. So I was experiencing myself like I was an empty shell. In order to rediscover myself things started landing in my path (like the energy healing modality called ThetaHealing), and that really started to help me bring myself back together. And in my journey for the next decade as a lawyer, in all of my spare time, I did trainings in different modalities — yoga, Qigong, and ThetaHealing.
Breathwork didn't figure into any of this other than through some pranayama in yoga practices, and during training as a yoga teacher. In that training I really went into the darkness or the shadow self and understood how I could break out of that. What ended up happening was that I went to Costa Rica and worked at an ayahuasca retreat center where I started assisting in ceremonies after 10 years of saying ‘I'm never going to do that [ayahuasca] again’ because it had been so traumatic and dark for me.
But at that retreat center, I was introduced to breathwork. And they structured these week-long programs where people came to heal — from surgeons to actors to people who were just really struggling with addiction or other kinds of trauma from their past. Every week we had three breathwork ceremonies and four ayahuasca ceremonies and I was assisting in all of the breathwork ceremonies and in two of the ayahuasca ceremonies.
That was my introduction and I could see from that how powerful it was for people to come into a space and to meet their own energetic selves through this practice. And the breathwork practice itself without the plant medicine is really powerful because it allows you to come into contact with the shadow parts of yourself, with the parts that you maybe haven't looked at, and it allows you to meet them. Because you're bringing more oxygen into your body, you’re carving out the emotions that have been stuck in different parts of your body over years, and allowing them to move using the breath.
So, it can be a really emotional experience, it can be a really clarifying experience because you're creating space in your brain by doing this breathwork.
Later I discovered what I now teach and guide, which is very similar, but it's called breathwork healing. And then I ended up doing a training with David Elliott, who is based in New Mexico and California. The idea of this breathwork healing is to really reconnect you with this exchange of love with source, with consciousness, with the universe — whatever you want to call that kind of unidentifiable essence of life.
That energy exists in all of life, and this breathwork allows you to connect to that. So I just fell in love with it and it's held me. As a lawyer, I was always in my mind. In the work I did in human rights before that, I was always in my mind and not very embodied. And this breathwork was one of the more powerful tools that I've found to start linking mind and body together.
And once you start doing that, and you start experiencing yourself in presence, through a practice that doesn't require you to stop your thoughts, but helps you to create space and clarity in your system — to be more potent as a human being, more spacious and more able to engage with life.
How do you work with people coming to this practice — or to you — for the first time, perhaps with a bit of nervousness or skepticism?
So I would describe this practice first as a practice.
It's a practice like any other practice that you would come to in order to get to know yourself better, whether it's journaling or analyzing your response to a documentary or whatever it might be.
Secondly, I would describe it as an active meditation technique that allows you to more easily get into your body and out of your mind so that you can create space for clarity. Meditation is often come to as a practice that that gives you clarity and presence — breathwork takes the work out of that. The first time I meditated, I hated it as a practice because my mind was so busy and I couldn't turn it off and I didn't like what I was hearing or experiencing in my own mind — it was just too chaotic.
Breathwork is a way of quieting the mind without you having to force yourself to do it. It just does it for you. So for people who have never come to it, I always say that it's an opportunity to experience yourself in a different way: to meet yourself, and allow yourself to release anything that's blocking you. There's so much that is held in our subconscious that we don't even know, and may be having an impact on how we bring ourselves to our lives, how we experience relationship with others, whether it's family, friends, colleagues. There might also be anxiety, fear, doubt there, a feeling of needing to prove ourselves.
Some of that can sometimes be clarified using breathwork. It can be an emotional experience, and in the session I will be taking people through what can occur, because it's really important to know not to panic if a big emotion surfaces. It’s also really important to know that you don't have to know why something is happening, but just that it's a clearing. It's a way of cleaning your system out physically and energetically so that you have more space and clarity in your mind.
What you said there — that you don't necessarily need to know why it's happening — is interesting because I think this often can be our immediate question during a new experience, especially if we're very intellectually-oriented and have always been asked to explain the ‘why’ in an academic or work context.
The way I guide these sessions is going to be very confronting for people who are used to being very intellectual because I'm going to request that people bring themselves in a different way and open themselves to the possibility of an experience that doesn't have to be analyzed or understood even to know that it's a true experience internally.
Everybody has experienced their own gut feeling, their own intuition in some way in their life. And the moments where it's been like, ‘okay, I really knew that that was going to happen’ or ‘I really knew, I didn't have words for it, but I knew’ — this breathwork is a way of you accessing those parts of you and allowing the intuitive parts of you to come online more.
Darkness is dominant in this period of the year in the northern hemisphere, and so I'm curious about how you work with that darkness as an additional element. You were also speaking before about shadows, so I'm wondering if those two are connected somehow? Might seasonal shifts affect our experience of the practice?
That's interesting, I haven't thought of it that way. But I do think that when we start to go into winter, and to the colder months, we are definitely — even if we're not conscious of it — going inwards more than we do at other times of the year.
Things get quieter, we stay indoors more, we're maybe not as social, and that tends to be the case even in big cities. There is that kind of inward-looking moment through the winter months. When we go into that darkness, we start to get quieter, and when we get quieter, we start to hear and feel and see what's there more than when we're in bright sunshine and summer activity.
Seasons I think definitely do have an impact because every time you do this breath practice, the experience is different. There may be similar elements, but what you meet and how you experience it and what you get from it tends to be different. And it tends to be exactly what you need in that moment.
So the way I want to bring darkness into this session with Perspectiva on the 13th is to really think about this idea of when we start to get quiet and start to meet ourselves in that quiet. The parts of ourselves that are a little shyer or a little less visible, even to us, start to show themselves. Those parts are generally the parts that we don't want to look at — the parts of us that go into fear or doubt, or are anxious about some project that we're working on. The parts of us that feel like, ‘Oh, am I a bit of a fraud here’? ‘Am I really good enough to be doing this work now?’
Whatever it is, those parts of us that we keep in darkness we don't want to see. So, what do you not want to see about yourself? Do you not want to see that you can be quite manipulative sometimes? Do you not want to see that you want to control everything and everyone in order to feel safe? Do you not want to see that actually you're still feeling scared like you did when you were three years old?
A practice like this can bring us to a place where we can really confront who we think we are and bring to the light the parts of us that we don't want to address, that we're too scared to address, or where we say, ‘oh, that makes me a bad person if that's part of who I am.’
And by working with the darkness with a breath practice like this, you start to clear it out. It starts to become less scary and not have so much of a hold over you. If you're aware of that darkness or what lies in your own shadow, and you are tender and kind and loving towards it, then it loses its power over you. So, from that darkness, you come into the light.
So it's very much like the season: you have this darkness and composting over winter and then what's been growing under the surface eventually comes out into the light. So if you're aware of what's growing under the surface, then you can bring what you wish to life, into the light — rather than having it bring itself into the light.
In a potentially self-destructive and/or destructive-to-others kind of way…
Exactly. Yeah.
Can you speak to how various elements come together into breathwork from meditation as well as psychotherapy practices?
I think the way I teach is a product of everything that I've trained in. And so that includes yoga practices, it includes ThetaHealing, it includes a little bit of the psychotherapy aspect — ThetaHealing work is about all about working with the subconscious mind and changing beliefs and programs. So it's much more like psychotherapy, but with an energy healing slant.
So for me, all of these practices are ways for us to open our minds and re-pattern them in ways that allow us to be more effective, more self-responsible, more self-loving, accepting and therefore more effective and potent in the world.
That's why I love these practices and why I'm doing what I do now. That's why I left the law because I think that these are the things that allow people to then have the inner resourcing that can bring change into the world at a higher level.
Let's transform the world. But that has to start with transforming how we experience ourselves and how we're resourced. I really think that all of this work goes towards bringing ourselves closer to who we really are, and who we really are is love. And the more we can remember that through these practices, the more that can shift everything that's in the world.
(edited)
Join us for a breathwork session with Shanti Faiia on December 13th at 6pm UK (7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST):