I first recalled the memory of the old hospital building during a breathwork session when I was 19. Not that I hadn't heard stories of how I spent extended periods there at age 4 and again at 5.
During my breathing session, I felt the whole experience inside my body.
The night I had blood in my stools. Walking down the endless winding staircase from the apartment where we lived in Copenhagen with my mom.
The hospital was cold, hollow and half empty; the snow was flying outside in the dark. My mom disappeared and I was put into a white bed by a nurse. I remember her back when she left the room. Her long thick braid against her crisp white uniform.
She told me I could call her if I got scared, she said her name was Mona. I woke up freezing cold in the night in my solo room with very high ceilings. I was frightened and called out, Mona, Mona, Monaaahh...light on in the hallway and steps approaching. But Mona didn't enter; a gruff nurse came in her place and told me to be quiet.
As I was breathing deep and fast, I was flooded by these repressed memories. I cried and cried like a little kid from this overwhelming loneliness and fear deep inside my body. I curled up into a tight fetal pose, sobbed so violently that I broke little blood vessels all over my face. When I was all done and quiet again, I had tiny red dots covering my face.
The following hospital days are a blur, and what do I know about what they were doing to me? I know; it included drinking contrast fluid so they could see my insides on X-rays. Well, my breathworker, a nurse, deciphered that for me. The glass they told me to drink thick white chalky tasting fluid from seemed as big as my head, it was hard to get down. They had to keep pushing me to drink up, drink up, and then I went into the X-ray machine.
Needles. I had blood drawn all the time it seemed. I don’t remember my mom there but sometimes my dad would be there and then I would sit in his lap when my blood was drawn. The hospital must have been cold because, as I remember, he was always wearing his sheepskin coat, soft suede on the outside, and curly fur on the inside; it smelled like a wet animal.
My breathing session didn't do away with that primordial fear; it's still in there and has often shown up in my relationships. But over the years, I have learned to hold myself through it better and better.
Not perfectly sometimes, I still think it's someone else's fault if I feel lonely and abandoned. But I have the tender awareness of what happened to me, which, in the grand scheme of bad things that happen to kids, is not so bad. Yet it felt really awful in my body.
A recent coaching client had a similar experience of being left to cry; it was still in her body and showed up in her love life.
That's how tender we are as children; the neglect that is so commonplace mares us for life, but the good news is that in realizing and feeling these old wounds, we can gradually learn to stay close to ourselves again, to come back inside our bodies with presence and tend to the pain and the fear the way we would have wished our caretakers would have.
We slowly start to realize that our own full Presence is Love. Is God. As we love and hold ourselves through the arising pain, we reconnect to the Divine Presence inside, and slowly it grows and slowly we fill ourselves with the Light of our own Divine Being.
That painful wound that has caused so much pain and shame and drama becomes the very portal into a self-holding and self-love that brings us closer to our own creator. To True unconditional Love. To God.
When I was living in Copenhagen for a little while again after 25 years abroad. I did a some googling and, lo and behold found one of the retired nurses who had worked at the hospital in the 70s.
I invited her over for lunch and she told me that she had been so young when she worked there, in her early 20s. The head nurses had instructed them sternly on not giving the little kids affection and compassion. Don’t hug and hold them: you don't want these kids to become needy, do you?
I wonder if they realize now that becoming needy and codependent is how most kids respond to early neglect.
In case you are wondering if our Breathe Release it, All practice goes to that depth. The answer is no. We don't breathe as long or as hard in Breathe Release it All as one would do in a Rebirthing breathwork session -- so the releases are much more gentle and gradual.
The Breathe Release it All practice is a fantastic tool for accessing the body's energy field and illuminating what wants to be felt and released gently. We teach the method in classes and retreats.