An Introduction to Breema: An Interview
Arlie has extensive experience teaching and presenting Breema internationally and nationally for over 24 years. She is a senior practitioner at The Breema Clinic and Instructor at The Breema Center in Oakland, CA. In addition, she has been in private practice for 18 years offering various forms of massage therapy and healing arts combining indigenous healing methods. Contact Arlie at Touch of Heart: www.touchofheart.info
Check out our upcoming retreat that we will be co-hosting.
Interview Q&A
1. What is Breema?
Breema is a practice that unites body, mind, and feelings. By doing so we learn to be present. We come out of the past and future and into the present moment. From doing so, we become more balanced and are able to experience life more fully. Breema is a method with a philosophy, the Nine Principals of Harmony, that guides us into being more present. We can use the body to learn how to participate fully in a more harmonious way.
2. How did you (Arlie) find Breema?
Most people have something in their life that can either be an opportunity for growth and to discover something really meaningful in their life. Mine happened to be dealing with problems in the body. My body was not functioning at an optimal level anymore and at the same time my mind was wrapped up in thinking about how sick I was all the time. My feelings were also thrown off by the discomfort, instability, pain, and suffering. I was in a corporate environment back then and not at all satisfied with what I was doing. I had lots of stress in my life. After going to many doctors who could not figure out what was wrong, I heard it was all in my head. In a way, it was true. My mental state was an aspect of it because of all the mental churning and confusion. Western/modern medicine doesn’t address that as illness per se, so I started looking into alternative therapies. I tried different therapies for 1-2 years which all were helpful as they opened me up to new things. I started practicing very simple poses of yoga and that’s when I read an article in the Yoga Journal about Breema. Luck would have it that the Breema Center was just down the road from me. What really brought me there though was something in the article that resonated with me. I was not just this sick person, but that there was something vital inside me that was alive. I read that Breema does not fight sickness but increases vitality. When I read that I knew it was the direction that I wanted to go.
3. What benefits can you receive from practicing?
There are so many benefits from the smallest exercise of self-Breema to doing many bodywork sequences where you can feel profound shifts. There is such simplicity to this work because we say it’s who you really are. It has just been covered up and so Breema helps you to uncover or discover who you really are. It does it in a very non-forceful, gentle way that helps connect with something that is natural.
For many of us, we are so bombarded by information (the internet, jobs, relationships) and that takes us outside of ourselves. Breema brings us back to ourselves. For many people, even touching the body very naturally can be foreign to them. People are very uncomfortable with even just holding themselves. A simple brush on the arm can all of a sudden bring you to an experience of having compassion for yourself. I hear so many people who are not gentle with themselves. They don’t know how to be loving with themselves and all the attention has always been put outside of themselves. Breema helps them connect back to themselves.
This is not how society is really set up. All the things we worry about are not in the present. If you are in the present you are not worried about anything. By bringing the attention to the present we can have a shift very naturally. Breema simply and gently guides you to the present, to your body, so instead of living only in the past and future you can have the connection to the present in a holistic and nurturing way. It doesn’t have to be a fight to get there. Just by putting your hands on your knees and doing circles can shift where your attention lies. We bring our attention that is normally outside ourselves to our body and to the activity of the body.
In Breema, we do bodywork and we do self-care exercises to help us connect to the body and to another person. Life is about relationships and without being able to function well in our relationships and the world around us, there is no peace. There is no joy of life unless we can have a direct relationship with our self and another person. We see that we are not separate. Just touching the body can break through so many barriers from what we think we are to what we truly are: essential beings.
4. What are the 9 Principals of Harmony and how to do you apply them in Breema?
They are of course an integral part of the practice. Without the principals there would not be Breema; there would not be the form. We call them the Nine Principals of Harmony and really they can apply to anything that we do in our day. It is not just while you give a session or do a self-Breema exercise.
I can talk a little about one in particular that I have been using during this period of the coronavirus. I have a lot of paperwork that I need to take care of and that I want to take care of. I have been putting it off because of the job and other activities but now is the perfect time to put some things in order in my life. I have tons of papers and books spread out on my dining room table. I have to do my tax return and everything kind of relates to doing that. I actually filed online a while ago but I made a mistake so I had to amend part of it. I kept procrastinating and procrastinating until finally I said I am going to do this. There was still so much resistance. Then I saw that resistance and I remembered the principal, “Single Moment, Single Activity”. I connected to my body and decided to just do one thing on my tax return. I focused on that one thing stopped focusing on all the other parts, things on my table, eating, and cooking.
So I started. That is when the resistance changed. I had more energy by connecting to principal and bringing my attention to the actual activity in my body. With that energy, my feelings were available. The body, mind, and feelings came together and with that I knocked out that paperwork so fast. Yet there was no rush while doing it. We also say, “No Hurry, No Pause”. It could have been anything- eating a delicious meal, holding a baby, or anything that I love to do, but it was tax returns. Even so, I felt that same connection, level of energy, and pure enthusiasm while doing the paperwork. I had been thinking it would be boring, messy, or difficult but all of that disappeared. They were just concepts. Once I connected to the principals it was my entryway to being present. I became fulfilled by what is.
I use that principal to bring order to my life. That is the aim of Breema. There is only so much time we spend on Breema each day. A half hour self-Breema in the morning and maybe a session in the afternoon, but what about all the other hours in our day. The principals are what you can bring to your day and then any activity can be fulfilling and bring inner satisfaction.
