Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual,—neither in nor of matter,—and the body will then utter no complaints. If suffering from a belief in sickness, you will find yourself suddenly well, (Science and Health, p. 14). – Mary Baker Eddy
My Rebirthing Breathwork teacher Leonard Orr introduced me to Christian Science and the amazing discoveries Mary Baker-Eddy had in the 1860s. Both Mary and Leonard were spiritual pioneers and had much in common.
Rebirthing Breathwork is a spiritual practice. Leonard was the discoverer of Rebirthing Breathwork, a practice of connected breathing that reconnects the practitioner with Divine life force energy and unconditional love. The practitioner must breathe through any resistances that arise to the flow of this energy, before they experience peace, bliss and unconditional love. Leonard discovered Rebirthing whilst in a bath tub and noticed his birth trauma was reignited. Through connected breathing he found that he could release the trauma by connecting with Divine life force energy. He spread the practice worldwide because he saw how it helped release human suffering. Leonard was a Theology graduate and a lifelong student of the Bible, as well as the Hindu scriptures.
Mary was also a lifelong student of the Bible. She sought to find solutions to human suffering. When she was critically injured in 1866, she turned to God with her whole heart. While reading accounts of Jesus’ swift, powerful healings, she experienced a new sense of God. She discerned that the spiritual experience of God, is the only reality and she was completely healed. This experience was so profound that she wanted to understand what had happened, so she studied the Bible and scrutinised Jesus’ documented healings. She realised that the single moment of insight she had experienced about Divine unconditional love brought about healing.
What Mary realised is that healing came through prayer. However, the manner of prayer she discovered is nothing like what is taught in conventional Christian practice. I was really intrigued about what Mary’s experience of prayer that heals was like. Particularly, because I had been indoctrinated as a child into prayer as a petition to God. So it was hard for me to fathom what Mary was talking about, because of my simplistic experience of prayer.
Fortunately, I had experienced this to a lesser degree through Rebirthing. Through connected breathing, you allow yourself to relax and connect with the Divine. When you are one with the Source there is only pure unconditional love. Where there is love there is no space for fear. You allow each and every cell of your body to immerse in this love and become that love. It is like a feeling that each cell vibrating and dancing with Love. Rebirthing is the science of not holding your breath and filling up your physical body with Divine loving energy.
Leonard explained that by breathing energy as well as air, Divine intelligence takes over and breathes the body. He believed it was holy work. Confronting fear is a major component of Rebirthing. Mary Baker Eddy said, “pain is often held in place by fear.” Importantly, both practices are about surrender.
In Christian Science it is important to cultivate a state of Divine unconditional love, whilst Rebirthing is about connecting to this state through the breath. God breathed His own breath of life into man, revealing that man is more than dust. Dust is material matter and we as humans are more than this material matter.
Both practices involve becoming thought-less which is a state of having no thoughts. However, going from thinking yourself into a state to simply being in a state is no mean feat. If you have been conditioned in to the conventional thinking style of prayer then this is an enormous challenge. Mary wrote much about the Mortal Mind (our thinking) which is not aligned with God consciousness. You cannot think yourself out of thinking, you become one with God’s consciousness by dropping all thought. With no words, just allowing unconditional love to permeate our being. We are human beings not human doings and both practices are the science of being.
My curiosity led me to asking many Christian Science practitioners if they could describe what happens for them when they pray. A fellow Rebirther and class taught student of Christian Science recounted a profound experience with a Christian Science Nurse Practitioner.
He told me about an experience that happened to him when he was in a coffee shop in Toronto. “I was having a coffee and Christian Science Nurse rang me and she asked me how my son was? My son had a motorcycle accident a year before and lost an arm. I answered, he’s improving gradually, but you know it’s been very difficult, it’s not been an easy process. He’s been in the hospital for a year and he just got out.”
She replied, “if you had a practitioner working for him immediately, she could have backed up the timeline, to before the accident happened and worked with consciousness to bring him back to the state without an accident. To his consciousness as it was, before the accident and this would heal him.”
I said, “well okay that’s great, but we can’t do that now. Can you explain to me what this would feel like? what it would be like as an experience?”
She replied, “Imagine you’re in the coffee shop you are in right now and you receive a call from God. Listening to him you’re convinced that something very different happening to you, because this individual seems to know who you are and where you are.”
God says to you, “I want you to go to the building on the other corner of this intersection from where you are now. Go to the 12th floor and I want you to go to room 309, because I would like to have a word with you. Do this now, just leave your coffee and come see me.”
I closed my eyes as I listened to her, “imagine leaving the coffee house and going over to the building. Go up to the 12th floor to room 306. Usually you wouldn’t find a room numbered 306 on the 12th floor.” To my astonishment in my vision I saw room 306.
She continued, “walk towards the door, and you’ll notice a white light underneath the door frame. Open the door, and walk into the room. In the room, your whole body, your whole consciousness is flooded with this white light. This light has a quality that enables you to forget everything about who you are. You forget your name, you forget how you got there, you forget your age, you forget everything about yourself. You are as a conscious being. You feel a sense of pervading unconditional love. There isn’t any condition attached to this love, because it is simply permeating through your being. You feel it physically, you feel it emotionally, on all levels.”
I was feeling all of this, as the Nurse Practitioner described it to me. I felt like I had absorbed this light. My sense of this light was physical and non-physical at the very same time. I thought okay I’ve got it.
She continued, “when you decide to leave the room, you don’t know how you got there, so you have to recollect your thoughts.”
This chat with God was without words, an experience that left me with a sense of who I was, as a child of God – without any material part of me and for this I was very grateful.
Conventional Christians and the media tend to denigrate Christian Science. But you know what? Mary really got it, she experienced what Jesus experienced when he did his healings. Of course, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, especially if a person just doesn’t ‘get’ it and that’s okay. I don’t doubt the ability of some people to actually experience consciousness on that level and change their reality.
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