Education is key. To become a good therapist I suggest teaching people to heal themselves (which is what this training is). To teach people to heal themselves we must:

1. Be healing ourselves (to be authentic with integrity)
2. To explain what we are doing when possible (even more so in de-armouring as the process with the nervous system works better once the mind understanding as the mind communicates through the nervous system).

• Lowering the pain threshold: Teaching people to lower the pain threshold is an art you perfect through practice, it comes with more guidelines than rules, as we need to listen to how the person's body, emotions and nervous system is currently working. Sometimes someone needs to resist and fight the pain so that they can surrender to it, sometimes people need to breath faster and into their chest to find pain, once they have had a few sessions they will be able to lower the pain threshold with whole body breathing. We need to work with people where they are at. Rules of thumb to start: 
  • circular breathing (no pause)
  • breath into the abdomen with a fully relaxed breath (get fat on the in breath (rise the abdomen) get thin on the out breath (drop the abdomen))
  • in through the nose 
  • out through the mouth with a slight low sound (when pain happens the sound increases) 
  • aim for equalised breath to keep oxygen and CO2 balanced (this is more important than balanced in time, but balanced in time is good too)
  • exhale should be around 8 seconds long (we feel more on the exhale, so 8 seconds out = 8 seconds of feeling) 
  • most painful emotions are generally at the bottom of the breath, so we need to learn to empty the lungs completely 
  • de-amouring the abdomen and pelvic floor so we can use these muscles to help us breathe deeper into trauma is very helpful, as is practising anti-dote to mulabhanda
• Teaching people to tap when:
  • • the pain is pleasurable (“I like that level of pain just hold it there for one breath”)
    • before the pain is so strong they need to tense the body or change the breath (“that’s enough for now, just hold it and let me breathe through it”)
  • NOTE: we are not asking people to talk when we lower the pain threshold unless essential, as we need them to relax fully. They communicate with us by tapping. 
    
• Consent and boundaries: must always be discussed during the education of de-armouring.
• Stay energised:
  • The de-armouring breath deeply relaxes us, and may depelte the body of chi and prana if practised for too long
  • The holotropic breath can energise us in the moment but may leave us exhausted later
  • The transformative / Ujayia breath can energise us in a balanced way
  • The chi increasing/sublimation breath (that we learn later in the orgasmic spine section) mixed with the straw breath can give us more energy and it's important to integrate this with the transformative / Ujayia breath at the end, otherwise we may experience the opposite later
  • These four breaths are achieved with various combinations of nose and mouth breathing with variations in each on how deep or fast the breath is, if the core is engaged or relaxed and if breath retention is used or not. De-armouring works with and through breath work. Once we develop intense experiences of all of these breaths in our body and understand how to work with our nervous system and emotions, with these four breaths and all their variations, we become a good transmission of this knowledge, and people find it easy to learn with us. If we have not integrated the understanding and experience of all these breaths into our own body and try to teach from the mind alone, it is much harder for people to learn.
• Pain moves: if pain moves around the body (example: starts in the kidney, moves to the hip, then moves to the shoulder), this is an indication that the pain is emotional and psychosomatic. This understanding allows the client to have more faith in the work. You can follow and chase the pain around the body, but it's best to pull it out into the aura and then transform it tantrically through the communication of the chakra system and the channelling of the 3 positive vibrations/virtues/intentions the client gave at the start into the field.
• Stay present: be present with the client at all times. If energy is not moving, try not to leave the body. When your hands leave the body the client should feel you are still connected and present with their experience.
• Move between waves of pleasure and pain (or neutral, relaxed feelings and pain): this looks different in sessions; people need different things, aim to make sessions more pleasurable and less painful overall.
• Change the sounds: If the client always makes the same sounds, encourage them to make different sounds by demonstrating different sounds. These could be a range of deep and ugly sounds, and when breathing in and out through these could be pleasant sounds (I often ask the client to make the sound of eating really good ice cream, mmmmmmmm). Always encourage the client to be louder than you, so it's like you're following their sound by being quieter than them, even if you're making the sound first to demonstrate a change in sound.
• Press less to hurt more: once the session is in flow you might find you don't need to press very hard or at all, simply focusing on a point with your eyes, or lightly touch an area and pretending to press will often be enough as the nervous system and emotions are already in a process of release. As you pull your hand away this might be the most intense pain for the client as they're fully relaxed and feel completely safe.