I sprawl on a futon in the living room of a small, spotless apartment in Evanston, and a pretty woman in her 40s covers me with a lightweight blue blanket and tells me to breathe. “Listen to how I’m breathing,” she says, inhaling deep and loud–and then exhaling with the same force and sound. “When you get to the end of the exhale, don’t wait a beat to inhale again. Ignore your instinct to wait that beat. Connect your exhale and inhale and form a continuous circle with your breath.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“The results are profound and quick,” says Loewy, who tried rebirthing for the first time herself three years ago; her complaints were emotional and relationship problems, indecisiveness, allergies, and a lack of direction. “I tried psychotherapy, group therapy, yoga, t’ai chi, meditation, macrobiotics and other diets, est, and raw foods. But with rebirthing, healing takes place that we can’t grasp. I’m not arrogant enough to say I know how this works. I tell clients, ‘Trust the process. Trust your breath.’”
Loewy tells me how well I’m doing with my smooth circle of exhale and inhale–the right force, the right sound, everything’s right, she says. I wait for profound change.
The creator of rebirthing is Leonard Orr, who was Loewy’s teacher during a week-long course in Nevada: 24 hours a day, they got in touch with fire, earth, water, and air by sitting outside by a fire, fasting, remaining totally silent, and not sleeping. Orr says that rebirthing breathing lets people reexperience their births, the pain of which otherwise reappears throughout life–“over and over in adult life,” says Loewy. “But I have a strong belief in gearing my clients more to the present, to get them to a place of well-being–through experiencing peace, security, love, joy, wisdom, and faith–rather than concentrating on old negative patterns and pain. The past is not where we are now.
I ask Loewy, the certified massage therapist, to massage my back to bring me back to reality, which she does, at the same time calming me down by explaining what happened. “Having all that oxygen in your system is something you’re not used to,” she says. “A lot of oxygen in the system helps people get in touch with their ‘life’s work,’ with their inner spirituality, and helps them make changes they have to make. If we’d gone the whole session, you’d feel refreshed and rejuvenated from all the oxygen.”
