Body, Breath, and Gnosis

Ritualistic Transformational Bodywork and Connected Breathwork

Coral Carte & Dave Lee

Embodied Presence

This retreat is focused on the gnosis of being present in the body, in the infinite richness and bliss of present time. We use the techniques of Ritual Transformational Bodywork and Connected Breathwork.

We're encouraged to value our thinking more than our immediate embodied experience. Our culture rewards us for cultivating symbolic mental processes, which hold in place our narrative identities, the stories we tell ourselves about 'what I am'. 

We are estranged from immediacy.

This is a legacy of the disaster of christianization - the horror of the body and the desire to control everybody, which persists into the cultural institutions of our current era. The suppression of the primal identity that emerges from the body never went away, and as a culture we are only just beginning to unpack that toxic conditioning 

Through the body we can connect with the infinite and with the deepest self. The state of gnosis or transcendence is accessible through the body, taking us to a state of supreme happiness and knowledge of all including our truest divine nature.

Accessing our own divinity gives us the courage to affront the abyss, increases the depth of our perception, and enables us to encounter the richest energy fields of love, eroticism, and forms of personal expression. Integrating affectivity with movement promotes harmony between feeling and acting, reactivating instinctive forces that preserve life and allow its evolution. improving the quality of our lives. 

Connected Breathwork is the set of simple breathing techniques that underlies the Rebirthing and holotropic schools of breathwork and which provide new levels of embodied presence and magical energy

CBW has been described as ‘the science of enjoying the whole of your life’. It relieves anxiety and stress, improves outlook on life, causes bliss states, puts you in touch with the profound life-energy of breath – and cures boredom! 

Sacred transformational Bodywork is a group activity that takes place with ritual intention consisting of a sequence of exercises designed to carry the participant into a a state of transcendence where the human qualities of affective and intimate communication, the awakening of pleasure, connection to instincts, and creative and emotional expression are stimulated. The connection with one's divine self through the body allows one access to knowledge beyond the human experience snd thus to creating resilience and making changes to a healthier lifestyle and.

Coral Carte

Transcendence, Divination and Magical practice

I was born with a caul, a sign of second sight in folklore, I began to develop a knowing and precognitive dreams in adolescence. My path lead to Shamanism, lucid dreaming and learning to connect with the spirits of the land. In my late teens, I learnt the Tarot by handwriting the meanings and redrawing the cards. As a ninth house sun, I have a thirst for the anomalous and I have studied from chaos magic and astrology, to psychogenealogy and remote viewing. As an animist and Chaos magician, I believe that everything is alive and interconnected. I facilitate embodied cognition and connection with the universe we inhabit.

Dave Lee

My CBW journey began at a workshop led by Lionel Snell in 1991. I was so impressed by the power of this simple technique I found myself a coach, and then enrolled in a professional training course, from which I qualified in 1993. 

At that time, I’d been doing magic as a regular practice for fifteen years, but I hadn’t found a technique that could so reliably open me up to immediate embodied experience in the way that psychedelics had in my youth. And what’s more, this technique was much more portable, being shorter in duration and more controllable than the wild rides of entheogens.  

I used the word 'journey' because Connected Breathwork has been and remains one of the great adventures of my life, together with the Chaos approach to magic, meditation and the runes. 

Dave Lee has been practicing magic for over four decades. He was one of the founder members of the first IOT group in UK, and is still serving as an Elder in that organization. He is a member of the Rune-Gild since 1996 and is recognized as a Master in that community for his book Bright From the Well. His other published works include Chaotopia, The Wealth Magic Workbook and his groundbreaking book Life Force: Sensed energy in Breathwork, Psychedelia and Chaos Magic.