Pulsation Practitioners - An Interview with Prabodhi Mildenberg
How and when were you introduced to pulsation?The first taste of reichian bodywork I had while being a law student in Freiburg/Germany in 1982. In the osho center there they offered evening groups, one was Bio-energetic and the other was Rebirthing. In one of the first sessions the leader, Andrea, was giving individual sessions in the group and I found myself lying there - 22 years old - no previious experience of nothing :-) and breathing at some moment she touched my body and a high loud scream came out of my mouth. I was so surprised and baffled that that experience impressed me deeply. And over time I also felt the immense expansion possible through my breathing - I was hooked.
I few years later, I participated in the 3 year training of Orgodynamik, also a method that in that time was very much based on reichian bodywork and has discovery of the orgone energy.
Towards the end of the training Osho left his body and I just left everything in Germany and went to Pune.
There I met Aneesha for the first time and gave her a test session for my bodywork sessions.
But life took me different directions. I followed my love of movement and dance and did the dancetherapy training and than got very involved in the AFH Process and later I got pulled into the Hypnosis training, as Osho had said he wants all his therapists trained in it. So there I ended up 1990 in this huge therapist training and was busy with that work, creating my own NLP and Hypnosis institute for 10 years.
2002 - after quiet a long break - Aneesha was offering once again a 2 week Pulsation training for practitiioners, and while standing on the waiting line for the movies she told me about it one evening. After working intensely with "the mind“ for so many years, my longing to go back to the body was becoming stronger, meanwhile I also wanted to bring the understanding that body and mind are one, more and more into my work.
What made you fall in love with the work?
Those 2 weeks were strong and obviously just at the perfect moment in my life. I felt so much release, so much tension leaving my body, so many tears being cried - creating an inner space, a sense of expansion. Ah!
In that time Aneesha made a little side remark, that for her the most valuable thing that she had done was the 50 individual sessions that she had received from her own teacher Charles Kelley in the 70s. I remember asking: one five? or five zero??? 50 sessions seamed such a huge number!!
For days that conversation kept coming back into my mind and I decided to also do those 50 sessions. For the next 3 years I studied, participated, helped, translated, assisted and 2004/5 was co-leading a pulsation training in Hamburg.
What works for you clients?
I had started my own evening group and was having my clients. And I became aware that many of my NLP and Hypnosis clients would greatly benefit from some Pulsation work. Many of them had trained their intellect and were sucessfull in the world, but had supressed their emotions and impulses so much that the body was rebelling. Many were functioning but had lost the joy of life, were moving fast towards a burn-out, were depressed and didn‘t know what to do. So that was how the hamburg training came to life.
After 9 years of intense working with pulsationwhat really, deep down works is the contact. The real relationship, the willingness and capability to create a field.
In all these years I have continued my own work. I had the immense luck to find in Hamburg a Reichian therapist and I have been working with her ever since. My own experience of deep inner healing, of layers of anxiety and fear dissolving, moments of deep inner contentment, waves of joy.
It‘s such a different general feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) - it‘s difficult to put into words. I keep having waves of deep gratitude.
Why are you doing the work?
I feel I have received such a great gift that I have the urge to pass it on, to share this expansion with other human beings in a deep and meaningful relationship. To see the slow dissolution of armouring in my clients, how their eyes become more clear, more and more feeling, how they are able to bring their feelings into their eyes and into contact, how they are able to express themselves differently and how their quality of their contact with me changes - that is what makes this work for me so precious and unique.
And from being a client came my most precious learnings. It was never the so called exercises that did anything real deep. Never. It was the human authentic being there of my therapist - sometimes "just“ the tender loving touch on my face that brought to the surface the deep release of inner pain.
From all the trainings and all the work I have done, I believe that the Reichian training is the longest and the most ardous and demanding for the student. You have to go through your own de-armoring process and that needs a lot of inner committment and unwavering dedication. Otherwise you will be just another so called „neo-reichian therapist“ hooked on the surface, doing "exercises“ in a mechanical way - actually the most un-reichian thing you can do.
And - if you stick with it - it‘s the most rewarding work, it makes you laugh and cry - it opens your heart beyond the sentimental, into deep human love.
In those moments I always remember Oshos words: "The only thing that really heals is love"