PROFESSIONAL SKILLS

Duart offers private and group sessions of rebirthing for emotional and mental clearing. He also teaches transcendental deep meditation and yoga, as well as leading transformational workships and trainings.

Duart draws on years of study in eastern and western philosophy. He is recognized as an excellent communicator who is able to speak on difficult topics in a way that is simple, clear and profound. Duart is also a writer and co-author of ‘Awakening The Fire Within: Relationship, Leadership and Self-Esteem’. He can be reached at: duartmc9@gmail.com or (514)769-0719

MY APPROACH TO REBIRTHING

As a breathworker my main function is to facilitate EMOTIONAL CLEARING in my clients:

Transformational breathwork (also known as ‘Rebirthing’ and ‘Conscious-Connected-Breathing’) is a safe, natural, effective method for EMOTIONAL CLEARING.

There are two sides to the coin called ‘emotional clearing’:

1) HEADS: Discovering and transforming the largely unconscious, negative beliefs and judgments that always accompany repressed emotions. Since thought is creative, if we do not recognize and let go of our unconscious negatives we will continue to recycle unhealthy patterns of behavior. THESE BURIED, NEGATIVE THOUGHT-FORMS REINFORCE AND HOLD OUR REPRESSED EMOTIONAL MASS IN PLACE.

2) TAILS: Letting go of and integrating powerful emotions (anger, grief, anxiety) that we have repressed in our bodies due to fear and resistance. THE ENERGY OF BLOCKED EMOTIONAL MASS NEGATIVELY AFFECTS OUR BODIES AND OUR PSYCHES.

Emotional clearing is an energetic process:

Talking about our emotions will not resolve the problem, because our blocked emotions are not in our heads but in our bodies, literally below the neck. Conscious-Connected-Breathing is the safest, most efficient way to let go of the unhealthy ‘stuff’ we have been holding onto.

Often our negative thought-forms, which inevitably accompany the emotions we are repressing, will reveal themselves during a breathwork session. A skilled Rebirther will be able to assist the client in bringing these self-sabotaging, unconscious thought-forms to awareness and transforming them.

On the importance of expanding SELF-AWARENESS in conjunction with EMOTIONAL CLEARING:

In conjunction with transformational breathing I encourage clients to take up the practice of either transcendental deep meditation or self-enquiry. Both methods are explained in our book, ‘Awakening The Fire Within: Relationship, Leadership & Self-Esteem’. Since 1974 I have initiated many hundreds of individuals into both deep mantra meditation and the method of self-enquiry.

Through regular practice of meditation or self-enquiry we discover that who we are is BEING-CONSCIOUSNESS, and we realize that Being-Consciousness is the true nature of the Self:

The body-mind is an important but temporal phenomenon, whereas consciousness is omnipresent and indestructible. Consciousness is the ultimate ground of all experience and does not die with the death of the body. However, this Reality can be known only through direct experience, and for this either the practice of meditation or self-enquiry is required. Since consciousness is not a ‘thing’ — i.e., a substance, it is inaccessible to the mind via the method of empiricism and scientific enquiry. Our true nature as ‘being-consciousness’ can be revealed only through a deep, persistant introspection.

For more information or to enquire about a private session, please contact me at 514-769-0719 or send me message at duartmc9@gmail.com (please include a phone number where I can reach you).

 

A BRIEF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I was born in Vancouver in 1950 and grew up in the beautiful Okanagan Valley. Since an early age I devoured good novels but by my late teens my interest shifted to philosophy, poetry and spirituality. At 19 I travelled throughout Europe for seven months, mostly hitch-hiking and staying in youth hostels. My travels led me to an Israeli kibbutz near Haifa, where I lived and worked for 10 weeks. I learned a lot about this ancient, sacred land of Israel from a few ‘kibbutznik’ families who befriended me. Hannah, the woman responsible for volunteers treated me like a son. She had suffered the hell of a nazi concentration camp in Poland during WWII and managed to survive despite losing all of her closest friends to hunger and disease. Hannah was one of nine young survivors who found their way to Israel after the war and who, with little more than bare hands and rudimentary tools, built this beautiful, simple kibbutz, Ramot Menashe, which is situated 20 miles south-east of Haifa. I would see Hannah every morning. About twice a week she would look twice her age, with dark circles for eyes, blotchy skin, tired posture and a very sad aura. I asked her about this and she told me of her recurring nightmares since her time in the death camp. Hannah was a strong woman with a strong spirit and an example of courage, tenacity and endurance. In spite of the horrors she’d suffered, she retained her supportive, compassionate nature. Hannah, in her own simple way was a great teacher for me, someone I will never cease to admire and appreciate.

My time in Israel allowed me to visit the sacred places and holy sites of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Baha’i Faith. The river Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, Tiberious, Acca, the Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, the crypt of the holy family in Nazareth, the Stages of the Cross in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock, Solomon’s oasis at Ein Geddhi, the Dead Sea, etc — it was my privilege to visit and reflect in all of these places. My twenties and thirties were years of travel and exploration, visiting at least 20 countries east and west.

After attending university in Victoria in the late ’60s and working summers for the B.C. government doing property appraisal, I found myself at an existential impasse. All of my studying and travelling had not enabled me to answer the question that bedeviled me: ‘Who am I?’. I had thought I knew who I was until I returned from a trip to Belize in my crippled, second-hand volkswagon. I fixed my VW, then headed to the Kootenay Valley for my final year of summer work. There, I discovered that all my ways of defining myself simply didn’t hold up. The crisis came when my self-created self-concept was broken into pieces during a brief love affair that turned weird and bitter. I was profoundly shaken by the experience and came to the hard revelation that I really didn’t have a clue about who I was. My ego had taken a big blow from a young woman who was not only better looking than me, but also smarter. She made me see — perhaps unintentionally — that all of my travelling, reading and self-analysis hadn’t amounted to a ‘hill of beans’. I learned, painfully, that if I was to discover my ‘essence’ I would need to analyse less, not more, and that what I was looking for was a realization rather than something invented by my over-heated brain.

In Israel, I had read a short biography of Mahatma Gandhi and was impressed by this great man. Gandhi based his actions largely on a small but important classic of Hindu spirituality, the Bhagavad-Gita. When I returned to Canada I found a copy of the Gita in my father’s library and devoured its teachings. This small, ancient book is truly worth reading and meditating on. The most important piece of information revealed to me up to this point in my life is contained in this book. At one point Lord Krishna councils the warrior, Arjuna that he is neither his body nor his mind, but rather that he is the Self. Krishna tells Arjuna that the Self is not a ‘thing’ and cannot ‘be cut with a sword, wetted by water or burned by fire’… but rather the Self is unborn and deathless, it is pure ‘being-consciousness’. Krishna’s ‘Self’ is not the ordinary self that is our ego, but rather the very ground of our entire being. I devoured the Gita’s liberating words with awe and wonder, but it took me years of meditation and self-enquiry to integrate them. In 1971 I began the practice of Transcendental Meditation, then in early 1974 travelled to Belgium for a twelve week training with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in order to become a certified TM instructor. Co-incidentally, the course leader of my group was a young man of 21 called Johnny, whom all of us loved for his wit, wisdom and gentle nature. Years later I happened to stumble across his all-time best-selling book on male-female relationships: ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’.

During the years that followed I taught hunderds of people how to meditate and benefited enormously from my own practice. However, in spite of my progress in becoming Self-aware I still had to deal with issues of self-esteem and self-confidence, and this led me to Werner Erhard, founder of the controversial ‘est training’. I enrolled myself into Werner’s workshop in Seattle in 1977 and participated in many of the other courses that he created, such as the Guest Seminar Leader’s Program, The Communication Workshop, The Breakthrough Workshop and a gruelling Six Day Program, which involved rappelling down high cliffs, swinging across deep canyons attached to a rope and pully, examining issues related to sexuality, body-consciousness, self-image, and much more. Werner had a genius for understanding how the mind works. I finally got to personally meet and interact with him through my participation in the global Hunger Project, which he launched in 1977. I held the position of national manager for Canada for five intense years, working long hours six days a week. My position took me to Europe, Australia and other countries, but most importantly to Mumbai, India where I participated in establishing a volunteer network and office in the financial heart of the city, the famous Nariman Point. I matured and strengthened from this intensive experience in leadership and my association with Werner and the people close to him.

In the mid-80′s I resigned from The Hunger Project and moved from Vancouver to Montreal, where I met Lyse LeBeau, a 35 year old Quebecoise who had been leading her own seminars on relationships and self-awareness for several years. Lyse was a gifted ‘rebirther’ and she introduced me to this powerful tool for emotional and mental clearing. I experienced my first breathwork session when Leonard Orr, founder of the Rebirthing movement lead a workshop near Montreal. After my initiation with Leonard I studied with Lyse for several months and then began rebirthing others. I found the experience both challenging and moving. Through rebirthing others I saw for the first time just how how deep is the pain and anxiety that burdens most people. To the present day I’ve continued to offer breathwork to others, both privately and in groups. My most fulfilling and moving moments occur while I’m supporting clients as they let go of old hurts and wounds they’ve been holding inside, mostly unconsciously.

In 2004 I began co-writing a book on relationships, ‘patterns’, rebirthing, leadership and yoga: the subject matter of workshops that Lyse has been teaching since 1983. Lyse worked closely with me during the writing, contributing a great deal of her wisdom and experience to the book’s content. We published ‘Awakening The Fire Within: Relationship, Leadership & Self-Esteem’ in 2005 (english) and in 2006 (french). It is available in both soft cover and ebook formats. Since the publication of ‘Awakening The Fire Within’ I’ve been the principle leader of three of our programs and seminars, including ‘The 3 Month Rebirthing Trainings (I & II)’, ‘Open Heart: Expansion in Relationships and Self-Awareness’ and ‘The Leadership Program’. Lyse and I collaborate closely on every aspect of these programs which have been delivered consistently in the Montreal region over the past 26 years.