Holding to Flowing: Richard Bock on Breath, Bodyand Liberation

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

Today, we're exploring the profound wisdom of Richard Bock - a master of breath work, aquatic body healing, and spiritual exploration. Richard brings over 40 years of personal inquiry into practices that unlock our deepest potential. From wandering through India as a young seeker to developing the Quantum Light Breath technique, he's dedicated his life to helping people reconnect with their authentic selves. In this episode, we'll journey through Richard's remarkable story - from his exploration through India and radical experiments in consciousness to his current work in Soma Rasa, exploring how breath, presence, and emotional awareness can transform our human experience. Get ready for an intimate, powerful conversation about healing, liberation, and the extraordinary capacity of the human heart.


In this episode, we cover:

  • Introduction to Quantum Light Breath and Richard Bock

  • Journey to India and Spiritual Exploration

  • Experiences with the Hare Krishna Movement

  • 35:00 The move to Harbin Hot Springs and his training in aquatic bodywork and breath work

  • The principles of Quantum Light Breath and its benefits

  • Teachings on Emotions, Breath, and Healing

  • The Benefits of conscious, connected breathing and how it increases vitality

  • The Difference between catharsis and healing

  • The Concept of Soma Rasa

  • The Importance of presence and staying present with emotions

  • How to begin breathwork as a transformation modality


Helpful links:

TRANSCRIPT

Christine Mason  0:01  

I think you would really enjoy dropping in for a five day retreat with me in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. This may, I am going to be co hosting with the most amazing bhakti devotional Yogi singer Adam Bauer and the sensual, lovely, vibrant ball of energy known as Faraja prema, and we have reserved rooms at this very highly consecrated yogic center in one of the most beautiful parts of North America on the east coast, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Boone, North Carolina. And we would love for you to come so you can go to my website, christinemouriemason.com, and find out more about this retreat. It's going to be hiking and breath work and yoga and beautiful food and interactions and practices to be more attuned and present with yourself and each other and connection things that are based on classical Tantra and a little bit of Neo Tantra. So please come and join us. We would so love to share the sacred time with you. If you mention the rose woman podcast, when you're registering, by putting the code in rose woman, you will get a discount on the course, which is exclusive only to podcast listeners Come play with us.


Richard Bock  1:22  

And I'm like, Okay, I let go of my money and I just depend on you. And I gave somebody walked by. I handed them my wallet, my my passport was up in a tree somewhere, hidden in a blanket, and I gave away my money and my little pipe with hashish, pipe with some hashish in it. And I was one of the those people that you know, became a mendicant in India, where I just gave away this source of support and aliveness, trusting that I would be taken care of.


Christine Mason  1:59  

Hello, my friends. It's Christine Marie Mason, your host for the rosewood podcast on love and liberation. I've just recently published a piece on substack, on the newsletter on how we're wired to switch between unity consciousness and the sensation of being separate and in the body and having all of these amazing sensory experiences. And one of the techniques for that is the breath. It's a built in switch. So today, I'm very happy to be introducing you to my dear friend Richard Bach. Richard Bach is a master of aquatic body work, a bhakti yogi and an innovator in breath work practices. He integrates live soundscapes, guided meditation and ecstatic breath into the quantum light breath experience with over 40 years of personal inquiry, Richard has cultivated a deeply compassionate and attuned presence that facilitates true transformation and those he guides. The Quantum light breath is a dynamic breathing meditation developed by the late mystic Jeru Kabal, who was born in 1930 and it combines elements of Vipassana, or silent meditation, observing the self, with deep, rhythmic and consciously connected breathing to accelerate the bypassing of the conscious mind to release all programs directly from the subconscious. And this process often leads to an expanded state, allowing practitioners to experience universal love as a tangible reality. Currently based in Hawaii, he offers in person and online mentoring through his Soma rasa modality, aiming to lead participants toward an experience of oneness. When I started the interview with him, I was aiming to get a little bit of background, just to sort of set the stage for this person who has been deeply on the spiritual path for many decades. And we got a little carried away, because he's such a good storyteller number one. So the first 30 minutes of the interview takes us on an overland journey to India, explores youthful drug addiction, explores all kinds of radical experimentation that he did to begin to find his innermost heart. The actual part of the show on quantum light Breath and breath work begins around 38 minutes. So if you'd like to jump ahead at any time and just learn about breath work, you can do that, but if you're in the mood for a good story, which, in and of itself has a lot of gems on how to trace the emergent in yourself and to know when it's a good time to change or go in a new direction, or just be inspired at the many radical ways one might live on the planet, then drop in for the whole story. Our gift to you with this episode is a free quantum light breath session to try at home. You can find that in the show notes. All right, with no further ado. Richard Bach,


Richard Bock  4:57  

well, when I was 18, I had a. Already left home when I was 17, and I went to the south of Germany and bought a VW van. It's called a Volkswagen bus that it was a year older than me. It was 19 years old, 1956 model, and I started living in it. So many things had shifted and changed for me. One day, I found myself in a cafe really freaked out because I had received a letter from the courts that I was that I had a court case pending for the possession of hashish a year prior, and that I had to apply for my military service, mandatory military service in 1975 it was almost impossible to be a conscientious, conscientious objector in Germany, my girlfriend had just stolen $500 from me and started shooting heroin again. My job had changed, and I didn't like it, and my van was out of technical inspection. It was already overdue, and it would have not passed technical inspection. And I sat there for the first time experiencing depression. I'd never known depression before. I eat like, what am I gonna do? And this Pakistani man walks up to me and says, I heard you have a van for VW van for sale. I said, I have a VW van, but it's not for sale. I live in it. He says, Well, let me introduce myself. I'm actually not just looking for a van, but for a van with a driver, because I am a traveling salesman, and this time, I'm traveling with my wife and my son, and we would like to go back to Pakistan in a van. So we would pay for everything, if you wanting to, you know, get away. And I just looked at him like, what happened? He and I said, When are we leaving? And he says, We can leave in three days. And we left within three days. He had bald head, and he had really long white hair just on the rim of his head, because it had fallen out. He was old, and his son was a young one year younger than me. And I left Germany, and on my way to Pakistan, there was a bus line, I think it was called Sunshine tours from from Istanbul to Delhi, where they took half of the seats out of a big tour bus and put mattresses in, and there was hookahs in there. And, you know, people were just traveling back and forth a lot, and so I was traveling that route in my VW bus with finance by this traveling salesman who made dolls. His wife made the clothes for these Pakistani traditional dolls. He made the faces and the hands and feet and and she made the dresses, and that's how they supported themselves.


Christine Mason  7:46  

So you're traveling across the route of the sunshine bus, but in your own vehicle toward Pakistan. And do you get all the way to Pakistan, or do you stop in India, like, how do you get to the Indian philosophy and land in this whole other world. How does that happen in


Richard Bock  8:04  

Germany? I was an atheist. I was an atheist, a belligerent atheist. Teenager. Anybody starts talking about God, we would get into an intense philosophical discussion. I was one of those German atheists that is like on a mission. And you know, I was raised Catholic, and I left the church when I was 13, which was very controversial. Initially, I didn't even think beyond Pakistan. Of course, I was attracted to India. Some of my friends had traveled over land to India via, via that bus line when we reached Pakistan. This This guy was really clever. He wasn't just a salesman. He was he was very, very clever. He knew that in order for me to take the van to India, I would need a carne de passage, and there's only one place in the world where you can get that, which is in Munich. And he didn't tell me that, but he knew that really well, and he didn't tell me. And so when we approached Pakistan, I had figured out by then, because you meet all these travelers, that I wouldn't be able to go to India in my in my van, which was beautiful. Later on, I recognized but at that time, I would have been very angry with him. So I sold him the bus on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, this tribal area where no government has any jurisdiction, where the tribal people allowed the Pakistani government to put a border post. And so we were stranded there for a week because he had to go into Peshawar and get a bank guarantee that he will take the van out of the country, otherwise he would have had to pay enormous import duty, whatever. And so I spent a week at the Khyber Pass, and that was just one of the highlights. And let me tell you, Afghanistan was the absolute highlight of this entire trip. The Afghani people were the kindest. Like it makes so much emotion comes up in me. I had never met people like this before. The markets were filled with fruits. I mean, pomegranates this size juicy. I've never in my life eaten another pomegranate like that. The hospitality was unequaled. Yeah, it was just beautiful. And then the people at the Khyber passed. They protected me. A border patrol person at one point, after we had already done all our paperwork and everything, a border patrol person came with two guards and wanted to look into the van. And my van was packed with stuff, movie cameras, everything that this guy bought along the way, that he was going to sell in Pakistan. And I didn't want him to look in my van. And so I got really uncomfortable. The guy was very, you know, strong. And all of a sudden I hear somebody shouting behind him, and it was this man with an eye patch, a young man that spoke English, a local man with also with two armed guards. And he yelled at this patrol person, this border patrol person, asked him to step away from the van and walk away. And then he came up to me, and he said we had become friends in those days. And he said, This is our territory. We allow the government here. They have no say here, and you are my guest, and you don't need to answer their questions. You are my guest if, if there's any trouble, you just ignore them and come and find me and I will take care of it. And I was like, wow, this is, you know, in Germany, everything is law and order. And he is like, I'm under the jurisdiction of a law and order of tribal people who don't recognize the authority of the government. And that was lovely. The way we made friends is, you know, I mean, I had hair down to my hips, you know, long blonde hair, blue eyes. And because I loved smoking hashish. He would bring me into a tent in the evening where only the older men were, and he was the only younger person. The young people don't smoke hashish in Afghanistan, only the old men do. And I got the honor. Every evening, they were waiting for me to come and start the hookah, which is like a big clay pot sitting on top of a water pipe. And they would wait till I come, and I had this huge lung capacity, and I would light the hookah, and then he would translate for them, and they would laugh, and it was like I was the star there. That's


Christine Mason  12:32  

a good story. I mean, I find only growing up hearing Afghanistan, sort of in the war and Taliban and the abuse of women and the silencing. I mean, it feels like such a joy to hear about this deeper culture and and just the grief that arises thinking about the years of war, the decades of war and and how they've lost so much humanity in in the treatment of their of their feminine makes me so sad. Christine


Richard Bock  13:02  

in these years after that, you know, experience of Afghanistan every time I heard about, you know, Russia invading and and then the whole Taliban thing and America being involved. And it was just horrendous to hear that, because I had so much love for these people. I my my secret plan was I was going to go back to these tribal people and buy a horse with the money that I got for my van, and then ride back to Germany overland on a horse.


Christine Mason  13:33  

Well, let's go. Let's go. You sell them. You sell the van. We're still only not even to India yet. I don't know how we're gonna finish this podcast. Okay, so you go from there to India. How do you get to India, and where do you


Richard Bock  13:47  

land? So I was in Lahore with him and and then went on to India via bus, and took a boat from Bombay, a bus and train, and then took a boat from Bombay to Goa. And in Goa I had my maybe it was my fifth or sixth LSD trip. I couldn't trip on LSD very often, because every time it was so big and the last two trips were not digestible, I couldn't talk to anyone about it, because I experienced the oneness of everything and so many insights, my first deep insight into the breathing rhythm of sleeping people came during that trip to my last trip, and I was tripping in Goa at a party. And it's like the scene there full moon parties in Goa, a guy standing on it, on a chair, people lined up, and he has a dripper bottle, and he would ask you, how many drips, you know, LSD mirrors being reached around with lines of cocaine on it, tablets, I mean, with big chunks of hashish and. Just everything free and naked. So I started coming on to the LSD for the first time in my life. It was a big party with big speakers on the stage, and I stood behind the stage. I didn't dare to go downstairs to where all the people were, because I was tripping really hard. And it's the first time in my life that I heard reggae music. This was 1975 and maybe December or so during that trip, everything opened up again, and it was really clear that everything is intricately connected with everything else, and the music directly spoke to me, I would have like some some answer to whatever I had heard, and then the music would come back. And one of the biggest sentences there where Bob Marley is singing, you're running and you're running and you're running away, but you can turn away from yourself. And that's what I was doing. I was trying to run away from myself. And so I made a deal with God. I recognized that my God at that time was my purse with money in it. And I was really bothered by by how Indian people related to me through my money. And I was like, Okay, I need to find this in a sober state. I need to find this connection in a completely sober stadium where there was no doubt as to what I was experiencing as a reality, and I'm like, Okay, I let go of my money and I just depend on you, and I gave somebody walked by, I I handed them my wallet, my my passport was up in a tree somewhere, hidden in a blanket, and I gave away my money and my little pipe with hashish, pipe with some hashish in it. And I was one of the those people that, you know, became a mendicant in India, where I just gave away this source of support and aliveness, trusting that I would be taken care of and India took care of me so well, the Indian people deeply, deeply respected my choice to be possessionless, to not depend on money for my sustenance, to just, you know, trust God, whatever God was for me, the realization was that I needed to purify my body and my mind by meditating, by not eating. I believed that I had to fast for 30 days in order to become enlightened. Oh, I missed one big part on the way down to India, somebody had handed me a hand printed copy of Carlos castanedas, first book, The teachings of Don Juan. It was a German translation. My English wasn't so good yet Siddhartha. Somebody gave me a copy of Siddhartha. So I had read Siddhartha and and that all came together. And then after the trip, I realized, I want to go to the Himalayas. I want to find a cave. I want to, you know, I wanted to stop eating. I really believe that if I fasted and meditated, I would become enlightened. Somebody handed me an Osho book called der wake der Weisen Volker, the way of the white cloud in German also. And I got to the like second paragraph in the introduction where Osho says that he attained enlightenment without a guru. So I closed the book. I said, Thanks, sir, that's my path. I was 90. I turned 19 right around the time of that trip. Maybe I turned 19 just after that, but that's how my journey began in earnest.


Christine Mason  18:42  

There's a an incredible, again, set of circumstances there to be guided that early, to the sober access of unity consciousness, right, to see that so clearly, I need to be able to get this and also to see from such a young age, how money gets in the way, how this transactional medium of what can I get, and the taking energy gets in the way of authentic attunement, right? I think those are immense things and courage to say I am going to trust the goddess, or trust life, and give all of this up and just see what happens. It's so potent. I mean, I can't think of many people today who would take that path and be able to sustain it. You know, to just say, let's see what happens. So you go into this life of trusting and just falling into the arms of the community. And how is that? How is that process for you? Well,


Richard Bock  19:42  

I fell into the arms of the community that's called India, and I felt safe in India with that faith, any thought of going back to Germany was just brought up so much fear, yeah. And in fact, later. On i My passport was stolen at one point. I was in the Himalayas in Pakistan at that time, and the German Embassy wouldn't hand me my my passport, my new passport. They kept delaying and delaying, and many years later, I found out that it was because they were in touch with my mother, who was trying to get me back to Germany. And I didn't feel safe in India. I felt safe because my newfound like I could not have imagined what it would be like to encounter a teenage atheist in Germany like I was with this newfound faith I needed to first have realizations in that sobriety. And so I was searching, you know, searching for a place where that was possible. And I very rarely did not eat. People were so kind, always sharing their food. And so I never really fasted for more than a day or two, sometimes three. I went back to India from that trip after the embassy finally gave me my passport, and so I went back to India and went into the Himalayas in India. I walked from Pahalgam through this Shiva cave in Amarnath, all the way to Kargil and into lay I had a pair of shoes at that point my mother, that was the last contact I had with my mother, where she sent me a pair of hiking boots to Pakistan. Never found a cave that felt like you know my place. I was actually on my way from lay to Manali hiking. I was detained by the by the army because it was a restricted area. They have a big border dispute with China, and so this was a restricted to foreigners. So they brought me back to lay, and they took my passport and and I stood there in front of a judge, and he wanted to know why I was hiking there, why I was walking, and so I shared with him this whole trip about fasting and all of this stuff, and we spoke for an hour, he revealed that he was a Sufi by heart, and by the time we were done with this thing, the outside of the courtroom was completely packed with people, because there was all these other cases that needed to be heard. And at the end of our conversation, he said, Look, I don't see anything wrong with what you did. You had no ill intent, and I could let you go free, if he said, but as a judge, you know I could let you go free, but I'm also a father, and you look very emaciated, and I'm going to ground you for a month. And please don't be alarmed. Our prison here only has one other prisoner, and he's a Buddhist monk. And you will learn a lot, and you can do your either your fasting, or you get to cook your own food. You have a ration every day and and I believe you will learn something from him, and I will make sure that the guards treat you with with compassion. And I was like, okay, and this is how God took care of me. It was, yeah, wow.


Christine Mason  23:08  

And then you eventually did make your way into ashram life, yes,


Richard Bock  23:12  

so, so after this time in Ladakh, where I was in prison for a month, there was an Australian so the word got around really quick that there is a foreigner in in jail. And people would come by, and they would they would offer me hashish to smoke right there at the gate the prison. The prison cell was had a had a gate to the outside. And so people would come, the children of God brought me a Bible. Somebody brought me a book by Ramakrishna. This Australian guy came, and I told him about this idea of building a raft out of 455 gallon barrels and and putting some wood on top and floating down the Ganges. So he waited for me to come out of jail, and then we, we, he paid for the trip to Srinagar, and then to hard run Rishikesh, and then a little further down, hard run Rishikesh, the Ganges is still really wild, and then a little further down. And then we ended up on a raft, and he was smoking hashish every day. And every time I smoked hashish, I would feel so let down by myself, because I wanted to become pure, and I couldn't kick this habit. You know, when, when a chillum would go around, you know, with some sadhus, I would always, you know, intend to take the chillum and honor it and then pass it on. And I would always take the chillum and honor it, and no, and the last time I did that, the last time I said, in a circle of Babaji smoking Ganja chatas, I was able to pass the Chilam to the next person, and I knew I'm done. Yeah,


Christine Mason  24:55  

anybody who's ever been addicted to anything understands, yeah. That moment, that moment of clarity is like. And why does it take so long? And when you knew you knew, a long time before that, but it still takes something to drop into the habit, like when you hear the bell ringing, how long does it take you before you answer its call? But this happens in Brindavan, so maybe Krishna was helping you out a little bit.


Richard Bock  25:19  

So, so this, this happened in Mathura. Actually, the chillum happened in Mathura. A student had brought me to this, to this little ashram where these babajis were sitting around and, you know, smoking chillums. And I spent the night there, and he promised he would come back in the morning and bring me to some temples, because I was really into visiting temples. At that point, I was barefoot. I didn't have shoes. I had one cloth on the top of chatter that was saffron colored, and a Doughty, a white Doughty, and a little tiny bag that I had made up of my pants that that I carried under my shoulder with my passport and a diary and a pen. That's the only possessions I had. Nothing else. The student came back in the morning, and he arranged for me to walk to Vrindavan with this Sadhu that I was really attracted to. He wasn't part of the chillum kind of Shaivite, see, was a Vaishnava. He sat in front of the Bhagat Purana in the morning and and read out loud. And I was so attracted to him, and so I asked him to paint a tea lac on my forehead. And he reluctantly did that. He didn't want to touch me, but he made tea luck in his, you know, the clay on his in his palm, and then used the the spoon from the archman Cup to dip into the into the paste, and then painted a Tilak on my forehead. And then he brought me to Vrindavan, brought me to the bunker Bihari temple. Long story, but I cut it short, and I couldn't bow down in the bunker Bihari temple. It was a crazy scene, and he asked me to bow down, and I couldn't. And I would always bow down in the temples. So he knew he would have to bring me to the to the angry people, to the, you know, the in India with the white people are called angry. I don't actually know what that means, but, but he brought me to the Hare Krishna temple where Prabhupada was and when, when I stepped from the street through the gate of the temple, I stopped and I I just took in like my life has just completely changed. I always would answer the question, who is my guru? You know, I would say, I don't have a guru. I don't need a guru the evening before stepping into that temple, when that Indian student brought me to the ashram, he he asked me who my guru was, and I said, I don't have one yet. And I'm like, What did I just say? That was so, you know, out of the Yeah,


Christine Mason  27:54  

particularly for someone who is already like, yeah, Osho, I don't need a guru to get it in place. Something else was was working in so


Richard Bock  28:04  

this is, this is worth telling them. So I step in the temp into the Krishna Balaam temple, and I'm wearing a white Doti, a saffron chatter, no, no, no, no, no. White for householders, saffron for celibate, for brahmacharis, I had neck beats, but they weren't made of Tulsi. They were made of tiny shells that somebody had gifted me. I had a brahman thread, because when I was walking alone on the Ganges after this raft trip with this Australian guy, I continued walking, a brahman had initiated me into the Gayatri Mantra. And so I had a Brahmin thread. I had beads. I had a shaved head, because in Goa I shaved my head, but I left two. The Jewish people have two little braids on the left and right. And I had a seeker like the Hare Krishnas do, right? So it looked like I had all the and I had tea like on my forehead. So nobody preached to me. They were all like, they looked at me, and they're like, you know, leave this guy alone. Don't, don't talk to him. He's been around, and he doesn't get it, you know, he's got it all mixed up. And that was very nice that they left me alone in that way. But then there was one guy from from England. I even remember his name, smart Hari. And he looked at me. He says, You look hungry. I've got some food for you. And so he brought me in the back, and he fed me tree and God knows what, and and he asked me, you know what my trip was? And I told him about wanting to attain enlightenment by fasting for 30 days. He goes, this is not what we do here. Here we eat food to become enlightened. We only ever eat food that is prepared and offered to God, and so it becomes the medium for enlightenment. And I told him about my meditation practice, which which was, you know, when I read Ramakrishna book, he says that the easiest form of meditation is mantra meditation. Asian. So I would sit there, he didn't give a mantra in the book, and I would go, God, God, God, God. That didn't really work. But a few days before I arrived in vudavan, when I was still walking on the banks of the Ganges the Hare Krishna, the memory of the Hare Krishna mantra came back to me. I had heard it in German in Germany through a record, and we were singing it for like 20 minutes or so, and that melody and the mantra came back, and I was singing Hare Krishna on the banks of the Ganges. It was the happiest day of my life. Nowhere to go, nothing to fear, nothing to attain. And I was just happy. And here I am in the place where they're chanting all day they eat sanctified food I had a dream on my trip towards Asia. I had a dream repeatedly where I was in a youth hostel in an upper bunk bed, and somebody gifted me a book that explained everything. It was a gigantic book that explained everything I was ever interested in. And when I heard the word Bhagavad Gita the first time. I knew that's the book, but I had never had a copy of the Bhagavad Gita. So this guy, while he fed me, he, you know, he got all this information out of me, he arranged for me to stay in the ashram that night, even though that wasn't allowed, because you have to first show you sincerity by coming regularly for a few weeks. He said, there's some German devotees. They live upstairs in the ashram, and they have a free bed, and they have one of them is going to gift you a German version of the Bhagavad Gita. So it was just crazy. So many things coming together, and then I lived in the ashram for 15 years in different places in India and Sri Lanka, in the Philippines and then America.


Christine Mason  31:46  

So in the ashram, you're really entering into a devotional life, yes.


Richard Bock  31:52  

And I mean, I was already so attracted to everything that he had shared with me. But then in the evening, I was in an environment, and I was observing a scene that would have been the biggest turn off ever, where a man was being worshiped on a marble throne with peacock feathers and ghee lamp and incense and flowers and and and he sat there being worshiped. And that was just such a no no to my old self, right? And I looked at him and really just felt into him and saw that he did not take one ounce, not one hair of that adoration personally, it dried through him. That was really clear. After the kirtan and the Guru Puja. He gave a lecture, and I couldn't really understand his English. It was so thick, and he looked around, and our eyes met, and he lingered for a few seconds, and in those few seconds, I saw myself for the first time make it. I saw all the games I was playing with myself all the pretenses, and I just like I realized I am on some trip about not having a guru, and I need guidance one year that was almost one year of struggling on my own.


Christine Mason  33:14  

It's very universal, the things that you're sharing. I remember when I met my personal guide. That same feeling like I never really wanted a guru. I always really liked having teachers and friends my like Mark Whitwell has been my mentor forever, but he's very clear that the teacher is no more than a friend and no less than a friend, and like you're meeting his soul peers. But when I met my guide, he looked at me with this sparkle, and he saw right through me, everything, all the warping and stories and tension and grief, but it was totally without judgment. It was complete unconditional love, and I felt like the combination of like being seen clearly to the core, in all my magnificence and in all my ick and and just being loved there. And I knew that that is how I wanted to walk in the world, and that this was a person to I could be safely bowed down to without worrying about being colonized like I would have been in the traditional dominance hierarchies. There was no authoritarianism coming off of this. It was an invitation to be in a loving field, not in a dominance field. And yeah, that was very life changing and a relief to me to have a place to surrender. Yes. What a relief. Yes. So this devotional life didn't last forever. 15 years is a long time, but you, you went ahead and had a family life, you became a householder, and now you're sort of by the time you finish the ashram. Stage, you're in your mid 30s. What is what is happening? Prabhu


Richard Bock  35:04  

pad passed away a year after I joined and got initiated by him. The hare krishna movement went downhill from there. At first, there was this big, you know, like it was beautiful, even in his departure. But then the people who took these roles as gurus, they that was too big for them. And the one person that I chose, he fell apart. He had, you know, he was fucking his female students. He was on drugs. He was on Halcyon and and and getting drunk. And he confided in me. And then I went to West Virginia. I mean, he had brought me to America to manage a farm that was just north of Harbin hot springs. It was called Mount Kailash. And then from there, I went to West Virginia, and there was another guru who later on, I found out, you know, was molesting the boys in the gurukula. And so I left there, and then I ended up in Los Angeles, at the temple. I started a business. I was distributing antique reproduction oil paintings. And there was a huge market for that, because you can buy a whole living room furniture, you know, antique, but to buy one painting will cost you as much as the whole living room furniture. Paintings are very rare, and so I made a lot of money in supporting the temple, and I was asked to manage the Laguna Beach temple. And during one of my travels along the West Coast, in this big truck that had all these paintings in it, I was attracted to this young woman, so I had two, two children. I was married. I had an affair with her in Vancouver, and my heart opened and she she got me in touch with Robert Bly, a few other things. And we read this book together, God body, which, by the way, Theodore Sturgeon, that is his crown piece called God body. I ordered a copy. It's on its way. It's going to be, it might already be at the post office, because I knew it would come back into my life when my heart opened. I couldn't even chant all my prescribed 16 rounds of Hare Krishna mantra, because I would get so emotional in my love for God here, and in the name, in the mantra, and in my heart, and I, for the first time, recognized that I really needed to refine this, this presence here. And when I came home to LA from this affair, I became honest with my wife. I asked her for a few days of just allowing me to reveal myself completely. I said three days. It actually took four days. And the deal was that if I wasn't able to share something that she asked about, that she gave me time to really just unwind everything around it and that by the end of our time in Desert Hot Springs, we had left our kids in LA. We went to Desert Hot Springs, and our sexuality during that Revelation, where I completely shared everything honesty, our sexuality completely shifted, and we went into stillness, and she would have these 15 minute long orgasms while I was completely still inside of her and completely transformed. And I completely transformed. My whole orgasm addiction was gone. It was just absent. I, you know, struggled with that for a long time. And when we came back to Los Angeles. Our little apartment there at the Los Angeles temple compound became like a beehive. People just would come because every time I would speak, I wouldn't speak from the books anymore. Wasn't representing Prabhupada anymore, but I spoke straight from my heart, and then every time i i left to go on a trip for my business, you know, people would come to my wife. And so he's, he's not following Prabhu teachings anymore, and he's, you know, this and that. And so she would, she became really crazy. And one day, my eight year old son, Bali, he took me by the hand, walked me outside the apartment and in the driveway out there, he says, Dad, mom is suffering every time you come. It is so amazing and beautiful. But the moment you leave and she's she's completely crazy. I think you should move out eight years old, yeah, oh yeah. And so, and I knew at that point that I needed to leave the Krishna movement. We had, we, we eventually filed for divorce, and I let go of the of managing the Laguna Beach temple and and I knew that I had to just leave the heart Krishna movement. And for. Find a place where I can, where I can really discover, because people say, Follow your heart. But what does that mean? You know, I wanted to find a place that where I could practice following my heart and fall on my, you know, fall on my face and get up and wipe off and start again. And I found Harvard hot springs, which is owned by the heart consciousness church. And so I went from ashram life to the very permissive life of, you know, a nudist community in Northern California.


Christine Mason  40:36  

Well, there's a lot of similarities in terms of, like, no ownership and communal living. And yeah, but I think what you said about the kind of the diffusion of energetics and guidance when a guru dies, and then his community sort of closes in and they try to take his seat, but they don't have that same energy, and it kind of degrades from there. I even, even when the Guru is alive, I think there's this an inner circle that can sometimes warp the teachings. So what I like about places like carbon is this pure based, non guru effort to create a heart based way of living together and touching the sacred without that dogmatic structure. So I can imagine that it was a little bit of a relief as well as a big difference, but that your heart seems to have been learning yearning toward freedom for a long time, right? I saw a


Richard Bock  41:37  

beautiful bumper stick at Harvard one day, my karma ran over your dogma. I should, it should actually have said, my karma ran over my dogma. And, and Harbin was so permissive, you know, if you paid your rent and you were kind and you didn't like fight with people, you were welcome there. And, and the founder of of Harbin was just a it was my first experience of a benevolent dictator, and I came there to learn. First I came there just because I remembered that that place existed, and I went there. And then later, one of the my I went there to learn massage and aquatic body work, everyone was allowed to live their religious beliefs. It was not so much an intentional community where we had regular community meetings that happened very rarely. It only happened when somebody was being kicked out, or, you know, big deal kind of things that the community meeting was called. It was a beautiful place for me. It was just the right thing. I had made a list of things that I wanted to manifest in the next 10 years of my life before moving to argon, and one of them was that I would find a healing modality that would take my whole meditation background into a fruition. And in my first class at Harmon, the woman who was teaching, she on our day off, she played a tape in the morning of a meditation that was called Quantum light breath. When I did the quantum light breath, and I heard the guidance and the music, I went through the full experience. I heard this voice saying again and again, this man is doing my work. This is my work. And so that was the modality that you know, became my main focus, even in the aquatic body work. When I was teaching aquatic body work, it always became breath work. So to say,


Christine Mason  43:37  

Yeah, could you? Could you for those people who are unfamiliar with quantum light breath, would you describe its core principles, its benefits? Who was Jeru, all of that stuff.


Richard Bock  43:49  

Jeru became famous in Europe. He was an Osho student. His name was Santosh in early Pune. He left the Osho movement after Rajneesh puram failed in in Oregon, he left and started the apt Institute, the accelerated personal transformation Institute. And he had come across conscious, connected breath work. And he discovered that when he puts the vitality that is that is cultivated through conscious, connected breathing. When you couple that with a strong Vipassana guidance that all of your memories are not happening right now. Other than that, they're movies of the past. All of your future projections are not happening. They're just mental projections of what might be if you stay present in your direct experience, then you discover your divinity with this much vitality. And Jeru did that in a brilliant way, and every time I played his tape. So right after this massage course, there. Was I ended a training with him, when later on, it was called the clarity process, the anagogic process. And he called it the analogic process, because it's a natural biodynamic movement for us to come into our enlightened state. And he just found ways to accelerate it. And so and I was crazy. I would do quantum light breath every day. During my first course, I would get up at three o'clock in the morning, put on headphones, and sit in the hot tub and and listen to the recording of the quantum light breath. And then he would do two more quantum light breaths during the day. And it was, I was just It got me in touch with my feeling body. In the ashram life, I was divorced from my feeling body. Every day you hear, you're not this body, you're not these feelings, your spirit. And there is this like movement to transcend. And I needed to come back down into my heart and Oh, my humanness. And cheers. Work really helped me to do that. And every time I shared it with other people, you know, small groups would form and we would listen to the recording. And then one day, this woman said, I don't want to hear the recording again. I want you to guide it. So I just played some music and guided it like, you know, Jeru did, and it came completely natural for me. All the words, everything was just I breathe and I get high breathing, and then the intuition is open. And so after about a month or so of doing that, I asked Jeru. I told Jeru that I was doing that, and asked him what he thought of it. And he said, Well, I want you to stop for a month and really investigate why you want to do this? And so I stopped, and I didn't find any particular reason, reason other than that, people asked me. And so I came back to him, and I said, you know, I don't have a good reason why to do this other than that. People keep asking me. And he said, Then continue doing it and call it quantum light breath. That was my training for quantum light path. He just trusted me. He had gotten to know me really deeply because I took all his courses when he went to teach in Germany. I went to Germany to attend his courses there because I knew that the German language. He also spoke German. He was an American, but he spoke good German, cute German, very cute German and and so much came. Yeah, I had so many. I mean, I had my conception memories. I had my birth memories that were all later on, confirmed by my mother while she was still alive. I


Christine Mason  47:33  

remember hearing that recording at Harbin, and maybe 2007 and I really also had incredible


Richard Bock  47:40  

2007 that wasn't the recording. That was me. Oh, no, you anyway, it was a


Christine Mason  47:44  

recording. I was in a chorus on something else. I was Steven Lakita.


Richard Bock  47:48  

Yes, yes. They played it regularly, yes, guy. And


Christine Mason  47:51  

I got tetany, tetonny, I got that I was crying and screaming, and got tetany and like, it was just such an intense experience. I'd never done breath work at all before that, and I hadn't even really started a strong pranayama practice in my yoga, a breathing practice in my yoga. But now today, you know there is Holotropic breathwork, quantum light breath. There's all kinds of modern names for pranayama, and I wonder it started as rebirthing. There's Stan groff's work. So I wonder if you could contextualize this particular modality with the other modalities and how it is the same or different.


Richard Bock  48:28  

So rebirthing is very focused on bringing up old memories and working with them. Stancrafts work when I experienced it not through Stan Grof, but through somebody who was an authorized teacher at Harbin, it uses the unconscious, the subconscious, and the access to the subconscious, then you start making paintings and drawings and you know, and it's already analyzed and in the quantum light breath. Jerusa unique gift was that he was able to so deeply respond to the people in the room, even through his recording, in a way that he brought attention back to the present experience. I tell you a little story. So I'm teaching, I'm sharing a quantum light breath doing a Watsu course. And the founder of Watsu Herald, all was in the in the audience. And so in the middle of the Conan light breath, he remembers his enlightenment. He hears me say, all your memories, just treat them like garbage. Just flush them down the toilet. Just come here. It's all here. He got so offended, and this huge anger rose up in him. And because he was able to not have a story around his anger, he recognized that, oh, this is my present enlightenment, my memory of my, of my, of my enlightenment is stale and. It has become stale enlightenment. This is the fresh version. And so that's the potential of quantum light breath. I became a Satori dealer. I could bring people into multiple sartories Within one hour of quantum light breath and and that's how it became popular. And that even even the recording worked in a way, well, it works that it brings up the things that were not. So let me put it like this. Now I'm diverging a little bit from quantum light, but this is my version of quantum light. Breath. By breathing more deeply, you create more vitality. When you are requiring more oxygen, like when you're running or jogging, you breathe more just you don't have to think about breathing. Your body does that automatically. If you, if you pay attention to your breathing, and you breathe more, more vitality comes up. If vitality comes up to the degree that you can't fully handle it, it shows up as tetany. It shows up as all kinds of blocks. When, when, when someone does this for the first time and they have big catharsis, I say, great, you know, it can be. Catharsis can be a way of breaking through some boundaries that you had before for yourself, trauma doesn't heal through catharsis. It can be an initial breakthrough, but trauma heals to the degree that a person can stay present in their feeling experience. And this is something that I cultivated. This is something that Jeru was able to facilitate through his words, you know, and when quantum light path is administered through a recording, there should be somebody in the room that can assist people into not even needing to go into catharsis, just to slow it down a little bit and really digest what's coming up, rather than catharting.


Christine Mason  51:53  

Yeah, and I mean, noticing the difference between catharsis and healing


Richard Bock  51:57  

and catharsis can be an initial like breakthrough into healing, but then you have to slow down. You need to learn how to facilitate by Titration and by really keeping the person deeply involved with their feeling experience, rather than making it louder and louder so that they can become their own resource, that their presence is their resource.


Christine Mason  52:22  

That's a very beautiful idea. Say more about that, that your your presence is your resource.


Richard Bock  52:29  

So this is where Soma rasa comes in. So after all of these years of doing quantum light breath and doing aquatic body work and facilitating so many different healing modalities, I got in touch with this teacher that was sharing a process called the Open human hard work. Shortly after I discovered this, it started to manifest in the way I was facilitating with people where, when I am able to assist you in returning your attention to where attention is arising from. You see, your attention doesn't arise in the next room. Now, it arises in your body, but your center could be outside of your body. I discovered that I had a connection to my heart, but I was like safely back here, I wasn't even fully in my body. But then when presence becomes really anchored in the body. And when a person can own their feelings, they start breathing in organic ways more deeply than I was ever able to facilitate by bringing their attention to their breath. And you've experienced that when we sat in Lotus house and we did a full on summer Assa session. I don't have to ask you to breathe more, just you being present, having permission to feel your fear fully, to allow your grief and to stay present in your grief, you start breathing more because your vitality requires a deeper breath. So the breath work is like the other way around. You breathe more. You become more vital. Here in being more present, your vitality increases, and you automatically breathe more. And so oftentimes, when people come to me for a one on one breath session, I don't mention the breath at all. I just, I just, if they trust me, my guidance enough to redirect their attention into their heart and in into their feeling body, their breathing is just gorgeous, divine, beautiful, and that they recognize the Divinity, which in itself, can be a big deal and overwhelming. I'm


Christine Mason  54:44  

feeling into that like when that moment of seeing your own and soul divinity, and how that flies in the face of all of the stories that there's something in you that needs to be fixed.


Richard Bock  54:59  

Well. Well, let me just you shared something earlier when you met your teacher. So he showed you a relating with yourself that had no judgment. You showed you a relating with yourself when you don't have judgment.


Christine Mason  55:17  

I see That's right. Well, in that particular instance, it was he said, Are you aware of grief in your field? And I had been trying so hard to hide that grief with with joy, with, like, optimism and gratitude, and it was sitting on top of that grief, and I realized, like, how I had judged the grief and made the grief raw.


Richard Bock  55:38  

Yes, yes, yes. Oh, that's so beautiful, and that's so honest. It was honest, yes, and then when there is enough of a safety that you can actually allow your grief and feel your grief, then grief is blessing you, right? Same with fear, instead of overcoming fear. If, if, if I allow fear, if I have enough presence to allow myself to be scared, to tap on the head from my teacher going, wake up, Richard, you're here already. You've arrived, you know. And so then it's like an alarm clock that says, Hey, wake up when fear and grief are fully allowed. Next thing that comes is power or anger in the form of anger. And it's like, what is this? And if I own it and not project it out or project it against myself, when I just own it, I have become human to feel this, then anger blesses me. It becomes wisdom. Anger, it can even become wisdom hatred. When I heard that word for the first time, I had no clue what this man is talking about. I didn't hear it. I read it in an introduction to a book, and this teacher of the open human artwork, he had written an introduction to the book in the arms of love, where a Western woman did a full circumambulation of Mount collage with full prostrations. She was one of his students. And in the introduction, he talks about what you encounter on a pilgrimage of that magnitude. And he said, one of the things you will encounter is wisdom, hatred and and in my soul, I knew what he was talking about. But in my humanness, I was like, I have no clue, but I knew I need to study with this man wisdom


Christine Mason  57:29  

hatred and pain, you know,


Richard Bock  57:34  

and the underlying quality of all of it is joy. Yeah,


Christine Mason  57:38  

you have a tremendous ability to hold Express, deal with whatever's arising, and then pass it through you and be just friends again. I mean, basically, I want to say that it works like whatever you're doing. Well,


Richard Bock  57:51  

the proof, the proof of the pudding is and how this is manifesting in my relationship with my wife, who is my greatest teacher. You know, ever since we met, she has been my greatest teacher. Well, even this man who who taught the open, human hard work, he invited us to New Jersey. We came from China, partially because he invited us to his house and to take a course for free. During that course, it became really clear that my primary teacher is my relationship with Kiki?


Christine Mason  58:23  

Well, how interesting, how, how, for how many of us is the most intimate relationship we're in our primary teacher, right? Right?


Richard Bock  58:32  

And then, you know, Kiki, if Kiki was here right now listening to this, she would say, well, you are your primary teacher like and to really bring it home, to really bring it home, and this is how we get along with each other. Because it's like, for me, it's Richard first, Kiki second. For Kiki, it's Kiki first, Richard second, or anything else second. And when it's Richard first, it's not, you know, Richard first, no, it's, it's my presence here, where I receive my feelings as visitors to the guest house, and I receive and entertain them all. I welcome and entertain them all. I


Christine Mason  59:15  

think you also by deeply immersing in this work around emotions and feelings and noticing how they are changed with breath and how they're coming and going all the time, makes you much less triggerable and reactive to what's happening in the environment. So you can be like, Wow, someone's escalated, elevated, someone's in a mood today, but you just don't someone's joyful today, but you just don't take it personally. So


Richard Bock  59:47  

short story there we been living in our Subaru station wagon here in Hawaii. And you know, it can get really intense when you live in such small living quarters, even though. You in Hawaii, Kiki's I'm driving, Kiki is like typing on her phone, and, you know, she needs to translate something, and she asked me to pull over, and I read what she wrote, and it was just I got so triggered. I was so angry, because it was demeaning, it was critical, it was belittling. It was just everything in the book, and I had just really learned, and had just really come to increase my capacity of receiving my anger as a gift from me first. So Kiki watches me reading this, and she sees my anger, and she said, you're angry, and you know, the first response would always be, no, no, no, you know, but I was able to say, Yes, I'm very angry, and this is for me. And it was real. It wasn't like some pretense. It wasn't like I made it up. I experienced my anger as a pleasure. That was that it was arising in my body, and I just let it really wash through me. And then I continued driving, and there was no other talk, you know, it's just owning my anger. She didn't know how to respond to that. And after five minutes, her hand comes over and touches my hand. She said, Please pull over again. And I pulled over, and she looked at me with these loving eyes, and she apologized from the depth of her heart that she was unaware of where she was coming from. And she wrote this and, and the silence gave her enough space to recognize that. And I was like, Oh my God, thank you so much. And And nowadays, like when Kiki gets angry, all I need to do is just look at her without judgment, and she recognizes that she is enjoying her anger. And it's a dance. It's a Leela. That's why Soma rasa, Leela. Leela is the dance. And when she when she admits to this dance that she's chosen to incarnate, to dance like this, then there is a choice, and she can let it go and we just laugh. Well,


Christine Mason  1:02:07  

you know, I think in this outrage economy, that the idea that your anger is pleasurable is sometimes lost on people, but it's there. There is a point where the anger is the only way to Valve trapped energy, right? And and that if you can begin to work with the energy moving without needing the anger, that's even more joyful. But if you, if you can't move the energy without opening the anger portal, then it gets then it'll make you sick, right? You know exactly.


Richard Bock  1:02:40  

And the secret there for me is that when we can uncouple the anger from the story, and when, because angry is always like projecting the life energy, anger is a vitality, you know, and when anger is just pure anger vitality and not wasted by by projecting it out, by just allowing it, then it purifies the system, and we arrive in our heart again, and the wisdom comes out of it, a gift comes out of it. So it is. It is this investment in the story that keeps us repeating the same thing over and over and over, Yeah, beautiful. And that's an addiction that is actually a chemical addiction. It's a biochemical addiction. The molecules of emotions are very addictive, where we even create it, create scenarios that allow us to be righteous about our anger.


Christine Mason  1:03:39  

Yeah? That's a very crazy idea that you are. Well, it's not crazy. This is an accurate explanation of why we stay in pattern behavior loops that are familiar to us from childhood, right? You're so used to that molecular chain of events that you just create situations and repeat them even, even in a situation that doesn't have that in its seed, you will call out of that situation that exact pattern or project it onto another person so that you can summon the same pattern that you're familiar with to basically get your Little molecular melody.


Richard Bock  1:04:20  

I'm so glad you're recording this. This is, this is beautiful. Yeah,


Christine Mason  1:04:27  

you're playing my tune. Yes, you


Richard Bock  1:04:31  

didn't push my button. You played my keyboard. You played my


Christine Mason  1:04:35  

my molecular melody keyboard, yeah, exactly yes,


Richard Bock  1:04:38  

yes, yes. Well, that's beautiful, the way you put that. I love that.


Christine Mason  1:04:44  

Oh, not that it's not happening, still it's still happening. But I do find that the more that I own, as you said, put my own, take responsibility for my own awareness of my feelings, it's less likely that somebody is going to play my keyboard or even that I'll play it again


Richard Bock  1:04:59  

in. Underlying quality is really that there is a secret pleasure if you can't feel the pleasure, if you can't admit to it yet, it is that it's safe to have it secretly.


Christine Mason  1:05:10  

Yes, all right, so I'm having a secret pleasure at our laughing with you over these topics. Okay, so let's ground this a little bit for somebody who's considering working with breath as a modality to access something in themselves, how do they begin


Richard Bock  1:05:28  

by experiencing themselves by being in the direct experience of what happens if you engage in conscious, connected breathing, and how your vitality increases, and let yourself be guided by someone who is trained to deal with trauma, because your traumas will come up, you know, and trauma meaning anger can be overwhelming. Fear can be overwhelming, even joy can be overwhelming, and and to not go to overwhelm, to just to just really feel to the level where you can stay, and that if you have to keep leaving, leaving is a leaving into the safety of familiarity, of what's familiar, if you, If you let your attention, if you can. What we're trying to cultivate as a facilitator, as a human being, is the capacity like to grow, the capacity to stay present. That when we come upon a moment where it is obvious, I can choose here, choose staying as the utmost that can happen. I had a beautiful thing where the anicca in the Vipassana, the Anita means, you know, it's all temporary and, and the English version is, this too shall pass. So I was sitting with something, and I heard this word, the sentence, this too shall pass, and all of a sudden it's like, fuck that. I'm not gonna wait till this passes. I'm gonna, like, open to this. I'm gonna expose myself to the arising of emotion, because that's what I incarnated for. And I take responsibility for being human, for being not just any human, Richard Killian Bach here, with this particular past, and then to really in that embodiment, then there is moments of fulfillment. And so when, when a facility, when someone wants to facilitate for others, they need to be able to have that, that they need to cultivate their own capacity to stay. And if I can cultivate that in myself, then I can also, then I also automatically facilitate that for others. Because it's obvious, Christine, it is the simplest thing, but it is the absolute most difficult thing. It's not complicated. It's really simple, but it's not easy. It requires immense courage to cultivate this.


Christine Mason  1:08:01  

Thank you for your decades and decades of study and your willingness to follow the pulse of what's emergent and to go so deep in such a breath of healing modalities. Yeah,


Richard Bock  1:08:16  

Christine, please bring me a copy of your book when you come nine lives, like when I read the Table of Contents, I got high. I got so excited. Thank you every cent, every every line of the chapters, just like, yeah,


Christine Mason  1:08:33  

thank you. Oh, it's coming out April 1. And I'm very grateful for anybody who pre orders on Amazon or orders on rosewoman.com because it's three years in the making, and I was really stuck on it. And I just said, I I'm going to pull it all the way through to conclusion. And it turned out to be 400 pages of highly footnoted, a six page bibliography, a very intense and I hope, a work that contributes something unique. I appreciate you so much and to everyone's full beautiful coming into their own potential, shining as the unique light of divinity that you are here to be. Thank you. Well, that was quite a ride through the wilds of India the Krishna movement, all the way into simply being attuned and helping other people be attuned to what's really going on in their emotional lives. If you want to find Richard, he is at true contact.com or you can come visit him in person for sessions on the Big Island of Hawaii, please check the show notes and find him. You will be very grateful. My audio engineer and producer, Tim Wahlberg, was unbelievably patient with me on this episode. He is such a stickler for exacting audio and our online book. Platform failed, so I ended up doing it in zoom, and we only have one track, and he really tried to work around that for environmental noise, and he is the backbone of the show, along with Geneva, who makes sure that the guests have all the information they need, and the show wouldn't happen without them and without you. So thank you for being with me and for passing on the episodes you like directly in text to people who might benefit. Just text them the link, and if you get a chance to comment on the episodes, if you're listening on Spotify, they have a new comment function. I always appreciate that. And please rate the show on any platform that you're on. It really supports getting it out into more people's ears, wherever you're at in this moment, no matter what's going on in the body politic, in your family, in the environment, you can find that bindi in your own heart and be utterly resourced and remember who you are, you can switch. So let's take a big breath together, inhale. Feel the deliciousness of your breath as it comes in and enters the body. Float there for a minute with a retention. Hold your breath a little bit, and then let it all go. Maybe shake the body a little bit, just let it all go. You are always the radiant light of the one you




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Bonus Episode: The Nine Lives Of Woman: Sensual, Sexual and Reproductive Stages From Birth To 100