1) Quote
2) Seven Days of Conscious Breathing
There are a few experiences I wanted to share related to the week where I was focused on observing my breathing:
i. Whole-Body Listening - my friend Audra and I have the coolest conversations, she's deep, hilarious and a little bit crazy so it's always cool to compare notes. We chat once every few weeks or so and these conversations are so good that I sometimes get too excited and interrupt her when she's speaking. On this occasion I started observing my breathing just before I called and by having an awareness of it I found my breathing slowed down and I felt grounded and centred. I let go of all the stuff I wanted to tell her and just let the conversation flow.
I continued paying some attention to my breathing as we spoke and I noticed it completely changed the quality of the communication. Instead of cutting her off because she said something that triggered a thought, or waiting for a gap so I could share the thought that was triggered I was able to let go and just listen. Fully. It was surreal, I felt like I was listening with my mind and my body. The conversation itself became a kind of meditation.
I’m now convinced that without a connection to our bodies when we communicate we may operate from a left-brained perspective and therefore be more likely to misinterpret meaning or emotional content and jump to the wrong conclusions. By maintaining an awareness of my breathing it felt like I was listening with my whole self.
ii. Trapped Memory – another experience happened while I was walking around at home and was pretty shocking. I was paying attention to my breath and I could feel what felt like an uncomfortable knot in my solar-plexus all morning, then I suddenly had a flashback to being 5 years old and my brother teasing me about my pot-belly. I was really skinny at that age so the pot-belly did look kind of funny; it was just the kind of silly teasing an older brother would subject you to but my response to it had resulted in me unconsciously holding tension for 30 years! I’d heard tell that specific parts of the body store memories within them but this was my first personal experience of it.
Over the next several days I had a dull pain there so I used a technique from Ingrid Bacci's The Art of Effortless Living and breathing into the area when I was aware of it. It now feels like most of the tension has been released.
During that week I also noticed that every negative feeling whether impatience, stress, annoyance or anything else resulted in either my breathing stopping or becoming much shallower and high in the chest. This type of breathing in turn tends to maintain or escalate the negative feeling. By contrast observing the breath tends to cause it to naturally deepen into belly breathing, triggering the relaxation response and the alpha brain wave pattern where left and right-brain work together. This, as I said in Breathing Part 1 is the relaxed state of concentration where peak performance can be achieved.
Observing the breath has taught me how unconscious I am much of the time. It is said that 95% of our behaviour is governed by the subconscious, by becoming aware of my breathing which is an unconscious habit it wakes me up from the various trances I live in and brings me into the present. Once that happens, once I am present I have more choice as to how I react to situations instead of just being on auto-pilot. The thing I love about it is all you are doing is paying attention to the breathing, not controlling it, just observing.
Finally, as you become aware of your own breathing and your body in space you begin to notice how other people breathe and carry themselves. You begin to notice how they hold tension in the shoulders or chest, you also notice the rate at which they breathe and even when their breathing freezes for a split-second when they are nervous or stressed.
The next time you're not feeling so great, check your breathing, observe it with curiosity for a little while and notice what happens...
I've shared this simple practise with a few people already and have had some fascinating feedback. Please leave a comment below or drop me a few lines if you have any interesting experiences to share (email me at sterling.to@gmail.com or freeformbeats@gmail.com).
3) Song: Breathe Me - Sia
Have fun out there.
Dx
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