Harmonising breath

Spending a moment just establishing yourself in this place, in your seat, in the shape of your body. Just tuning into the particular shape your body’s made this morning and checking in with your body. What’s here? What are the experiences that are letting you know that you have a body this morning? And what’s the general sense of the body, the felt sense? Is it tired, restless, relaxed, tense, or just neutral? Then, becoming aware of the emotional atmosphere as well. Noticing how the heart is this morning. That might be obvious to you—it might be easy to identify that—or it might be a little bit more vague, hard to define, or even hard to connect with. And all of that’s just fine. Just noticing and welcoming all of this into the practice. Your body, your heart—just as it is. We’re going to be working with the breath in a way that encourages things to harmonize, encourages our experience to become softer. But we’ll bring all of us with us on that journey. We won’t be tunneling through anything else—breathing with the whole of our experience. We’ll begin to enter into this appreciative relationship with our breath by using a little bit of movement to help tune awareness to the breath in a way that makes sense. On the inhale, you can just very slowly lift your hands up to around chest height, or somewhere that feels natural. With the exhale, let them fall back down. The length of your breath and the movement of your hands should be the nicest, most pleasurable, most soothing length of breath that you can find. It doesn’t have to be artificially long—just looking for a quality of breath that feels silky, soothing. The movement of the hands helps to keep that awareness for the whole length of each breath, and the smooth, subtle movement of the hands helps the breath to be smoother and more subtle. You can tune into this movement and the breath as one thing—they’re not separate. It’s like the movement describes the breath, and the breath describes the movement. Your job as you do this is to be the most welcoming and appreciative host for your breath. So you meet the inhale with this open-hearted appreciation and enjoyment. Welcome, breath. Thank you for visiting me. The next time your hands come to the bottom of an exhale, you can just rest them and stay with this quality of breath—this longer, silky, smooth breath. At any point, if it feels helpful, you can come back to this movement—if you become distracted or if the breath feels like it becomes more shallow or jagged. We’re going to stay with this appreciative awareness, really following the breath all the way from the beginning of the inhale to the point where the inhale turns into the exhale, and then all the way to the bottom of the exhale. You’ll notice there are places in this cycle of breathing where it’s easier to become distracted. It tends to be toward either end—for some reason, distraction wants to come in. So we just stay close to the breath and emphasize this quality of enjoyment and soothing. It can really help to use our imagination to encourage the breath to feel subtle, pleasurable, and supportive. One way we can do this is to sense the breath not so much as the movement of air through an anatomically correct respiratory system, but more as a kind of influx of energy into the body. You might sense this as a particular color—like a golden, white, or blue cloud of energy, a cloud of light that, with the inhale, is absorbed into the body. It could be from any direction—the breath could come up from the ground, from the depths of the earth, could come down from the sky, or could come from all directions at once. Let yourself be led by what feels nice, pleasurable. As the energy of the breath enters and leaves the space of the body, we can be sensitive to how the body responds—tuning into the body more as a space of experience, a field of experience, rather than a collection of body parts. How does this space react when this influx of breath energy arrives? You might notice a kind of brightening, a lightening, a buoyancy. And then, with the exhale, maybe a kind of release, a deepening of the sense of this space of the body. So we’re simply resting back into the space of the body, receiving the energy of the breath—appreciating it, enjoying it, being interested in it. Each breath is a completely unique constellation of sensations. Of course, thoughts and other experiences will continue while we have this intention of receiving the breath in this way. And there’s no need to block anything out. It’s just that we choose what to emphasize. We choose to emphasize and center the breath and the body and this soothing movement of energy, while thoughts and whatever else can still be there in the background—just like a babbling river or the hum of distant traffic. Nothing that causes any kind of problem or disturbance. As we continue to welcome the breath into the space of the body, it might begin to happen that the body starts to feel a little bit more cloud-like, a little less well-defined. As if you couldn’t clearly say where your body ends and the space around you begins. If this is your experience, just notice this cloud-like, more diffuse sense of the body space. You might be able to appreciate it, enjoy the sense of lightness and freedom that it can bring. You might even sense that the space of the body is made of the same kind of golden light or blue light—or whatever color or texture of energy the breath is. The breath is more a kind of current within this space. As we prepare to transition out of formal meditation and into whatever comes next today, we can stay with this cloud-like body and breath as much as possible. Just finding again the ground underneath you, being aware of your location in space and time.