Our body breathes from our birth until our death. For the most part, our body knows how to do this well and if we interfere with this process without proper understanding, we can disturb the body’s homeostasis. At the same time if we grasp a few principles, attending our awareness to the process of breathing and altering it according to instructions from a guide or teacher, we can learn to ride our breath like riding a horse but the journey is in the realm of consciousness.
There are a few principles that can be applied without a guide, but for the most part it is best to find someone who can direct the process in an interactive way.
The first principle is that no matter what you are trying to do with your breath, if it makes you feel ill in any way, stop immediately and draw your attention to something else.
Usually the first thing to master is simple awareness of our body breathing in and out in its natural way. The temptation is to do this with our intellect rather than simply watching it in a non-verbal way. The problem with using the intellect is that it wants to interfere and doesn’t know how to simply observe without interference and it does not know how to breathe. When the intellect interferes we can disconnect from our body’s instinctive ability to do the job and we can be left in a terrifying situation where breathing becomes dependent on our intellect.
It is best to never allow the intellect to interfere with the breathing process. Expanding our awareness to the whole of our body can prevent interference from the intellect. From the whole of our self we can simply observe how the body breathes and let it do the job unobstructed by our thought process.
Just watching the breath in this way can be a liberating experience. We can become in touch with our inner life in a direct way and each inhale can invigorate this life. With each exhale we can be aware of releasing what our body doesn’t need.
We can experience inspiration and expiration as a wave of life rising and falling within our vehicle of consciousness. Our awareness can be uplifted in this process like riding a wave in the ocean. This requires our submission into the awareness and usually our attention is distracted elsewhere.
It is also helpful to be conscious of the respiration that occurs through the pores of our skin. Awareness of our skin respiration simultaneously with our lung respiration creates a unified wholeness.
The second principle to understand is that shallow and erratic breathing is less healthy for our bodies and creates physical and psychological disturbances. If our body instinctively knows how to breathe, how is it that most people have shallow and erratic breathing? It is similar to when we don’t pay attention to what we eat and don’t exercise our body in a proper way we accumulate fat and toxins that cause our body disease.
When we observe our breathing and notice that it is shallow or erratic we can relax our body so that our breathing is deeper and from our abdominal muscles. It is important to let our body do this naturally rather than forcing it.
The third principle to understand is that consciousness of the benefits of the natural breathing process will increase the actual benefit. For example, when we breathe in we take in nutrients from the air and when we breathe out we release waste products. When we become conscious of this beneficial process to our body, we actually take in more nutrients and we release more of our toxins. We can enhance this with the visualization of inhaling the purest, freshest air, and exhaling all of our toxins, tensions, and attachments.
A fourth principle to understand is that by experiencing the respiration process in a specific part of our body, or locating our breath to that place, we can enhance the level of relaxation in that part of the body. Since bodily tensions obstruct our sense of wholeness, this principle can be applied as often as we remember to give our body an inner massage and re-establish wholeness.
