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Don’t Bully Your Breath
When you work with your breathing, you are, whether you realize it or not, working with the whole of yourself. Your breath touches and connects every aspect of your being, and a change in one area can bring unforeseen, often undesirable, consequences in others. My advice, therefore, is not to bully your breath with your ego and its manipulative techniques, which so many people do, but to approach your breath with respect, wonder, and gentle awareness.
What Is Your Own Inherent Speed?
Based on conditioning and other factors, we have become habituated to speeds and rhythms in our lives that are not really inherent to us and thus cause strain and even anxiety. Next time you go for a walk or do yoga, qigong, or other bodily movements, try slowing down or speeding up and notice what happens in your thoughts, emotions, and body. Try this often in many different situations. Can you sense your own inherent speed and rhythm?
Taking Off Your Self-Identity
Breathing practices by themselves can bring many benefits, but they need to be supported by fundamental changes in our inner attitudes. To learn how to let go, to exhale ourselves, we need to practice in many ways. Here is a practice that you can try when you go to bed at night and arise in the morning, and that you can learn to integrate into your daily life.
As you take off your clothes to get into bed, have the sense that you are taking off your self-identity, your past, and your anticipated future, and that you are entering gladly and voluntarily into the unknown. Take off your thoughts, emotions, worries, and so on. Get into bed naked both psychologically and physically (if you wish to wear something, put on something that you have not worn during the day). As you lie in bed ready for sleep, there is no past or future; there is only the full sensation of yourself now as a breathing being.
When you wake up in the morning, don’t just jump out of bed mechanically driven by everything that you believe you have to do. Before opening your eyes and getting out of bed, let yourself return for a minute or two to this unknown sensation of yourself as a breathing being alive right now. Listen, sense, and feel. Perhaps you can hear the question: “Who am I?” arising from deep within.
Copyright 2004 by Dennis Lewis. This passage, from my book Free Your Breath, Free Your Life: How Conscious Breathing Can Relieve Stress, Increase Vitality, and Help You Live More Fully, is an adaptation of a practice I learned from Advaita Vedanta master Jean Klein in various meetings and retreats.
Purchase and download “Free Your Breath, Free Your Life” today! Or purchase it in paperback.
Freedom
“For many years I was simply me. Later, guided by some remarkable beings, I became a Gurdjieffian, then a non-dualist, then a Taoist–and thought I was someone else. Now I simply am. What a journey! What freedom!”–Dennis Lewis
Taking Stress and Negativity for Granted
“We have become so accustomed to high levels of stress and negativity in our lives that we take it as ‘normal’, not realizing the tremendous toll it takes on our health and vitality. The noise produced by this stress makes it almost impossible to hear the quiet, ever-present intelligence of our own bodies.”–Dennis Lewis, The Tao of Natural Breathing
The Center for Harmonious Awakening
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Instant Meditation: Connecting Heaven and Earth
Smiling to greet myself, my eyes follow my arms reaching toward the heavens with my feet rooted into the earth as I inhale quietly through my nose; then, as I exhale with a long, melodious hum, my eyes follow my arms downward as they slowly return to my sides and as I sense the earth fully supporting me. I do this several times, connecting heaven and earth with full awareness of all my thoughts, feelings, and sensations.
Copyright 2012 by Dennis Lewis
You Are Part of Organic Life on Earth
“Realize that you are supported by the earth and that this support is unconditional–there is nothing you have to do. All that is required is recognizing what is already obvious–the being-ness of your experience. Realize also that your body is made from the same substances as those of the earth and its atmosphere, and that everything you have or are at the physical level is somehow dependent on an exchange with the earth and the life it sustains. As a breathing being, you are part of organic life on earth interconnected with everything that exists.”
Dennis Lewis, Breathe Into Being: Awakening To Who You Really Are
The Treadmill of Self-Deception
People often look for panaceas in their lives: a spiritual teaching or teacher, a concept, a belief, a positive affirmation, a transformational technique, and so on. And, to be sure, we do need plenty of help and guidance–and we do need to practice. But practice what and for what, exactly? What is my aim, my motivation, not just the one I proclaim to put myself in the best light, but the actual impetus behind what I do? We need to face this motivation honestly and realize that it often is not what we believe it to be. Sometimes it is fueled less by the quest for understanding and truth than by the desire to bypass our discontent, unhappiness, confusion, loss, fear, anxiety, anger, trauma, and the many other aspects of our being we find too painful to face. Unless we see and face ourselves as a whole, however, and release through intimate awareness the powerful energies locked into these difficult emotions and experiences, our efforts and practices are likely to keep us on the treadmill of self-deception, with little hope of self-transformation or self-realization.
The Master and the Tea
The master offered her prospective student a cup of the tea she was drinking. The student, a very serious fellow, responded with what was clearly not a question: “But that tea isn’t real, is it?” The master simply smiled, enjoying the tea as she conversed further with him.
Harmonious Awakening 