If your
wellness, mindfulness,
relaxation or meditation
routine has a
BREATHING
element, try this:
it could be as transformational for you as it has been for me!
Many wellness, mindfulness, relaxation and meditation routines encourage breathing in a measured way, to help you become aware of the extent that your breathing is critical to your health and welfare and to help towards achieving a sense of inner calm.
Some programmes will also invite you to be especially aware of the air you breathe, and to be thankful for its life-giving nature.
Go to your programme and follow it in the usual way but put headphones on and just listen to the way they intensify the sound of your breathing.
Be even more amazed at the wonder of it all - and give thanks.
Back story.
Over many years, I have tried to have a quiet time in the early morning whilst the likelihood of being interrupted is minimal. Within those times, although mainly given over to journalling after a brief time of listening music I find lifts me, I have on several occasions explored how a time of silence can enrich such times by allowing my mind to be receptive to fruitful inspiration. From time to time, I have used guidelines by others focused on achieving spiritual connectedness and/ or inner calm.
Being an activist, I have seldom found the enthusiasm to continue such explorations over meaningful periods of weeks, or even days and I have often stumbled at suggestions of becoming aware of my own breathing. Those endeavours have tended to fall apart with my impatience to 'get on to the next thing’.
Yes! I can give some attention to my breathing, its significance for my continuing existence and the wonders of the function of the air surrounding me: but never for long.
Then, a short while ago, I had listened to some songs I love and which hold special meaning for me, and moved into a time in which I hoped to ‘go deeper’. By accident, I left my earphones on and at once heard my breathing rhythm in a wholly different way. I could hear my lungs being filled with air, I could explore the sound of a deep breath or of more rapid breathing. I could keep my breathing quite shallow and sense the effect of the difference, all intensified within the silence of my inactive headphones.
For me, that has been an amazingly different experience. Calm comes more readily and I am more easily moved when I do this to thanksgiving for the mix of gases that I breathe in and out and the way they nourish me.
Why not give it a try? It may work for you as it does for me. Then be thankful both for this idea and for the framework of whatever programme that brought you here.
AND
If you are minded to give thanks for these wonders of our living experience, you might like to reflect on where your thanks is directed and to think of the wider miracle of the ways our bodies function by looking at the poem/song ‘Give Thanks to God for Human brains’. This gives thanks not only for our brains but for ALL our senses as well. If you like the sound of that, then CLICK HERE
Image credits: 2 Pixabay free images merged by the author
