I have been thinking about breathing and breath. My breathing has evolved so much over the years--even lately I experienced a new awareness--well, I called it "breakthrough."
In yoga we say, "If you know breath, you know everything." If you think about it, it's true--how we breathe is how we are living at that moment. Do we hold our breath; is it uneven and jagged; do we inhale and inhale without exhaling (I have clients who do this when they're stressed and emotional)? Desired qualities of breath and breathing in yoga are through the nostrils, silent, even, without pause, and deep. (There are specific breath practices in yoga where these qualities are not observed.)A way I dealt with growing up in a household with a lot of verbal fighting between my parents was to hold my breath. I spent years holding my breath without even knowing it. More than that, I didn't know how to relax into my breathing--at least when I was trying to breathe and get a big breath so I could sing, or to speak (when I was thinking about breathing). I would tense up and two things would occur. My breath could only come in through a narrow pathway, as I was too tense to relax and allow my diaphragm to fully expand all sides of my belly and torso (my sides, my front and my back), so I never achieved a full breath. And when I exhaled, I frequently did not exhale fully. I guess I was keeping some in reserve just in case (how stressful is that?). I was bracing and trying so hard. I've spoken in a previous blog about my stuttering, and my then-breath practices only exacerbated my stuttering. Both singing and speaking need to ride on the breath.
When I first practiced yoga and was asked to breathe in a "full breath," I would become so tense, I hardly took in any breath at all, and I was doing quite a bit of chest breathing. But now, after years of faithfully practicing yoga, I am able to breathe fully and easily. It is such a blessing! At my silence retreat this January, I realized I was not relaxing fully at the bottom of my exhale so that my inhale would be even more full and complete. All it took was an awareness of that to improve the quality of my breath practices before my meditation. It is a lovely feeling.
We can't let go of the past if we cannot exhale fully. Instead, we're bringing the past into our next moment. And we can't fully take in the present moment if we are hanging on to the past. If we're holding our breath in anxiety, we're not in the present; we're in the future. So breathing fully from our diaphragms, letting the belly rise and fall easily, we let breath breathe us, and we live into our lives as they are. Try it!
