Breathing As A Way Of Life, Part 3: Step-by-Step Instructions - by Win Wenger
Easy step-by-step instructions for using your most valuable
and necessary (and great-feeling!) patterns of breathing.
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
In the previous articles, we introduced you here to the basic nature of the "Calm-Breathing Patterns" and gave you a working example of the particular pattern of "Relief Breathing."
We explored a little of how breathing, which you can do deliberately, is also part of the automatics of your body. Thus, your breathing is a bridge communicating between your conscious actions and intention and the other automatics of your body: the heartbeat, biochemistry and psychochemistry, the organs, the very tissues and even the individual cells. The combination of breathing pattern, imagery, and focussed physical remembered (or imagined) sensation, allows you to do some remarkably helpful things within your own body and mind.
Your mind, brain and body are a closely linked organic whole. Everything within the organism has bearing on and affects, and is affected by everything else within that organism.
Stress and tension
One example of body-mind-brain interplay is to imagine - as clearly and vividly as you can - standing on some narrow precarious ledge 40 floors up. Picture and feel that "precarious-ledge" situation as absolutely as you can... Now feel for where that experience is stressing in your body...
Now let go that feeling. If that feeling had been allowed to remain "locked in" to those stressed parts of the body, you would be going around feeling precarious, and possibly finding various reasons why this or that situation was disquieting.
But, in point of fact, nearly everyone has, locked into their bodies some counterparts of the "precarious-ledge" experience. Guilt, fear, or even some physical hurt are stored so continuously that it isn't even noticed, yet keeps on shaping our ongoing experiences (and even our very bodies!), creating situations of self-fulfilling prophecy and producing the various other major and minor maladjustments which flesh/mind is prone to.
Relieving stress, raising human potential
One of the things our book "Beyond O.K." teaches is how to focus breathing patterns on stressed areas of the body to remove the chronic tension patterns of being frozen on that ledge.
There is far more to this matter of breathing/self-reconditioning, and of breathing generally, than we ourselves can hope to get around to investigating any time soon. Researchers, and qualified therapists of whatever discipline, are urged to contact us through our website at http://www.winwenger.com, both for operational information on processes and programs which can be used for therapeutic purposes, and for suggested areas needing further research.
Meanwhile, the passages below represent a fair start in using breathing techniques.
Calm-Breathing Patterns
Here is is a set of step-by-step instructions for you to do. Remember, the value of the following is in the doing and experiencing, not in whatever mere information is written here. These are the step-by-step instructions for creating a very special set of experiences and skills, so allow yourself a good uninterrupted half-hour to do this in:
Basic Calm-Breathing
You can guide yourself through this procedure or you can work with someone else as a partner, taking turns to guide each other through. Alternatively, you may prerecord these instructions follow them as you play them back. In following a pre-recording or in guiding a group with these instructions, replace each of the questions below with the instruction to "Notice..." whatever is being asked about. Allow 2-3 seconds' pause after each phrase or sentence, long enough for the instruction to be followed or the indicated experience experienced.
1. Begin with a good deep stretch ....
2. For perhaps five minutes, breathe in very deeply, slowly, taking six seconds or longer to do so. And breathe out likewise very deeply, slowly, taking six seconds or longer... all one continuous breathing in and breathing out six seconds or longer each way... savor the long, slow, deep, calm, luxurious passage of each breath... with each breath out, from all over see how much more you can let go...
3. Breathe as deeply as you can, not only on inhale but exhale. So deeply on the exhale that you get your lungs as empty as you possibly can, then from those empty lungs blow out an imaginary candle a foot in front of your face—that's how deeply to exhale...
4. Then smoothe all that out so it's all one smooth, calm, deep, continuous, luxurious, almost sensual inhale-exhale-inhale, with each breath out see from all over just how much more you can simply let go ....
5. Use each next breath, if you can, to reach for further ranges of both these effects: each breath in to feel as much more luxurious as possible than did the previous breath in; with each breath out to discover how much more you can simply let go than you did with the previous breath out.
Continue this breathing pattern. After 3 to 5 minutes begin studying its effects on the way you feel, while continuing this breathing pattern. Still continuing this calm breathing pattern, now begin to modify it with the images (and feelings) described below, and to study the changes these images automatically cause in your breathing and in the ways you feel...
"Noise-Removal Breathing"
1. With each breath in, begin imagining (even picturing and feeling, if possible) that your air is coming in through the bottoms of your feet, all the way up from there. Breathe in as if you have to pull your air all the way up through ankles, legs and body, up to where you can breathe out through normal channels. (Perhaps picturing a nose in your feet might help, a nostril in the bottom of each foot between mid-arch and toes.) With each breath, breathe in against the pull of your air having to make its way up through the tissues and cells of your feet, ankles, legs and lower body... Continue for several minutes, examining the effects you feel from this procedure...
2. Picture or imagine piles of dried leaves or other debris being swirled up with each breath, out of your tissues and cells. Experience this stuff as being swirled up by each incoming breath, swirled up from the breath-swept tissues of your feet, legs and body, and swept up out of you on your deeply exhaled breath. Experience this as vividly as you can, with every breath. Sweep all that stuff cleanly out of you with your breath. (let all these leaves or debris represent all "noise"— tensions, toxins, tiredness, other pollutants which didn't belong there.}
3. As these clouds of "noise" sweep cleanly out of you on your slowly, deeply, calmly exhaled breath, as all this debris hits the open air, see it flaming into showers of bright sparks!
(Even "noise" is energy: there is no such thing as "bad" energy, only congested energy compared to free flowing, useful energy, so that when this stuff is swept from "bad" configurations and hits the open air, it becomes good clean usable life-enhancing energy again.)
Sweep up as much of that stuff as you can with each and every incoming breath, blowtorch out that shower of bright sparks with your breath, deeply and softly breathed out as the flame of a blowtorch, and see how much more, with each breath out, you can fill the space around you with good released energy ...
Continue for some minutes, studying the effects you feel from doing this...
4. Breathe in not only through your feet but through whatever parts of your body come to your attention in this context... Breathe in against the pull of the air having to come in through the tissues and cells of each such part, swirl up as much "noise" as you can with each breath in; blowtorch out as much released energy in bright hot spark-showers as you can, with each breath ...
(You may find it interesting to make mental note of just which parts of your body do come to your attention in this context, for you to breathe in through and to thereby swirl up and remove even subliminal "noise" from...)
Continue for several minutes, studying the effects you feel from this pattern of breathing and imaging.
5. In the same manner, use your breath to breathe up and away whatever could have in the slightest stood between you and even more profound levels of relaxed awareness. Continue this breathing-goal for several minutes, studying the effects you feel from it...
(In the same manner, use your breath to sweep up and away any feeling of discomfort, whenever experienced and not just during these exercises. Throughout your life, make it a reflex to respond to any problem, discomfort, difficulty or distress by this deep, slow, calm, releasing, noise-removal breathing. Emphasize breathing slowly when dealing with any distress... But first, before using this breathing on specific "targets" and problems, get in, over several sessions, a total of at least an hour's worth of this type of breathing, emphasizing the clarity and pleasure aspects especially, to build your general comfort levels.)
For future reference—If and when you like: think back to some situation, relating to problems or difficulties or hurts you have experienced, and "breathe on it" in this manner, drawing up and away any static or negative feelings out of that experience, until you feel perfectly, wholly, comfortable while clearly recalling all aspects of that situation..
6. In the same manner, for several minutes before any task, creative work, schooling or performance of whatever nature, picture your goal for that activity and breathe up and away whatever could in the slightest have impeded full swift rich clean attainment of that goal—then go directly into that work and let fly!
7. In the same manner, breathe up and away whatever could in the slightest have impeded your clear, rich perception of beauty or of some insight ....
Yawn Breathing
1. Continue to noise-removal breathe, but let yawns come up if they will. Enjoy.
2. Stretch deeply one time or so and continue noise breathing. This may well either trigger or intensify the yawning. Give deep. intense, repeated yawns which cleanse out anxiety, fear, all sorts of stuff. Every dozen or so breaths, stretch deeply and luxuriously again, even if you have to force the stretching, to encourage the yawns to come, and continue such stretch-interspersed breathing for as long as the yawns are flowing...
3. Even reflect back on some situation about which you have felt anxious, fearful or even angry, "breathe on that situation" as above until all yawns are exhausted from it... Study the effects of all this yawning on the way you feel about that situation. and on the way you feel generally...
Next month, Win Wenger continues his exploration of breathing patterns, and will go on in the following months to detail precisely how to control state more effectively.
Copyright 2010 Win Winger, all rights reserved in all media.
About Win Wenger: Win has sought to emulate the original natural philosophers who began science, by using direct first-hand observation as a main way to find out things, not only as regards breathing patterns here, but in his pioneering work in the field of creativity and creative problem-solving (see for example http://www.winwenger.com/solving.htm) and in educational methods (please see http://www.winwenger.com/replay.html and http://www.winwenger.com/BottomLine_TL.htm).
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