What’s your relationship to your breath? Do you have one?

There are days that go by when I take about two full breaths. Sound familiar? I have a magnet on my vision board that reminds me to BREATHE and a huge Inhale, Exhale card obviously doing the same. But it’s still not enough. I mean, how many reminders do we need?

We’re basically lazy when it comes to breathing, don’t you think? We are so used to the breath always being with us, that we unequivocally take it for granted. Additionally, we’re often so checked out of our bodies that we actually believe we breathe with our brains.

More than 7 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, this was made abundantly clear. I had a random and terrifying panic attack. I literally couldn’t find my breath—it was so shallow and constricted—and my mind went crazy searching for it. Only when I dropped out of my head, and re-inhabited my body, did breathing kick in and my lungs soften to receive it.

Seriously, we shouldn’t have to wait around for something acute like this to happen to get us to pay attention to our breathing. If you’re not convinced, here are five of my favorite reasons, and things we can do, to be more conscious of the breath:

1. CLEANSE—Inhale the fresh and the vibrant. Exhale the toxic and the un-necessary.

2. CONDUCT—Send healing breath into sore parts of your body, and help to alleviate physical pain.

3. CALM—Take slow attentive breaths to quiet you down when you are aggravated and on edge.

4. CENTER—With each inhale and exhale, draw inwards and awaken deeper awareness of you.

5. CONNECT—Synchronize body and mind, and link with spirit.

In meditation, we are often encouraged to count our breath. Maybe this sounds incredibly dull to you, like counting sheep to put you to sleep. Yet in my son’s bedtime book, Russell the Sheep, Russell is a sheep who tries desperately hard to fall asleep but he just can’t settle down. He tries counting everything, until he finally decides to count sheep or essentially count on himself. Guess what? It works. Finally, relaxed enough, he dozes off.

Breathing is like this too. When we count our breath, we count on our breath. We discover it is the ticket back to ourselves. The breath both coaches and coaxes us into self-reliance, not only for relaxation into sleeping states, but also for profound letting go in superlatively chaotic and awake states. What a tool!

The beauty of breath is that it is, for most of us, always available. It is after all what makes living in these blessed and temperamental bodies possible, right? So please, if nothing else, honor your breathing. Believe in it. Really value it. Consciously BREATHE.

In sweetness,

Maggie

Eckhart Tolle discusses meditation and the value of “being” present.

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Lynch gives some background on how he got involved in transcendental meditation and how it informs his consciousness and creativity.

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Herbert Benson, MD, a brilliant Harvard Medical School professor, has been studying the science of meditation for decades. His pioneering book, Relaxation Revolution (Scribner, 2011), is packed with scientific research studies, practical tips, and guided meditations and visualizations on how to deal with a range of specific life challenges.

I’m excited to share a few of my favorite Big Ideas from this mind-blowing book. So let’s dive in!

A Solution to Stress

The relaxation response, writes Benson, is the opposite of the fight-or-flight stress response. “It is characterized by the following: decreased metabolism, heart rate, blood pressure, and rate of breathing; a decrease or ‘calming’ in brain activity; an increase in attention and decision-making functions of the brain; and changes in gene activity that are the opposite of those associated with stress.”

Our bodies are brilliantly designed in such a way that, when faced with a life-threatening danger (or a perceived life-threatening danger), our hearts pump blood to our legs so we can make a quick exit, and adrenaline floods our system so we’re as strong as possible for a potential fight. Unfortunately, our bodies’ evolution hasn’t quite kept up with our minds’ evolution, and now a sideways glance from our boss or someone cutting us off in traffic often elicits the same response. All. Day. Long.

But researchers have discovered that we possess the ability to induce the relaxation response in a relatively short period of time. And there’s more good news: The benefits of doing so are huge.

The Power to Change Your Genes

Benson and his team of researchers wanted to see if mind-body practices influence our genetics. They studied 19 seasoned mind-body practitioners and 19 people without any experience in mind-body practices. The participants were married and unmarried men and women in their mid-30s to early 40s. Their findings were significant: 2,209 genes were expressed differently — and more healthfully — in the mind-body practitioners.

The researchers didn’t stop there. “We continued our investigation by posing these questions: ‘What would happen if the participants . . . with no experience with the relaxation response were instructed in appropriate mind-body techniques and then applied them in their daily lives for a few weeks? In that short time period, would they show any of the same positive, anti-stress gene-expression changes that the highly experienced mind-body practitioners had shown?’”

The answer is yes. After eight weeks of doing mind-body practices, the second group exhibited healthful changes in genetic expression on 1,561 genes.

“The probability of this being due to chance was less than five in 100,” writes Benson. “Even more striking, when we compared [the nonpracticing] group after their training with the experienced mind-body group [with an average of 9.4 years of mind-body practice], we found that 433 gene-expression signatures were similar in both groups.” Just eight weeks of training had induced a genetic relaxation response similar to the one in long-time practitioners.

“The significance of these results came home to us dramatically when we considered how likely (or unlikely) it would be for these changes to have happened by chance in both parts of the experiment. We determined that the probability of the same gene signatures being involved accidentally in both groups in both experiments was less than one in 10 billion,” he adds.

Wow! It’s incredibly inspiring that we can significantly alter our genes by engaging in simple mind-body practices for as little as eight weeks.

Triggering the Mindy-Body Response

One of the key findings Benson emphasizes throughout the book is this: It doesn’t really matter what techniques you employ to relax; what matters is that those techniques successfully induce the mind-body response for you.

“The participants in the genetics study used a number of different meditative, relaxation, and prayer-based techniques. These included repeating a mantra, mindfulness meditation, transcendental meditation, Vipassana meditation, breath focus, Kripalu or Kundalini yoga, and repetitive prayer. Despite the variety, all techniques yielded the same gene expression,” he says.

Whatever technique you choose, Benson offers these tips for success:

Brush Your Brain. When someone experiences performance anxiety about how well they’re inducing the relaxation response, Benson tells them: “Don’t worry about how well you’re doing! Don’t worry about whether the relaxation response is really working. . . . Just do it!”

He likens it to brushing your teeth. “Most of us are concerned to one extent or another with dental hygiene,” he explains, “but we don’t dwell on the tooth-cleaning process. Almost no one evaluates the brushing to say, ‘That was a good brush!’ or, ‘Too bad — that was a bad brush.’ We simply do it.”

Now imagine taking the same approach with our meditation. It’s not about doing it perfectly; it’s about doing it consistently.

And, of course, the same rule holds for any activity in our lives where we may hold back for fear of not doing it perfectly — whether that’s writing or performing or teaching, or whatever. The fact is, the greatest risk is simply not showing up.

Just say, “Oh, well.” During the genetics study, participants would pose questions to the researchers. The most common question was some variation on this: “I keep having these outside thoughts that interfere with my concentration — what can I do to avoid them?” Their stock answer? “Just say, ‘Oh well,’ and return to the exercise.”

A Powerful Key to Health

According to Benson, “Any condition that is caused or exacerbated by stress can be helped by a well-designed mind-body approach. Further-more, because all health conditions have some stress component, it is no overstatement to say that virtually every single health problem and disease can be improved with a mind-body approach.”

Plato once said: “The greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and the body are one and should not be treated separately!”

Now, 2,500 years later, science has finally proven Plato right!

Reprinted with permission from Experience Life Magazine.

Experience Life magazine is an award-winning health and fitness publication that aims to empower people to live their best, most authentic lives, and challenges the conventions of hype, gimmicks and superficiality in favor of a discerning, whole-person perspective. Visit www.experiencelife.com to learn more, to sign up for Experience Life newsletters, or to subscribe to the print or digital version.

My mom recently asked me about meditation. I had three minutes to communicate this practice to her, over the phone, in a way that would both serve AND inspire her to continue a practice on her own. I was nervous and had no plan, but this is what I shared, and it feels right to share it here.

Lightning-fast meditation to balance your head and your heart — an actual, factual balance. Right now, as you read, feel how much energy it’s taking to read and process these words in your brain.

Now bring an equal amount of attention down into your heart. Even though we read and compute first with our minds, play with this for a few seconds. Close your eyes and feel the resonance in your heart as equal to the resonance in your mind.

Why is this so difficult to do?

We all have a much easier time living in our minds than in our hearts. I watched a super smart woman today literally fight herself to stay present to her heart’s voice instead of her mind, and she couldn’t hold that space for more than one moment at a time. Our tendency as humans, simply, is to live in our minds. Recently I had been listening to two of my colleagues, Kris Carr and Nick Ortner, one weekend as we were all co-leading a retreat up at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. We had a room full of accomplished, creative adults who seemed to have it all together, yet when Nick did his work and we began tapping on our emotions, our fears, our blocks, we all had a long-awaited shift into our hearts. Many tears were shed and pain released throughout the room, literally folks who had chronic pain for decades were practically pain-free after a few minutes.

Unravel the pain with repetitive phrases to define and refine awareness. Simultaneously tap on the primary meridian points on the body, and there you’ll find yourself wide open and present to healing again and again — all because you are now speaking to, from and with your heart.

Kris had the group write a letter to themselves to commence the weekend. Yes, you’d write a letter to yourself as though coming from your most supportive best friend. Every letter begins uniformly, “Okay [Elena], this is what’s really going on.” Again, there were tears, because the heart is speaking and the real story begins there every time. Whenever the heart closes because of doubt, judgement, fear, dread or shame, the mind steps in to make sense of it, to deftly shift the conversation to something else. All of our energy ends up there in the brain, draining the rest of our body of energy needed for listening, praying, helping, giving or sharing — all absolute requirements for healing.

So it’s about the mind and heart together, on the same page. Let’s get down to the meditation.

One practice, one minute to even out the resonance [the velocity, the intensity] of both the heart and the mind.

Sense the moment when you’ve arrived at an even energy in the two spaces. That “balanced” feeling lasts only briefly, but with practice, that sensation can be prolonged, and will be healing for your whole being. And everyone close to you.

One minute now. Take a few healing breaths and smile, be still here for just one minute. As you finish reading this sentence, soften your eyes, and make your heart as big, as active, as alive, as open and as receptive as your brain.

Feel how much softer it is in your heart now?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Bring this evenly open, softer state to both mind and heart, no matter what the context, no matter how vexing or crazy it seems in front of you, and watch as the confusion abates, everything gets quieter, because you’re in your heart. Watch how you begin to feel more abundant. I dare you.

It took me 13 years of teaching asana, and over 17 years of practicing it, to finally take a seat for meditation. Until recently, if I managed to sit down to meditate, I felt the irresistible magnetism of the dishes, the inbox, laundry and the cabinet to reorganize. Nothing could make me sit still for more than a few minutes, and on the few occasions I did, I felt fake every time, as though I was missing something. Turns out I’d needed a manual to help me crack the code.

Anodea Judith’s “Eastern Body, Western Mind” is shifting my relationship to, and my navigation of, meditation practice. Given practical details about each energy center (chakra) in the body (note: the word is pronounced with “ch” like “choice,” rather than “sh” like “shall”), I’ve learned to be more specific and purposeful in the meditation seat. I’m learning to locate, in my actual physical body, the places where unresolved confusions have been stored, which activates a ready focus for my breathing when I sit — in my own time, in my own words: the ultimate empowerment. Most importantly, I’m learning to generate more listening and respect for the closest people in my life — the ones who’d become accustomed to getting the worst of me, while my students, teachers and friends got the best.

The succinct “takeaway”: a level of consistency in my sitting, and therefore my behavior. Now I can be as astute a listener with my mom as I am with a new student detailing an injury. That wasn’t always the case. I was misappropriating my compassion away from my family and only toward my students. This made for a hilarious paradox — lovely, compassionate, generous teacher with her students versus the inattentive, angry, punishing girl with her family. And when my son was turning four last fall, I saw him trying to take it on. He became like a skycap at the airport, old enough to start helping me with my proverbial baggage, and that was so scary to see. He was impatient, mad, screaming “me.” I knew I either had to handle that weight myself, or pay dearly for the service he’d try to provide for the rest of my life, taking on the problems of parents as we’ve all done.

So if you’re reading this and you don’t currently have a meditation practice, I’ll finally get to the point, and offer you an example of one of the more universal coping mechanisms I’ve encountered in myself. Then you can get a feeling for how this might map out an aspect of you, and get you sitting down with yourself for meditation.

Place one hand on your belly, just below your navel, breathe right there, and read on. If it’s hard for you to hold space for others when they’re getting emotional, stay with me. If you have the compulsion to fix and serve others (teachers and parents to your parents, that’s you), this will help you bring healing to the cycle of having long been depleted emotionally, and you don’t need to blame anyone. In fact, you might find yourself thanking them for placing you in that situation so you could come to this profound healing for yourself.

This region holds your needs as a child — a child who had viable needs but was unable to ask for what was most needed. So instead, you either tuned out or started helping to avoid the feeling of not having your own needs met. Older siblings in big families, households wherein someone was ill, or a parent left abruptly or parents fought incessantly, this is you, too. This region holds the sensations of having been rejected, whether consciously or subconsciously, while others’ needs were addressed. It’s interesting to look at this because we do have a choice: We can blame and dramatize the situation (been there, done that), or sensitively bring balance to that situation by softening our own interior reactions to it.

On behalf of your family members, who in all cases did their best with what they had, you are here to evolve that feeling, that circumstance, or that cycle of behavior, in honour of them. And as awful as it may have been, you really did pick the right life.

Keep your hand on your belly, and breathe deeply there. Let it extend and really open when you breathe in, and soften back toward your spine as you breathe out. While the chakra just below this one (pelvic floor, root chakra) is about grounding, stability and focus, this second one is all about how we flow, feel and yield. It’s related to the element of water, which constitutes 80 percent of your body. When I’m teaching or speaking, I can take cues from anything, seen or unseen, and am completely in the flow – that’s my comfort zone, my hiding place. But when it comes to being alone with myself, I’ve avoided my own healing (and my meditation practice) by placing my focus literally anywhere else.

Your second chakra holds your guilt and your shame. This region also holds your right to feel. If someone was consistently volatile (or exceedingly incommunicative), your entire family had to create ways to handle that subconscious emotional tyranny, and everyone was constantly directed away from their own wellness into impending crisis mode. So you were all waiting for the next outburst or problem, and the flow in your house, your belly and your heart was re-routed in that direction. And you’re all still sort of exhausted from it. We needed healthy examples of how to address our own selves with huge love, and how to nourish ourselves with great care, and we have a chance to be that example now, for everyone around us. It’s never too late.

Here’s where meditation begins to make sense to me, at long last. After learning about the second chakra, the next time I sat down, for the first time ever, I was there for myself, in the same attentive way I’d been for my students. I put my hand on my belly, and sat with my body, by myself, feeling the block and breathing it open. Super simple, really. I’m just gathering information and breathing it open all the time now, whether I’m sitting or standing.

So now I’m listening, with this opening, which is healing me and my relationships with my family. I have a much broader, gentler view of how I can slow down my reactions, in real time. I’m no longer cursing so much in my classes because I’ve seen that my own healing vibration is pinched when I go down that road, which means my students’ healing is being similarly stifled. Misused words give birth to tiny contractions in our bodies. As funny, or inviting, or even comfortably familiar as it can be to hear your yoga teacher curse, I don’t want to perpetuate that tension in the context of class anymore. For now I want to explore what it’s like to just deliver the teachings, sans drama.

And now, when I’m having a really difficult conversation, or trying to get my kid’s shoes on, I’m breathing more space into my belly, and into everyone nearby. When I remember this with my son, I let him dance around in my boots for one extra moment (his favorite pastime) instead of rushing him into his own shoes and out the door. (By the way, the irony of his wanting to wear my shoes isn’t lost on me.) Every time I bring the work back into my body, I restore a bit of balance to myself, to him and to our relationship, thereby clearing the path for him to do this intuitively for himself going forward.

Take time to sit, unravel what resonates with you, ask for help if you need it and give yourself the gift of your own attention. Rather than finding some way to gain control over my animal instincts or take cover from the dictatorship of my mind or my past, I’m specifically bringing attention to the vortices in my body that been have been closed or too open, and I can just be still when I sit. That stillness helps everyone near me. When I bring awareness to those junctions via my simplest breathing in meditation, instead of feeling lazy, fraudulent or disconnected, I’m experiencing a reverent healing.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Meditate-Working-Thoughts-Emotions/dp/1401926630/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1282906298&sr=1-1

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk who had a promising career in cellular genetics before leaving France to study Buddhism in the Himalayas 37 years ago. He is a bestselling author, translator, and photographer; and an active participant in current scientific research on the effects of meditation on the brain. Wherever he goes, he is asked to explain what meditation is, how it is done, and what it can achieve. In this elegant, authoritative, and entirely accessible book, he sets out to answer these questions.

Although meditation is a lifelong process even for the wisest, Why Meditate? demonstrates that by practicing it on a daily basis we can change our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In this brilliant short book and the accompanying CD, Matthieu Ricard talks us through the theory, spirituality, and practical aspects of meditation. He illustrates each stage of his teaching with examples, leading the reader deeper into their own practice.

Through his experience as a monk, his close reading of sacred texts, and his deep knowledge of the Buddhist masters, Matthieu Ricard shows the significant benefits that meditation, based on selfless love and compassion, can bring to each of us.

About the Author

Matthieu Ricard lives in Nepal and dedicates much of his time to humanitarian projects in the Himalayas. Find out more at www.matthieuricard.org.

All of the author’s proceeds from the sale of this book go to Karuna-Shechen, a humanitarian organization that he founded to provide primary health care and education for the under-served populations of the Himalayan region.

Recently I was on an airplane watching a show in which two adult women were discussing a falling out they’d had. One of the women, upon being confronted with a description of her behavior, replied by saying “Well, that’s just HOW I AM and I can’t change that.” Once I finished judging her for her ridiculous closed-mindedness, I came to realize that I’ve used this excuse hundreds of times myself. So I began writing this down: There’s a choice here that we can explore. None of us are any ONE way. We choose who we are, moment to moment, day to day and year after year.

A close-to-home example: in the heat of a recent error in judgment on my part, I indulged in typically self-punishing, exhausting thinking. However, for the first time in my adult life, I actually stopped to breathe — and sensed the dramatically escalating inner pain literally squeezing my heart. I felt the tension emanating through my torso and down into my hands. For the first time, in that moment, I ASKED, in the silence of my own heart, for an opening. And I received that opening; from there I entered into a state of inquiry.

What IS this feeling? Can’t I just be sorry and move onward without this wild need to punish myself with sabotaging thoughts or actions?

I leaned over the metaphorical edge of the well of self-judgment, and instead of plunging into the usual damaging free-fall, I held myself still. I remembered a line from a great track, “Live through this, and you won’t look back.” I got really quiet inside, and the moment passed through, releasing my heart on its way out.
In the asking, I realized that trajectory from damaging thought to damaging behavior is simply NOT a path for me anymore. At my heart, I’m NOT a person who needs to be punishing herself with self-blame and self-destruction for making mistakes. It’s simply been a choice I’ve made in the past.

My point is, when I ceased to engage with my “usual” tendencies, and truly paid attention to what those habitual thoughts were doing to me, they ceased holding me hostage. In that moment of choice, I realized that those expressions of self-loathing were actually inefficient attempts at deflecting attention away from my actions! Using this well-honed but very destructive escape hatch of “hating myself” to avoid taking responsibility, I’d actually found a way to make those around me feel bad for me. In lieu of a clear-eyed apology, I’d make it even more about me.
So to set an efficacious example for my son, instead of now stating “that’s how I AM,” I have chosen to change gears. In that moment, instead of transforming my mistakes into an inappropriate, attention getting self-hatred session…I just apologized.

Please pardon that digression; that’s a whole lot of information to arrive at a constructive choice, which I can hopefully convey in the following contemplations.

My questions:

• What are the words I use to tell others about myself?
• How do those descriptions of myself shift when I am talking to someone I’d like to impress?
• Especially in a heated moment, when I know I’ve erred, do I try to escape an apology?

With these questions, I’ve chosen to starkly observe the ways in which I have sabotaged my own free will. I have chosen to identify the way I have, until now, chosen to negatively alter my own state of being. I stand still, and choose not to be too hard on myself. I have taken to remembering that I needn’t be a slave to what has, until now, always been true.
I want (and need) to be making choices about who and how I am.
Now.
Today.

It is a given that stress negatively affects our health. It is therefore important 1) to be aware that we have entered into a state of stress, and 2) to have self-care skills, such as meditation, to reduce the stress state rather than just suffer it. Without awareness, we can live in or near a state of stress all day long, even extending into a restless night and bad dreams.

The list below gives you a guideline to know if you are in a state of stress. You will notice that stress is not just perceived in your body, but in the state of your thoughts and feelings. Use this list to increase your awareness of stress and your signal to practice self-care.

Stress shows up in your mind as

• Hypervigilance
• Judgmental critique of others and/or self
• Inflexible thinking, black and white thinking
• Frantic defense of opinions
• The need to always be right
• Inflated and arrogant self-image
• Worrying
• Chronic refusal to decide, maintenance of confusion
• Inability to focus, numbed mind
• Active search for distraction
• Victimized thinking
• Isolative self-absorption
• Hyper-skepticism, cynicism

Stress shows up in your feelings as

• Easy to anger, rage
• Aggressiveness
• Fake performance of feelings
• Denial of hurt and vulnerability
• Restlessness, impatience
• Desire to dominate
• Helplessness
• Hopelessness
• Overwhelmed

Stress shows up in your body as

• Hypertense vascular system
• Tension headaches
• Gastro-intestinal disturbances such as acid reflux
• Rigid diets, anorexia
• Body armoring and stiffness, e.g., neck pain and low back pain
• Workaholism
• Willful forcing of body to exceed limits (i.e., risk taking, extreme sports)
• Spent, Low energy
• Repetitive self-soothing such as excessive masturbation
• Eating too much, stuffing

If you notice a pattern of any of these stress states in your life, it’s time to learn self-care skills such as meditation. Meditation has solid research proving its positive effect on your mind, feelings and body. In the face of a world filled with sources of stress, we are approaching a point where self-care skills such as meditation are not just a nice idea but a daily necessity.

Richard Schaub, Ph.D., is director of the Huntington Meditation and Imagery Center, Huntington NY.

“Shed the past, forget the future and fall into the moment feet first”

Why do we dance? We dance because it’s the fastest, most direct route to the truth — not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what’s-happening-in-me- right-now kind of truth. This is not always easy for us to access — we have to navigate some very deep past, as well as the probable futures we drum up to feed the fear that drives us round the same circles, day in and day out. We dance to hook up to the true genius lurking behind all that bullshit — to seek refuge in our originality and our power to reinvent ourselves; to shed the past, forget the future and fall into the moment feet first. You remember being fifteen, possessed by the beat, by the thrill of music pumping loud enough to drown out everything you’d ever known. Of course you do.

We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst. The beat is a lover that never disappoints and, like all lovers, it demands 100% surrender. It has the power to seduce moves we couldn’t dream. It grabs us by the belly, turns us inside out and leaves us abruptly begging for more. The beat is bad, wicked, sick –whatever the word is now.

“Dance to fall in love with the spirit in all things”

We dance to fall in love with the spirit in all things, to wipe out memory or transform it into moves that nobody else can make because they didn’t live it. It’s a sacred thing, the beat. We love beats that move faster than we can think, beats that drive us ever deeper inside, that rock our worlds, break down walls and make us sweat our prayers.

We dance to survive and the beat offers a yellow brick road to make it through the chaos that is the tempo of our times. Chaos is the way of the mind when it is free-styling , winging its way back to an instinctive, intuitive intelligence, the kind we need to survive — not only the real shit going down, but the massive amount of stuff we insist on making up to insure our suffering. God provides, and god don’t need no help. God is the dance and the dance is the way to freedom and freedom is our holy work.

So get down and find out what your hands, your shoulders, your elbows, knees and, most importantly, your hips and feet have to say about it. There is a dance only you can do, that exists only in you, here and now, always changing, always true. Are you willing to listen with fascination? If you are, it will deliver you unto the self you have always dreamed you could be. This is a promise.

Gabrielle Roth
Manhattan on a hot muggy day in July
www.gabrielleroth.com