 |
Winsights No. 29 (May 1999) |
Breathing as a Way of Life—Part 2 Easy step-by-step instructions for using your most valuable and necessary (and great-feeling!) patterns of breathing. by Win Wenger, Ph.D.  In March, 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. Heartbeat, biochemistry and psychochemistry, Including the organs, the very tissues and even the individual cells, as you will see later in this briefing, you can effectively enhance and communicate with and even redirect if need be. 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, of course. 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 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. (We also face a similar problem with each of a dozen other major tracks of discovery.) Researchers, and qualified therapists of whatever discipline, are urged to contact us, both for operational information on processes and programs which can be used for therapeutic purposes, and for suggested areas needing further research. Meanwhile, what you are pulling onto your screen here, in the passages immediately following, represents a fair start, useful in many directions besides those of healing and therapy. The following is not a therapy as such. We are not interested in practicing therapy, however much some of its processes may be usefully turned in that direction. We in Project Renaissance orient on upward human potential rather than on just patching people up to OK. Nowadays, the best consulting with the aid of these and related techniques is available through coaching by phone: contact George Copsey. Also, Steve Goldstone (212-663-2910) and Tony Pizur (607-754-8671) are trained professional practitioners who work with these breathing and related techniques. Meanwhile, anyone who wishes to can learn more of the system from the book Beyond O.K. "Calm-Breathing Patterns" is a set of step-by-step instructions to do. Like the energy instructions in the same above-mentioned book, and like others of our protocols published elsewhere, the value of the following is in the doing and experiencing, not in whatever mere information is written here. All information is subject to error, including whatever information you find here. Only your own experience is fully worth trusting. Creating key sectors of your experience is what this work is all about. These are the step-by-step instructions for creating a very special set of experiences and skills. (Allow yourself a good uninterrupted half-hour.) Basic Calm-Breathing You can conduct yourself through this protocol from the printed instructions. Or you can work with someone else as a partner, taking turns guiding each other through. Or you may prerecord these instructions onto tape and follow them as the tape plays back. In pre-recording a tape, or in guiding a group with these instructions, replace each of the questions 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 ....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...  |
| Home | Winsights Index | No. 28| This is No. 29 | 2 | 3 | 4 |