by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Winsights No. 107 (July/August 2009)
Here is a key principle:
We breathe the way we feel, and we feel the way we breathe! Meaning that we not only have a characteristic pattern or way that we breathe, for each feeling that we have, but if we deliberately breathe in one of those patterns, we bring on the feeling that’s associated with it.
Through your breath, you can communicate with and instruct the automatics of your system. Like your heartbeat, your breathing goes on by reflex without your “having to make it go.” Yet you can also deliberately breathe in various ways or patterns to bring on different desired feelings and conditions. For example:
Satisfaction Breathing
If you would like there to be a lot of satisfaction in your life, turn to your spice rack. Open the vanilla, the peppermint, the cinnamon, other favorite aroma sources. Slowly breathe in some of each one in turn, get as much flavor-reward out of each breath that you can!
After two minutes of that, compare how you are feeling now with how you were feeling before.
This remarkable improvement in feeling is because you were breathing in the pattern you would normally breathe in when experiencing a great deal of reward and satisfaction. That in turn instructed the other automatics of your system to relate to and create the feeling of reward and satisfaction for you, and so they have.
If you practice this deliciousness or satisfaction-breathing for several minutes at a time, several times a day for three to five days, you will also have instructed deeper forces within your system to organize your life toward a heightened likelihood of experiencing reward and satisfaction. That easily!
After your first time or so with the spice rack, see if you can re-establish the full satisfaction-breathing from memory and imagination, without having to literally carry the spices around with you. You can. – And this frees you up to create this satisfaction instruction and experience conveniently wherever you are, whatever you are doing, whenever you have a spare moment or whenever you so choose.
Velvety-Smooth Breathing
Here is another basic, instant-feel-good, almost as simple. This breathing pattern, the Satisfaction-Breathing pattern, and the Relief Breathing-pattern are faster than any pill (and with no adverse side-effects), relieve stress, and promote clarity, health and well-being. Being free, these patterns are not going to be expensively advertised or even let on about by any drug company. No paid salesman will be calling on their behalf to your physician to inform and remind him about them. It’s up to just you to inform yourself—and others whom you care about—about such benefits as you discover from your experience with these simple steps, and about how to cause them.
- Can you imagine how it would feel to your fingers, to be stroking gently a long smooth strip of sleek silk or soft plush velvet? Imagine the sheer luxury of that feeling. For 10-30 seconds, remember or imagine and intensify for yourself the luxurious feel of stroking that silk or velvet. Really get into the sheer luxury of that feeling.
- Now let your breathing become long, slow, smooth, luxurious… Let your breathing be like it is stroking you, stroking you gently as if you were a long smooth luxuriant piece of sleek silk or plush velvet. Let your breathing be stroking you as if your whole body, tip to tip, head to toe, were a long luxurious strip of silk or velvet.
- Each next breath, find a way to breathe more like that way than even the breath before it, more luxuriously with each breath, as if you were that silk or velvet being stroked.
- Practice intensifying that luxury-feeling through slow breathing, for the rest of that two or however many minutes, each next breath more deeply luxurious even than the breath before it.
Having just done those two or so minutes of luxurious Velvety-Smooth Breathing, now compare how you are feeling now with the way you were feeling before you started.
This also is a very simple set of steps you can easily practice on your own, at convenience. You don’t have to carry equipment around, or pills around, or your spice rack around. You have this ready, everywhere, at any time, and especially when you need it. When do you most need it? Any time you notice your breathing being up high and front in your chest, your most reliable sign of stress.
Yawns are a good thing to let roll also, once they start it’s good to encourage them. Anxiety and the burdens of responsibility are very nicely released through yawning. If you have a strong need to release either of these, yawns are very likely to start up as you do either the deliciousness/Satisfaction-Breathing above or the Velvety-Smooth Breathing here, the Relief Breathing, or the Calm-Breathing Patterns.
Stairstepping
An easy, simple, obvious way to intensify any state or effect, especially the feel-good effects of Relief-Breathing, Satisfaction-Breathing, Velvety-Smooth Breathing, or the main Calm-Breathing Patterns.
- Do whatever it is you do the first time to create the desired effect, feeling or state – as in the present instance, by breathing in the pattern associated with that effect, feeling or state.
- While as intensely or deeply in that state as you can get, mentally photograph or “sensograph” (involving all your senses, if possible, and especially feelings) everything you can notice about how that state feels, and everything good that you observe associated with that state or condition, to “anchor” that state. When you come out, you might want to record or note down everything you can about that mental sensograph, as a convenient reminder toward next time.
- Next time you enter that state, do so from memory and/or from that “sensograph,” without using the breathing or whatever process got you there the first time. See how fully you can get back into that condition or feeling just from memory and/or “sensograph.”
- When you are as strongly “there” as you can get from just memory or “sensograph,” turn on the breathing pattern again (or whatever process) to get distinctly further into and distinctly stronger into that desired state or condition or feeling. Make this as distinctly deeper and stronger a state, compared to the first time, as you can.
- Mentally photograph or “sensograph” this stronger version of the state as you can, describe and record all you can notice about this stronger state.
That was one step deeper in the direction you desire. That leaves you further steps – an entire staircase of such further steps – leading further still in that direction. Repeat this cycle of #3, #4 & #5 just above, one distinct further step each time and when you’ve gotten three such steps further or five such steps further, determine whether you care to go another three such steps further or five such steps further. Being so specific as to each defined step further, and goal-setting to three to five such steps further, provides you some useful leverage.
These are yours, for free, with no strings attached. It’s entirely up to you, it’s entirely in your hands—or lungs and bronchia!)—as to how good you want to feel, how free, how clear, how well. This is not intended to replace or displace doctor’s orders or any professionally prescribed course of treatment, only to help things along. Any one idea or factor pursued to the exclusion of all other factors or ideas—that exclusion flies in the face of nature’s tapestry of multiple causes and multiple effects. That exclusion is where things go wrong. The mind, brain, body, energies and, if you will, spirit are all part of one organism, in which everything affects everything else. An electrode on your left earlobe shows the response when you stub your right big toe. A problem can start from anywhere in the system; a recovery or improvement of well-being can likewise start from anywhere in that system.
These simple breathing patterns, and the Calm-Breathing Patterns generally, are some easy, ready-to-use, quick and cost-free ways to introduce improvements into that system. Use one or more of these today, and they are yours. Enjoy.