Help
Sign In
capacity
July 2009 
What keeps you peaceful?
Posted on Nov 9th, 2008
by 
Stef
Stef
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for November 09, 2008:
I have a very dear friend who spent this entire last year teaching me how to breathe. and not just breathe to live, but breathe to feel it throughout my body and soul. When times get tough, I have learned to take a moment and take those breaths. I feel
myself calm and become at peace with everything. I had been suffering from anxiety prior to these lessons and now it is no more. How grateful I am to this friend. Breathing is so much more than just putting air in our lungs. It sustains our every moment, our essence, the every part of our self.
myself calm and become at peace with everything. I had been suffering from anxiety prior to these lessons and now it is no more. How grateful I am to this friend. Breathing is so much more than just putting air in our lungs. It sustains our every moment, our essence, the every part of our self.
Access: Public
I enjoyed your thoughts. I've been told by others and by a naturopath that I don't breathe properly and tend to hold my breath. It seems to be related to anxiety. I'm a pacifist by nature, my mother told me I was born that way. So my main way of keeping peaceful is to steer clear of conflict. If I wind up in the middle of something I tend to be yielding and to make allowances for whoever is disturbing the peace. It usually takes the wind out of their sails and peace returns. I'm wondering how your friend taught you to breathe? Perhaps keeping inner peace is more difficult, for me anyway.
I've been doing the same thing for the last year. I took a meditation class that was offered at the community center, and the focal point of the meditation was attention to breath. That's it. Just watch the breath. Feel it. Feel the qualities of your breath. Don't control it just observe.
Just the simple act of observing your breath…it's lifechanging!
Wow, thank you for sharing that, I love it! Just to observe the breath, not do anything different to it. Very nice, I will be trying that.
Ingebrita, I apologize for not getting back to you about the breathing, and it has been awhile too. It is a very basic exercise, but the most important thing was to breathe from the belly, not from the chest. When you inhale, bring the air fully into your belly, if that makes sense. For myself, I was able to experience a deeper breath, more overall and calming. We would sit together and take these deep belly breaths for about 10 minutes, in quiet. What a difference it made for me. Slow and long breaths.
Thanks Stef and Joey! I tried observing my breathing and found that I do breathe from the belly, but they tend to be very short breaths and then I hold my breath when lifting weights or if I'm tense. So I'm going to stay conscious of taking deeper breaths - it does seem to calm me down. (Did it again - found myself holding my breath while trying to think of what to say to end this post…) I'll keep at it. Thanks again!