Breath Training
The Tantric sages tell us that our in-breath and out-breath actually mirror the divine creative gesture.
With the inhalation, we draw into our own centre, our own being.
With the exhalation, we expand outward into the world.
– Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga
Here’s a meditative and uplifting music track to practice your breathing exercises with
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This 5 minute breathing meditation is from the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA
Audio for this 5 minute breathing
Find a relaxed, comfortable position
Seated on a chair or on the floor, on a cushion
Keep your back upright, but not too tight
Hands resting wherever they’re comfortable
Tongue on the roof of your mouth or wherever it’s comfortable.
And you can notice your body
From the inside
Noticing the shape of your body, the weight, touch
And let yourself relax
And become curious about your body
Find a relaxed, comfortable position
Seated on a chair or on the floor, on a cushion
Keep your back upright, but not too tight
Hands resting wherever they’re comfortable
Tongue on the roof of your mouth or wherever it’s comfortable.
And you can notice your body
From the inside
Noticing the shape of your body, the weight, touch
And let yourself relax
And become curious about your body
Seated here
The sensations of your body
The touch
The connection with the floor
The chair
Relax any areas of tightness or tension
Just breathe
Soften
And now begin to tune into your breath
In your body
Feeling the natural flow of breath
Don’t need to do anything to your breath
Not long not short just natural
And notice where you feel your breath in your body
It might be in your abdomen
It may be in your chest or throat
Or in your nostrils
See if you can feel the sensations of breath
One breath at a time
When one breath ends, the next breath begins
Now as you do this you might notice that your mind might start to wander
You might start thinking about other things
If this happens this is not a problem
It’s very natural
Just notice that your mind has wandered
You can say “thinking” or “wandering” in your head softly
And then gently redirect your attention right back to the breathing
So we’ll stay with this for some time in silence
Just a short time
Noticing our breath
From time to time getting lost in thought and returning to our breath
See if you can be really kind to yourself in the process
And once again you can notice your body, your whole body, seated here
Let yourself relax even more deeply
And then offer yourself some appreciation
For doing this practice today
Whatever that means to you
Finding a sense of ease and wellbeing for yourself and this day
This 5 minute breathing meditation is from the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA
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“Life consists only of moments, nothing more than that. So if you make the moment matter, it all matters.
You can be mindful, you can be mindless. You can win, you can lose.
The worst case is to be mindless and lose. So when you are doing anything, be mindful, notice new things, make it meaningful to you and you’ll prosper”
Meditation
“Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
In our culture of busyness people tend not to be very present in the moment, they are not self aware, or are not aware of how people around them are feeling. In the busy momentum of life people don’t listen to their own body and what they need as a human being. People are often on autopilot attached to schedules, tech and punishing deadlines. People tend to be addicted to doing.
When given the opportunity to sit still, people feel compelled to check messages or social media, anything that distracts them from the present moment. These days, with our minds bouncing all over the place, it can be uncomfortable to just be in our bodies.
Mindfulness can help you become comfortable with being in the moment without the need to run towards a distraction which fills the moment with noise. As you come to practice mindfulness, you can eventually bring these powers of mindfulness and focus into the bedroom to improve intimacy and a sense of feeling connected to your partner in the moment. This can enable you and your partner to focus more on pleasure, sensations and intimacy as you become aware of each other in the moment and respond to each other’s needs.
If you are new to mindfulness or are interested in mindfulness here’s a simple mindful exercise you can try.
Turn away from the computer, tablet or phone and sit for a moment noticing the sensations in your mind and body.
How do you feel? What can you hear?
Try to be as present in that moment.
If your mind wanders off to tasks that you have to complete or starts working over things that happened yesterday, recognise this thought and then let it go. You can imagine letting go of the thought like a helium balloon and letting it float away from you.
Gently bring your mind’s focus back to the present, listen to your breathing as you breath in and out. Just be wherever you are for a few moments.
Remember mindfulness is not about trying to make sense of anything, it’s about attention to that moment.
Adapted from Dr. K Wise’s article on sexual wellbeing, erectile unpredictability and mindfulness
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Recent research provides strong evidence that practicing non-judgmental, present-moment awareness (a.k.a. mindfulness) changes the brain. Mindfulness changes your brain.
We contributed to this research in 2011 with a study on participants who completed an eight-week mindfulness program. We observed significant increases in the density of their gray matter. In the years since, other neuroscience laboratories from around the world have also investigated ways in which meditation, one key way to practice mindfulness, changes the brain.
In 2014 a team of scientists from the University of British Columbia and the Chemnitz University of Technology were able to pool data from more than 20 studies to determine which areas of the brain are consistently affected.
The first is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a structure located deep inside the forehead, behind the brain’s frontal lobe. The ACC is associated with self-regulation, meaning the ability to purposefully direct attention and behaviour, suppress inappropriate knee-jerk responses, and switch strategies flexibly.
People with damage to the ACC show impulsivity and unchecked aggression, and those with impaired connections between this and other brain regions perform poorly on tests of mental flexibility: they hold onto ineffective problem-solving strategies rather than adapting their behaviour.
Meditators, on the other hand, demonstrate superior performance on tests of self-regulation, resisting distractions and making correct answers more often than non-meditators. They also show more activity in the ACC than non-meditators. In addition to self-regulation, the ACC is associated with learning from past experience to support optimal decision-making.
The second brain region we want to highlight is the hippocampus, a region that showed increased amounts of gray matter in the brains of our 2011 mindfulness program participants. This seahorse-shaped area is buried inside the temple on each side of the brain and is part of the limbic system, a set of inner structures associated with emotion and memory. It is covered in receptors for the stress hormone cortisol, and studies have shown that it can be damaged by chronic stress, contributing to a harmful spiral in the body.
Indeed, people with stress-related disorders like depresssion and PTSD tend to have a smaller hippocampus. All of this points to the importance of this brain area in resilience—another key skill in the current high-demand business world.
This blog post, Mindfulness changes your brain, is adapted from an article that appeared in HBR, https://hbr.org/2015/01/mindfulness-can-literally-change-your-brain