To Enter In

To “enter in” to the Circle of Breath you let go and notice your breath  It’s not necessary to think about it or be “mindful” of it. Awareness of what is happening in the present moment is a slightly different part of your brain than the thinking part. Welcome a simple willingness to let go of everything for a few moments, like leaving your coat and shoes at the door. Everything will be there when you return. Then notice the wave of breath moving through you. Notice where you feel it, what it feels like. You do not need to describe it to yourself. Breathe around it like your breath is a form of touch and you are gently exploring.

Notice how deep the sensation of breath plunges into your torso. Notice where you sense tightness, pain or rigidity in your body. Now easily breathe a few breaths at the edge where normal becomes tightness. These sensations are all textures of your quantum expression within the life force. They all belong.

There is some cultural and existential fear just to take the time and let go without doing, learning, buying or consuming something. You may feel it as an immediate need to pay attention to something around you. Let the fear be and gently breath into the torso.  If the fear is commanding your attention, breath around the edges of fear in your body. Fear is a flow in the body. It too wants to be known. Many times we want to get past it to the good stuff.  Fear can be uncomfortable and not pretty. Externally we judge it in others and internally we judge it in ourselves. In quantum reality it is simply an expression with no qualifier of good or bad, pretty or ugly. When we ignore or judge fear we live in ignorance and judgement of a whole flow pattern in the body. There was a past president who said: “The only thing to fear is fear itself.” I don’t totally agree with that but there is no point to compound your fear by fearing your fear. And it’s not helpful to pressurize your fear by ignoring it or burying it in the vault. I digress.

Living on the earth is living with polarity. It is how things move. So breath into what ever shows up, whatever is commanding your attention will be breathed. You might notice that the qualities of breath are intimate with the qualities of attention. Eventually if you take the time to accept and soften the edges you will come to awareness, not from the perspective of the mind but from the wisdom, the beauty, the sensation in the breath. Then the doors will open to the gentler quieter places within. Notice who or what is beckoning, what gentle part of you wants to be known?  You are only going closer to your original self.

So many humans embark on a spiritual or awakening path with high hopes that spiritual reality will make everything better. It may and it may not. They sincerely leave everything for a day, a weekend immersion or several years only to find that all the aspects of the person are there waiting upon re-entry into the rhythms of daily life. The form and perspective shift and yet our basic survival patterns return. Things can look way better from a new perspective from within.

Breathe into the face of fear and gently acknowledge it. No need for bargaining. We don’t breathe to let go and we don’t command to let go. We simply let go.

This is one way to understand the Dao and Wu Wei, non-doing. I find this harmonious with the meaning of surrender in the Abrahamic religions. We create the conditions and then let go. We allow god, nature, consciousness, awareness or an unnameable energy to flow. It will anyway, something beyond us is moving us, on every level of our existence. 

If our actions were as motivated by and connected to the supportive reality of deep breath as they are to our thoughts and fears, our world would change. When we shift our value to the quality of breath, the context can shift. We may be able to create conditions for change that we never thought possible.

Related Posts