How learning to breath is constantly outstanding me and changing my life.

[AstralJosh]

Dear Reader,

I understand there is a breath work/energy work section but since i reached this conclusion
through meditation and spiritual development it only seems appropriate for it to be here.

Now i am someone who suffers from mild to acute anxiety with attacks being very rare
but always seeming to be on the brink. The best i can describe some days is that i feel
like i am reaching the top of a roller-coaster ride, but never get there. If that sounds fun,
just to clarify, it's not. Imagine this feeling all day. Increased heart rate and adrenaline
rushes over nothing. These are things i am trying to learn how to control.

This is not supposed to be some confessional i just wanted to provide some background
that might be helpful in understanding why i am so profoundly amazed by breathing and
why i am learning so much about it.

Being someone who has this and other sorts of mental undesirables i am frequently
researching how to alleviate the symptoms. One other thing, i saw somewhere about how
many of societies problems, egoic, constant suffering etc... are down to tensions in
the body, people literally have blockages in their systems both biological and spiritual. Some
may interpret the spiritual as being chakra blockages or something else, i am not sure, but
i whole-heartedly agree with this from my own experiences. I may post something on
this in the future.

Unto the topic at hand...

Meditation especially Tibetan, turns you unto the breathe as your first point of focus, slowly
easing you into totally become one with your breath and learning how you can listen to it,
follow it, let it tell you how you are feeling etc...

I am been following along with it and it has just hit me how powerful this ability can
be developed. If i was to be able to always tune into my breath and my body functions
around breath (heart rate and such things) i believe a would be a much more intuitive person,
alleviate many of my anxieties and get direct feedback from my body, not my mind, on
how i am feeling.

I don't know if i can express how this feels, it's as if there is a new person to gain direction
and feedback from, someone other than the mind. There are schools of thought that
believe that the heart is similar to the brain, as in you can literally think using your heart. I
have no opinion on this but it's an interesting perspective.
I am even learning of tapping into my subconscious for such thing but that's a different story.

All of this leads me to belief that people with mental health difficulties are the most able and
likely candidates for spiritual progression in our modern societies as it seems to come from
necessity rather than curiosity. Which is purely my experience and the experience
of others. If i don't meditate and use breath exercises i would be in a real pickle.

This would seem a fairly controversial statement so feel free to refute any of this and also
discuss any topics mentioned while hopefully keeping the thread on track of how getting
feedback directly from your body is a profound experience and secondarily how mental
health can be improved through conscious breathing. And well done you for reading it all.

TL;DR Summary:

I have anxiety
Conscious breathing helps
I didn't think anything of it but i have amazed myself
Unlocked a new part of me
Possibilities for further development seem huge


Josh

[shadedragon]

I agree, these things definitely help and can grow us spiritually. I learned how to change my breath patterns when I was little by sitting with our cat or dog and breathing just like them, and then going over to those animals that were smaller, like our rabbit and lizard, and breathing like them, and observing the way each made me feel. The larger the animal, when not excited, the longer the breath. When they got excited, frightened, or stressed, they would breathe like the smaller animals would, and the smaller animals would breath much faster. I would feel their heartbeat and they would either be at a regular pattern or be racing when that stress came on, but then in order to control these things, the animals would take longer breaths and go relax. So I tried it for myself when I would get stressed and it worked very well, and taught it to my cousins while I was little. And then we learned this already was known elsewhere, bring awareness into yourself and consciously choosing the patterns of the breath to affect the way you feel. :)
By consciously controlling your breath, you can create different feelings within yourself, you can heal, you can affect your mind, you can affect your energy.
Many of my friends also who have had issues with anxiety also have found ease while controlling the breath.

I was wondering which exercises have you done so far that have worked for your research :) I have also explored that field quite a bit both on and offline, and I think others here would appreciate what you have researched and found to work for you ;) because even if we have tried them, I always seem to find and learn something new while sharing what we have learned.

[Mr Interesting]

Yeah, I've gone back to the breath after a while forgetting it was even there... actually making a point of getting so deep in meditation that the breath was just this thing somewhere in the distance, so been there done that and am now kinda concentrating on being more into breaking down the differences between not meditating and meditating and that's where the breath comes in for me.

I've yet to really get with it but I realised at one point, just outta the blue, that deeper controlled, to start with, breathing is the living breath and that what it's kind of about is changing desire and ambition from a head thing to a breathing thing. As if the fullest and highest level of self, in the solar plexus chakra, stops being thought for the sake of the self, and just becomes the breath. Hard to explain that too.