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What makes it so difficult to breathe deeply all the time?
Healthy newborn babies breathe fully and deeply effortlessly
all the time. This natural way of breathing is our birthright.
Every breath travels in a graceful wave like motion over the
whole length of the trunk of the body, all the way from the
pelvic floor down below to the throat up above. The musculature
of the breathing apparatus noticeably expands the abdomen
and the rib cage on each inhalation and contracts them with
each exhalation. This is what natural healthy breathing looks
like, and it is how our body is meant to breathe.
"A being breathing thoughtful breath." William Wordsworth
When we breathe deeply all the time, we become more conscious
of what we are actually feeling in the body. An infant knows
how to breathe and how to feel everything. The very young
child just is - present to every feeling in the body and it
expresses it freely and fully. An infant does not hold back.
The emotional energy moves freely, uncensored and with intensity.
The energy of anger is expressed by screaming, kicking, flailing
of arms, or throwing a full temper tantrum. The body moves
the energy of fear by crying, trembling, shaking, perspiring
(cold sweat) and in the case of sorrow, the body cries, sobs
and wails. These expressions are readily observable in healthy
infants, toddlers and small children.
"In breathing there are two blessings: drawing breath, and releasing it again. The one pressurises us and the other refreshes us, so wonderfully mixed is life!" Goethe
When our tantrums, screaming, sobbing, trembling, even our
exuberant joyfulness, are not genuinely welcomed by our adult
caregivers, we feel intense pressure to somehow stop what
we are feeling. The only way we can do this is by tensing
up our body and shortening our breathing. And this is exactly
what we learn to do. In order to please our caregivers, or
to be safe, we tense up our muscles and cut off our natural
respiration. This enables us to successfully stop the inner
awareness and outward expression of what we are actually feeling.
We lose touch with parts of our deep feeling nature (we shut
down), and the emotional energy that originally wanted to
move ends up trapped in our body where it generates emotional
stress later on in life. As a result of such experiences we
emerge from childhood as habitual shallow breathers with major
amounts of emotional energy held in tensed up muscles in our
body.
Garuda, my teacher.
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