Breathing

Then you may notice that your breath is creating a problem for you: your mind is being distracted by your breath. Breath plays a great role in life. It helps you to control your mind, and if you know how to breathe properly you can control your emotional life. For example, if you get bad news, nobody hurts you physically, but you are affected mentally and you start to cry and sob. Your breath becomes shallow and you lose all your strength. So one thought, one negative or passive emotion can disturb your breath, affect the motion of the lungs, and upset you at all levels.

Breath is like a flywheel, and if disturbed, all the other vehicles and mechanisms within you are disturbed. On the other hand, if you know how to breathe well, you can help yourself.

Many of you jog or do exercises, but do not understand the relationship between breath and activity. If you coordinate your breathing and your exercise, you will find a one hundred percent benefit. When you exercise you should be conscious of when there is a pause in the breath. For example, suppose that you are playing tennis: when you return to your position you should be conscious of exhaling twice as long as you inhale. If you learn to do this when you jog, it is a really healthy thing.

What do you actually do? Suppose that you inhale to a count of eight. That is your capacity. Everyone has their own individual capacity and that should be respected. You should learn to understand your capacity and then gradually expand it. If you can inhale comfortably to a count of eight, then it will not be difficult to exhale for a count of sixteen.

When you create physical stillness, you are giving rest to your muscles and to your voluntary and involuntary nervous systems. By balancing the breath you are establishing a balance between intake and output. When you inhale, that supplies oxygen to your system. The lungs are the storehouse for the exchange of gases. When the oxygen is consumed, it becomes carbon dioxide, which comes back to the lungs and you expel it. This is the natural and healthy cycle of breathing.

Many times you will find that you are of normal health; there isn’t any disease or problem, but you are not feeling well. You say, “I don’t feel well. I am lazy. There is something that doesn’t allow me to move well or feel good.” This is because of the toxins that have built up in your system―because of the carbon dioxide that you have retained within yourself―that you don’t feel right. So if you learn to exhale efficiently, it will definitely help.

There are many breathing exercises that will help you. For example, it has been found that Alternate Nostril Breathing, if properly practiced, will help to get rid of emotional problems. But such special breathing exercises will not help if you don’t know how to do the most basic breathing exercise. If this basic exercise, deep diaphragmatic breathing, is not properly practiced, you cannot expect to make much progress. This is very important: If you do not do any other exercise but you learn to do this basic diaphragmatic breathing well, it will be very good. If you practice for five minutes, three times a day, in one month’s time you will be perfect at that, because that natural breathing pattern is your birthright.

Now, what do you do in diaphragmatic breathing? You don’t actually see your diaphragm, but if you press the abdomen in, the diaphragm pushes upon your lungs, and that expels the used-up gas. When you allow the carbon dioxide to come out, you create more space for fresh oxygen to come in.

Shallow breathing has become part of your life because of your shallow thinking, because of your shallow habits of eating too much food, not being active, not being accurate, not being exact, and not being direct. There are many reasons. Because of these, you have lost the natural capacity for breathing diaphragmatically and this results in self-created suffering. No therapist can help you if you suffer from yourself; if you want to suffer from yourself; if you want to suffer, then no one can help you. You have to get rid of your self suffering habits, then others can also help you. Otherwise you will acquire disease through ignorance.

It is easy to do this diaphragmatic breathing exercise. To begin, lie down in shavasana, the corpse posture, and put a small sandbag on your abdomen; that will help you to do this exercise. Now keep your head, neck, and trunk aligned and close your lips. Then push in your abdomen and exhale. Don’t force the inhalation, let it be natural. Don’t forget to practice it three times a day, and in a month’s time you will be a totally different person. You will think in a different way; you will feel very energetic. You will not have that feeling of sloth and lethargy in the morning.

Once you have done this basic exercise, you can practice other exercises. But the purpose of all these exercises is to learn to regulate the motion of your lungs mentally and consciously. Normally, your involuntary nervous system is not under your conscious control, but it should be. You should control the behavior of your breath.

After you have learned breathing exercises and have established coordination in your breath, then you will be breathing well. Breathing well means no shallow breath, no jerky breathing, no noise while breathing (which is a symptom of blockage or obstruction), and finally no lengthy pauses between exhalation and inhalation.

If you form the habit of having a long pause in the breath, it means that you are high-strung and there are emotional problems. Such pauses are not created when you are happy, but they occur when you are going through some agony, problem, or insecurity. Try to understand that there is a brief natural pause between inhalation and exhalation, but do not expand it by your bad habits. Such a pause, if unnecessarily expanded, can be a killer; it creates coronary heart disease.

Meditation

The mind never wants to meditate, because it was never educated, cultivated, or trained. Gradually you have to understand and train your mind. The mind is a train of thoughts, emotions, desires, and motivations, a catalog of ambitions. Habit patterns are strong motivations in your life, and it is not easy to break habits. If you have formed certain bad habits, you know you should not do them, yet you do them. To have a habit means you know you should not do something, yet you are helpless.

Self-transformation is possible when you become serious, and then somebody else can also help you. You want to change and someone wants to help you―this is what you do in therapy. You have to be ready for therapy, and then your therapist can help you. In self-therapy you are your own therapist, but you have to be honest with yourself and practice within your capacity.

By doing breathing exercises you will slowly stop doing things which you used to do before. There is one easy way to change the habit patterns and to form the personality. When you are doing something you don’t like and that you know isn’t helpful you should start doing something different, so that your mind comes out of the old groove and starts traveling in new grooves. But don’t stop practicing.

The system of meditation is the greatest of all therapies. Once you have learned to be still and to control your breathing, then you can learn to work with your mind. The mind does not want to meditate because you have formed a bad habit; your mind was never trained. You haven’t trained yourself in meditation because you think it is something foreign or strange. Really, meditation is a necessity of human life. Food nourishes the body and many external pleasures act as simple consolations. But when you are all alone you have to understand who you are, what you are, and what you want to do. Then you know that you have to deal with your mind.

Gradually you will have to understand and train your mind. If you learn to be still, and if you learn to breathe well, then there is a state of mind which is called “joyous mind.” In the technical language of yoga, this is called the application of Sushumna. It is how you lead the mind to a state of  joy where true meditation is possible.

. . . to be continued