How is your breathing right now? How often do notice your breath? If you do this from time to time, you may encounter some habits that could do with attention.
When, like I am doing right now, I work at my computer my chest sometimes gets tight and my breathing gets shallow, but I don’t notice because I am so focused on what I am doing. There is nothing wrong with focus, it can take you into the very positive, productive, deeply satisfying state of flow. But time pressure or performance anxiety get in the way of flow. They stop me feeling safe and my body moves into a state of threat. Eventually, my chest starts to hurt and, if I don’t stop because I feel I must get ‘it’ done, my chest becomes really painful and my neck and ears and eyes then join in and hurt too. I won’t feel better for a long time. What happens to you in this situation? Maybe you are very skilled at moving into flow. Or maybe your back starts to hurt, your eyes start aching or you develop a headache. It is interesting to experiment with stopping and paying attention when this happens. Perhaps asking yourself what is going on and whether the tasks you are doing might be better done if you were not in a state of threat.
Breath is one of the 4 pillars of Philip Shepherd’s Radical Wholeness weekend workshops. Different ways to breath and their effects are explored. Shallow upper chest breathing makes you more anxious – try it and see. Belly breathing is advocated by many disciplines as a way to calm down, but this doesn’t work for everyone. Another way is the back breath. We tend to ignore our backs;
they are out of sight and out of mind. And we don’t like going backward or being caught on the back foot. But the effect of letting the breath fall into the back – feeling the back of your chest moving against the back of a chair is deeply soothing. You may start to feel your spine moving a little with each breath and the effects broadcast up to you head and down to your sacrum. After a while the body calms down and comes out of the state of threat. It’s as though you can access the feeling that ‘someone has your back’ and all is going to be well. Try it sometime. Or come and explore all the different life enhancing embodiment practices on a TEPP weekend
workshop. The next UK weekend is in Oxford 22md/23 rd November.
