Breathe To Heal

It’s almost the end of March!

Spring Blessings to all those in the Northern Hemisphere.

"What is a blessing? A blessing is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen. Life is a constant flow of emergence. The beauty of blessing is its belief that it can affect what unfolds.

 To be in the world is to be distant from the homeland of wholeness. We are confined by limitation and difficulty. When we bless, we are enabled somehow to go beyond our present frontiers and reach into the source. A blessing awakens future wholeness. We use the word 'foreshadow' for the imperfect representation of something that is yet to come. We could say that a blessing forebrightens the way. When a blessing is invoked, a window opens in external time."

 --John O'Donohue, To Bless The Space Between Us

Bless you!

I’m going to start posting a blog weekly, every Wednesday, either written or in Vlog form, sharing practical, physical ways for us to bless our health, body-brain-spirit.

 We hear a lot about mindful breathing and meditation and how good they are for the spirit and for calming down. Some of us have long meditation practices, some of us have on-and-off again meditation practices, some of us are Emergency Meditators.

 No shaming here—whatever works for you! (I have a particular fondness for the Emergency Meditator myself. I so know this form of dedication/half-dedication.)

 We don’t have to be meditators or mindfulness experts. We can just be exactly what we are: animals who breathe.

We can appreciate the breath as a fundamental indicator and bringer of health, brain-body-spirit. Even a minute of calm deep breath into the belly—diaphragmatic breathing, so the inhaled oxygen drops deeper into the lungs—is a wonderful little sip of calm in the midst of  a busy day.

  So let me share a powerful breath/health technique. A Buddhist monk taught me this when I first learned to meditate in Thailand as a teenager. Curiously, I didn’t write about this in Touch The Dragon, my book about that year as an exchange student. It’s not easy to write about healing practices, especially when you’re a teenager without any health problems. At the time, it just seemed like something my mother would appreciate (and, in fact, she did!). Now that I’m a mother with a teenager, here I am with the wisdom . . . Right on schedule, perhaps.

 The physical benefits of using our breath in a focused way to oxygenate painful or tense tissue or joints is another health wonder.

 When we have certain aches or pains, we can mindfully use the breath to oxygenate those particular areas of the body. We can also use this technique to promote wound healing.

 We do some form of this technique regularly in The Courage Room Collective.

Create some calm space to practice, sitting or standing.

 Choose a part of the body that needs some attention—a particular area where you have an ache, pain, or wound that you need to heal. If it feels comfortable to do so, place a hand or both hands on or around that area, to focus the mind and to bring the care of mindful touch.

With the inhalation, send the oxygen of the breath to the area that needs attention.  Visualize the oxygen of the breath as a colour (blue, pink, silvery, whatever works for you).

See fresh oxygen flowing into the tissue, carrying with it other nutrients that promote healing, allowing the area to become more malleable and softer (or more or less fluid-filled as required).

 The goal is to spend at least two or three minutes of focused breathing into the painful tissue, perhaps with some gentle movement to increase the effect. The visualization is that movement makes more space for more oxygen—it’s also a way to focus our attention and to be aware of what happens when we bring breath to that part of the body. 

 Increase the time as you are able to focus more—but even a few directed breaths is helpful. The creative visualization plus breathing creates a light trance state that calms the entire nervous system.

There are really two health techniques here: the breath and the wonder of creative visualization. Together or separately, each of these have been used extensively in physical intervention practices for everything from elite athletic practice to compulsivity and cancer treatments. (Just google it—many many controlled studies are available out there.)

 Combined, these two techniques form the basis of self-hypnosis . . . 

 As you inhale, call up love, tenderness and kindness towards your entire body and especially toward the tense, painful or wounded area.

As you exhale, think or say aloud, I deserve this healing gift. 

Stay tune for next week: I’ll be writing more about Self-Hyposis.

My goal is to start posting a blog WEEKLY. Sometimes these will overlap with my newsletters, but not always . . .