Breath is Key to Life

Breath is Key to a Life Well Lived

Finding Space

Being aware of your breathing takes attention away from thinking and creates space. It is one way of generating consciousness. The breath is key to discovering inner space and connection to spirit. It creates gaps in the stream of thinking. Without those gaps, your thinking becomes repetitive, uninspired, devoid of any creative spark, which is how it is for most people on the planet. You don’t need to be concerned with the duration of those gaps. A few seconds is good enough. Gradually they will lengthen by themselves, without any effort on your part. More important then their length is to bring these gaps in frequently so that your daily activities and your stream of thinking become interspersed with space.

Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able. Do it whenever you remember. If you consistently do that for one year it will be more powerfully transformative then attending workshop after workshop. And breathing is free.

Be aware of your breathing. Notice the sensation of the breath. Feel the air moving in and out of your body. Notice how the chest and abdomen expand and contract slightly with the in – and outbreath. One conscious breath is enough to make some space where before there was the uninterrupted succession of one thought after another. One conscious breath (two or three would be even better), taken many times a day, is an excellent way of bringing space into your life.

Trees have space

Let’s now stop and do a short breathing exercise. Be sure you are sitting comfortably. Close your eyes and mouth. Place your hands over your belly. Breathe in with an internal count of five. Breathe out with a count of five. (Repeat for a total of five sets.) Relax and open your eyes.

Did you notice the natural pause between the inhales and exhales?

Even if you meditated on your breathing for two hours or more, which some people do, one breath is all you ever need to be aware of, indeed ever can be aware of. The rest is memory or anticipation, which is to say, thought. Another way to put it is the past or the future. Breathing isn’t really something you do but something that you witness as it happens. Breathing happens by itself in the now. The intelligence within the body is doing it. All you have to do is watch it happening. There is no strain or effort involved.

Many people’s breath is unnaturally shallow. The more you are aware of the breath, the more it’s natural depth will reestablish itself. This is like the breaths you see a baby taking.

Because breath has no form as such, it has since, ancient times, been equated with spirit. From the Bible: “God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature.”

The German word for breathing – atmen – is derived from the ancient Indian (Sanskrit) word Atman, meaning the indwelling divine spirit or God within.

The sky breathes

The fact that breath has no form is one of the reasons why breath awareness is an extremely effective way of bringing space into life, of generating consciousness. It is an excellent meditation object precisely because it is not an object, it has no shape or form. The other reason is that breath is one of the most subtle and seemingly insignificant phenomena, the ‘least thing’ that makes up the ‘best happiness’. Whether or not you practice breath awareness as an actual formal meditation is up to you.

Being aware of your breath forces you into the present moment – the key to all inner transformation. Whenever you are conscious of your breath, you are absolutely present. You may also notice that you cannot think and be aware of your breathing at the same time. Conscious breathing stops your mind. But far from being in a trance or half asleep, you are fully awake and highly alert. You are not falling below thinking, but rising above it. And if you look more closely, you will find that those two things – coming fully into the present moment and ceasing thinking without loss of consciousness – are actually one and the same; the awakening of consciousness.

Key thoughts from the book “A New Earth; Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” by Eckhart Tolle

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