Mindful breathing.
Take a moment to adjust your posture ready for meditation.
Ensure you have an even distribution of weight across the sit bones and you can feel symmetry in the placement of your legs,
Your feet,
The way your arms and hands lay in the lap.
Become aware of your spine becoming long and elegant,
Shoulders down and back allowing a lovely deep breath at the chest and have your crown tall and just take a moment to notice the natural character of your breath.
Is it long or short,
Noisy or silent,
Jagged or smooth?
Take a moment to notice the story that your breath is telling you.
I want you now to bring all of your awareness to the inside tip of your nose.
The inside tip of your nose and notice how the air swirls there on its way up into the body on the inhalation and it swirls again as you exhale but just in the opposite direction.
See if you can find the swirl point of the breath in the inside tip of your nose.
Bringing your awareness now to the nasal passages,
Notice the difference between the inhalation and the exhalation.
As you breathe in the air feels cool and oxygenated and light and as you breathe out the air is heavy,
Viscous and warm.
Notice how the breath feels as it channels upwards spiraling up the nasal passages.
Keep all of your awareness here and in the feeling of each breath.
On your next inhalation follow the movement of the air up each nasal passage on the left and the right and the discrete flows of the breath meet again in a chamber just behind the eyebrow center.
Another swirl point,
Very subtle.
See if you can find it.
Bringing your awareness deeper into your system now there's a patch on the inside of the throat that the breath brushes past on its way to the lungs.
It's a cool patch.
See if you can find it.
And deeper still now bring your awareness to the inside walls of the lungs and noticed on the next inhalation how the lungs expand in all directions to the front,
To the back,
To the sides,
Down below and they rise.
And as you breathe out there's a beautiful whole cell drawing into center.
Breathe with your lungs in this multi-dimensional way for the next few breaths.
I want you now to have the feeling that you're just breathing into the sides of your lungs.
Feel the lungs expand out to the sides towards the arms with the inhalation and draw back in horizontally on the exhalation.
Keep your awareness pegged on this horizontal movement of your breath.
And moving your awareness deeper still find the diaphragm in your abdomen.
As you breathe in you'll notice the diaphragm moving vertically downwards and as you breathe out the diaphragm rises vertically.
For the next few breaths breathe along the vertical axis of your breath.
And expanding your awareness now and taking the whole movement of the breath from the tip of the nose,
Nasal passages,
The eyebrow center,
The throat,
The lungs,
The diaphragm.
And notice that far from being a linear in and out motion of the system it's an organic swirling spiraling living aspect of your system.
Extend your awareness even further and feel into your body's response to each breath.
As you breathe in you're receiving oxygen and prana,
Life force.
As you breathe out you're releasing toxins and tension and tightness.
And this in itself is a beautiful mantra for the breath.
On your next inhalation say to yourself receive.
And as you exhale release.
Every breath is an active effect of renewal.
Every breath connects us with every living being on the earth.
You
