Welcome to this practice in finding presence in the body.
You cannot be present in the body until the body is available to the breath.
And you may think,
Well,
The body is always available to the breath.
How else would oxygen get to the cells?
But we tend to control the breath.
By control,
I mean we tend to breathe from the chest and muscle the breath.
So we know it's a good idea to breathe deeply.
It's helpful.
It's healthy.
But when we think about breathing deeply,
We think about pushing the breath from the top down,
Which takes muscles and the muscles get tired and the breath goes shallow again.
So there's another quality that I would like you to experience,
Which is the quality of releasing the body to the breath.
And as you release the body to the breath,
You make it more and more available to that quality of presence.
So begin just by gently,
Gently bringing your awareness to the breath.
So you're doing that without any idea of how to breathe correctly,
Because there's no such thing.
How to bring your awareness to the breath without judgment,
Without anticipation,
Without an agenda just to meet it where it is and feel it in the body.
And you feel the body gently open to the in-breath and gently release to the out-breath.
And then begin to notice where in the body you are holding against the breath.
It's a very subtle thing.
The body is fluid.
Your body is 65%,
Maybe 70% water.
And so the breath moving into the body is like a wave.
And it can travel to the bottoms of your feet.
It can travel to the top of the head,
To the fingertips.
So take it gently and allow yourself to feel each breath as a wave.
You feel the wave of the breath wash into the body and release out.
And anywhere in the body that that breath wave can't penetrate,
Think of it a little bit like a sand castle at the edge of the ocean.
And the tide is coming in and the waves bit by bit get closer to the sand castle and they begin to moisten the edge of it and then wash into it and the sand castle gently dissolves into the wave.
Just in exactly that way.
Feel anywhere in your body that the breath wave isn't penetrating and let it be like that wave on the beach.
It washes into that little shadow,
That little island of tension,
That holding pattern and it softens.
And you can allow the breath wave to soften into your hips.
You can allow it to soften the whole of your back.
You can allow it to soften your shoulders and wash down your arms to your fingertips.
Allow it to soften up to the top of your head.
And bit by bit allow it to soften down into the legs.
So you feel the in-breath moving into the thighs the way a wave moves into a sand castle.
And it becomes fluid,
That tissue in the thighs that responds to the breath,
That fluid nature of the body is activated.
The more deeply the breath moves into the legs the more fluid they will seem in your experience.
So it's not a matter of imagination.
The legs are fluid.
They are 65% water.
It's a matter of connecting with their reality through the breath.
And play with it on your own time in your own way.
Explore it.
What does it mean eventually to allow the whole of the body to be available to the breath?
So the in-breath floods down through the legs to the soles of the feet and then releases out.
And as it releases out it's got the quality of a sigh.
And you know when you when you sigh there's a sense of the whole body just releasing.
It's like every cell in the body is letting go with the out-breath.
And that's the quality of the out-breath that we're looking to allow.
The breath wave washes into the body and the whole body sighs it out.
And the more available the body becomes to that breath wave the more grounded the more present it's able to be.
I would really encourage you to come back to this.
Try it for yourself.
Play with it.
You know in the middle of the day notice where in the body you're available to the breath and where you're not and see if you can soften through those impediments and recover that sense of your natural fluidity in the world.
I hope you enjoy that and I look forward to sharing the next practice with you soon.
