Breathing and Feeling: The Art of Deep Listening
Breathing and Feeling are the most natural parts of our life. They simply „happen” without us having to be conscious of them, so we might even undervalue their importance in our everydays and not pay much attention to them. However, there is alot to be discovered here.
Breathing and Feeling are interconnected, which means that the way we breathe influences how we feel in any given moment and the way we feel determines the pace and the quality of our breath.
Showing my example: if I feel anxious I take fast and short breaths, but when I am balanced I tend to have long, slow and deep breaths. Whenever there is tension in me about completing an important task because I want to achieve a certain goal with an activity, I often catch myself holding my breath in after the inhale. Everytime my body’s innate intelligence brings forward the need to yawn, I immediately feel very relaxed afterwards.
It was actually first through Breath Awareness that I got to know my own breathing tendencies as well as more of how my body functions at a deeper level.
Feeling and Breathing connect us to the Present Moment which is the realm of our Heart Space. The Heart is one of our power centers and it is not confined only to the part of our body where our Heart is actually located. It is there in every cell and is strongly connected to intuition.
How strong our connection is to our Heart Space depends on the quality of our awareness. We cannot breathe and feel in the past or in the future, only in the Here and Now, that is why even when we may be lost in our thoughts, our body still „lives” in the Present in each ever-renewing moment. By directing our awareness to how we feel and breathe, we can get lots of information from our body about its actual state.
This is the art of deep listening that occurs through all senses as consciousness is behind each of them basically.
It takes time and patience to re-discover this simple innate skill that many of us have forgotten in the midst of the so many stimuli that are constantly arriving to us from the world around us. Besides, very often we are not in touch with how we feel and breathe as most of us tend to think too much, so the constant mental activity pulls us out of the Present Moment. Thoughts keep following each other, since the mental „busyness” involves the constant (re)construction of the image of what we uniquely perceive as our reality, based on our past experiences and coloured by our expectations about the future. We might see ourselves, other people and the world through the filter of our (sub)conscious beliefs formed from early childhood up until Now and such attitude does not allow for much spontaneity and creativity for us. Thinking is valuable for sure, at the same time, it can disconnect us from the flow of life, from staying in the Here and Now. Concentrating on the past or on the future are attitudes that both take up a lot of energy and we might even feel stuck in certain areas of our life due to having (repeated) thought patterns that fail to give us any new insights.
As we tune into our breath and feelings, we immediately switch to the witnessing mode of our mind. We are simply aware, our focus shifts gently and spontaneously from our mental space to our Heart Space, we recognize fully what is there for us both in our outer and our inner world. By witnessing (observing) our feelings ( also any thoughts that may surface) rather than identifying with them, we surrender to how everything and anything is right now, including ourselves. We let things be, how they are unfolding, without any resistance, and our breath stays/becomes balanced. We save energy by not forcing any solution, any agenda, rather allowing solutions to arrive to us in the form of insights trusting that we receive these exactly when we need them. We just give permission to life to flow through us and around us effortlessly. We don’t think about the feelings we experience, we let them come and go, we don’t label them as good or bad, don’t suppress, deny, avoid or fight them and also do not cling to them.
There is deep wisdom in surrender, it leads to inner freedom. We breathe and feel without any mental interpretation, we are fully present in the here and now. Feeling into the whole spectrum of feelings from joy to sadness, we might get absorbed in thoughts from time to time, or encounter resistance towards certain emotions, but the key is always noticing and watching, allowing all of what comes up for us to exist in our awareness without judgement. Since our pure awareness is inherently non-judgemental in itself, by simply observing things we immediately return to our Heart Space.
The intelligence of the Heart leads us to experience everything around us as well as inside us more profoundly, vividly and multidimensionally. Colours feel more alive, tastes, fragrances and sounds have more levels of depth, sensations are stronger as we perceive all things without any mental labels, we don’t restrict or try to control our experiences with any reasoning.
In every leaf of a tree we can glimpse the whole universe manifesting because we are open to that and notice. We glance the unrepeatable uniqueness in our environment and in ourselves, thus we judge and categorize less, while having a holistic picture of the world and embracing the details at the same time. All of that comes without any mental strain as in the realm of the Heart the whole world and all feelings have a loving space.
Thoughts we think cannot provide us with such unique sense of the world and ourselves in it. This perspective brings about the natural, ever-flowing creativity that resides in each of us, we can welcome new ideas,and viewpoints, maybe even multiple ones at the same time.
As children, everyone of us had a simple, open attitude towards life, but in schools and in society there is still much more emphasis on mental processes that have thinking as their basis. Thinking and reasoning are overdeveloped and overvalued, while feeling and simple awareness are often bypassed or are connected to sensitivity and vulnerability, two wonderfully deep words that are at times still incorrectly equated with weakness.
So, for many of us, still, thinking seems the only way to proceed through life meaningfully, because that is what we are used to. Even if nature „designed” us to breathe and feel our way through life, we don’t use these consciously as our inner compasses.
To be aware of Breathing and Feeling means that we are able to be conscious in each and every moment of how our breath is and what feelings are present for us, e.g. happiness, joy, fear and how these are manifested as sensations in our body, for example: expansion, lightness, contraction or ache in certain body parts.
If the body carries any type of trauma, to feel into certain sensations in the body with full awareness might become overwhelming. In this case, it can give us a great resource of self-trust if we remember that it is always safe to feel and breathe fully, and both breathing and feeling helps the body to tap into its own innate intelligence to regulate itself energetically.
To be continued.
