CLEAN BREATHING

Have you ever found yourself spellbound watching a hawk soar effortless high above? Or caught yourself mesmerized by a fish hovering in one spot for no apparent reason?  Or been fully entertained by a gull’s feather drifting on the water with billowy clouds reflecting beneath it?

How easy it is to fully surrender in nature. No need for answers, no need for questions, just expansive possibilities twinkling around everywhere.

“Thank you. I love you. Bless you:” just twinkling around.

What a rich summer this has been: the visitors, the entertainment, the culinary delights. It’s all been so exquisitely juicy, much like our bumper crop of cherry tomatoes this year.

Follow your bliss.

Follow your path.

Follow your breath.

Not only do the trees purify the air around us, so too do our peaceful bodies.  Acting as a filter system for negativity, our slow, relaxed nervous system imprints on inhaled circulating breath to restore it to a balanced state then exhales it back into our environment. Dr. Masaru Emoto showed that human consciousness has an effect on the molecular structure of water. Is it possible that space out there is not the final frontier, but space in our breath is?

Hmm.

What if a clean breathing movement took hold like the clean water and clean eating movements did?  What if the local market not only had fresh food and artisanal crafts for sale but also offered a place to breathe in joy together?  Maybe sing?  Maybe dance?  Maybe play? Together.

And what about in school cafeterias?  Would kids who intentionally breathed together and understood their influence on the web of life in this intimate way, be as likely to bully one another?

In the West we take our breath for granted.  We are born; we have it.  We die; we don’t have it. But as Eastern philosophies take hold here, we’re slowly becoming more mindful of what we’re doing to ourselves.  The slower and deeper our breath, the fuller our connection to life around us.  The faster and shallower our breath, the more we feel isolated and unhealthy. 

Yoga, Tai Chi and Chi Kung teach many types of breathing techniques that can warm us up and cools us down, help us concentrate and help us focus our strength on attackers. Masters even know how to feed themselves with breath alone.

Do you want to know how?   Look to the trees. Not only do they feed off the nutrients they take in through their root system, they also reach out with their limbs to draw in light and life through their leaves. Our breath does the same for us: we can draw in light and life and be fully alive, fully at home in our own skin, quite simply by utilizing our breath.  The charisma we see in movie stars can be ours too when we choose to energize from two sources instead of just one.  If we can synch up with nature’s rhythm, surrender to its subtleties, we can hook in to this dynamic energy and be lifted to a whole new realm of possibilities.

Changing our breathing pattern takes awareness and effort. There are meditations, movements, and repeated phrases that can help the process along. I’ve studied many over the past thirty years and to sum it up: connect with earth energy (see the feather technique in the previous column: http://thegiftofthewhitetrail.blogspot.ca/2016/06/stones-feathers.html) and then follow your breath: two beats into your belly and down, and four beats back to your spine and down- two beats into your belly and down, and four beats back to your spine and down, relaxing a little more each time.

Soon enough, “Thank you, I love you, Bless you,” will be twinkling around everywhere and everyone. Who knows, perhaps the Haliburton Highlands will become known as the home of the Clean Breathing Movement.

People will come.  They’ll come to the Haliburton Highlands for reasons they can’t fathom.  They’ll arrive as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if they look around.  It’s only $20 per person.  They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it; for it is money they have and peace they lack.  And it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters.*

Wow, expansive possibilities are twinkling everywhere!

*Paraphrased from the movie Field of Dreams based on the novel Shoeless by Canadian author W. P. Kinsella