A Daily Chore
When I'm sat on the bus, or tube you can also do it yourself - just fill your lungs slowly with air and let it come out without forcing it. The person next to you will fidget (if they aren't listening to music that is) and maybe glance at you as if you had made them feel uncomfortable. If you do it among friends in a quiet moment together, they would ask "are we boring you?" or "are you ok".. I'm not talking about sighing here, I'm talking about Breathing Deep, which just so happens to be taken as sighing to other people.
I do it often to just see a reaction in different situations but always wherever you are people say either with words or looks- "are you ok?" and when I say "yes I am fine, I was just breathing properly" they go , "oh" and the matter dissolves. I love when I meet people who are breathing deep. The remind me because of course I also find myself taking non existent breaths and talking to myself in the head! One girl in Germany on a train, we were talking about breathing and how many ways society dosn't even let us breathe and then she told me something to show the extremity's of this. She was a very attractive woman, physically fit, doing yoga etc and she told me that even if a woman knows how to breath properly by breathing deep and low, they wont do it because they then look fat! This woman was pritty cool though, she told me that she had glammy friends (to me she was quite "glammy" with huge fake eye lashes etc) and that when they were out together they would really dig at here for breathing because then she "had a belly" and this had led to her even loosing friends but her reaction to it was..
"Fuck that, I want to BREATH!"
There are many reasons why people arn't breathing but lets look at the most commons ones..
- Body posture
- Self Talk
- Stress
These 3 can all be linked in a circle and have a knock on effect to each other. You can be constantly stressed by hurrying Self Talk such as " I must do this, then I have to do that after, squeeze that in between somewhere, so much to be done today!" and this creates a bad body posture, leading to more negative self talk which usually is degrading to your beautiful self and the circle continues. Look at peoples shoulders, then you see if they are a shallow breather or a deep breather. Someone with low relaxed shoulders must be taking deeper breaths than someone with high rigid shoulders, because the only time our bodies truly relax completely, is when we exhale. There is no other time. I have since many years given stress relief massage by using trigger point methods. When I first started to earn money from it and take it seriously, I realized that some people I would massage an hour and nothing in the body would really relax compared to others and one day I had a client that was a deep breather and straight away the massage I was doing was 100% more effective when I applied pressure on the out-breath. This is anyway how I was taught, always to add pressure only on the out-breath but with most people you have no idea if they are still alive as there is not even any movement of filled lungs to determine an in breath or out-breath!
I read a book once in Spain and it was about breathing and in this book there was one sentence that I remember ever so clear "When we breath we give ourselves life, but the problem being most people don't feel they are worth the gift of life". This made me realize that the Self Talk, consumes so much of our attention that it distracts us from breathing in life. Really that's all life is, the "in" and "out" of the breathing part because our body's need air to stay alive. We also need different levels of breathing to just stay alive or to be alive. Think of someone as they lay in a coma, they are physical dead and they breath shallow just like everybody does on average. Then think of a runner, just finished a sprint- the bloods pumping , adrenaline rushing and they are breathing deep because they are really feeling alive at this point. If we are one who has constant negative self talk happening in the head, then the last thing you will think of is to take 1 deep breath, because then the voice will looses its power that its has on you and effectively die out, leaving you loving yourself. Your attention is fuel for the self talk, and the self talk is just there to bring you suffering at the end (pointless isnt it?!) . If you do manage even once throughout a whole day, take one deep breath, then maybe you have the time and concentration to be able to take 2 deep breaths back to back. This is the start to retraining your mind so that you can have more energy, better colour on your cheeks, an uplifting mood and you will start to be alive instead of just staying alive. You'd save a shit load'a money from not using a psychiatrist, to basically be telling you the same thing just to start taking one breath every day. To take one deep breath is a real challenge that most people would think was easy. But this isn't so easy to do without the voice given a reason to do it later because to take a deep breath is to Love Yourself. Smokers- Think about it when you smoke, what are you really doing?!
Our minds are so in need of love and yet they reject it somehow sadistically. There's even quiet a crazy fact that we enjoy telling a partner we love them, because we hear those words "I LOVE YOU" as if someone was telling us that they love us! There's just a cycle, and once you can see the cycle, you can start to take it apart , and throw out parts you don't really need. Build a fresh repetitive self talk and make it a positive one. Its a long road ahead but hey, its boring to live in a coma?! And as soon as you manage to take 2 breaths back to back, even whilst reading this, I promise you you will feel your shoulders lower and your body will sink somewhat leaving you relaxed! Small steps are the beginning to an experience of life that you thought only wealthy people could have. If you can do it whilst reading this, then that's great but don't be fooled, your mind right now is not in a stressed state because you are reading, so try it whenever you remind yourself, its hard also because of the reactions from others in public!
Keep reading posts like this, and stop watching negative text on screens, trust me its doing something because your subconscious mind is believing it all even if the voice says "Well that's Bollocks!" and it will act upon it sometime in the future because your reading it from pixels, and that's EXACTLY how pixels work with the subconscious, just like a sponge absorbing it all. Now you might realize why the television is in every home, giving you the "News"!