Honoring the Breath: A Field Manual & Quick-Reference.

Use this easy tool to get back to healthy breathing, allowing you to take advantage of a variety of health benefits. A walkthrough on correct breathing, reminders, techniques & simple meditations.

What You Will Learn From Reading

1. The correct physical technique for whole-body breathing.

2. Understanding shallow breathing & mouth breathing; why we do it and how to fix it.

3. Tools and tips to help develop and reinforce the behavior of correct breathing so that you don’t fall back into old patterns of shallow breathing.

4. How to train your body and mind to breath correctly, even when you’re not thinking about it.

5. Four amazingly simple meditations that will make your breathing meditations fun instead of feeling like a chore.

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The Breath: An Essential Building Block of Health & Happiness

Correct breathing is the first action of mastering mindful action and fundamental health and well-being. It must be performed consciously, subconsciously and consistently. Breathing deeply and fully is foundational to all other practices, mind-body states and techniques of mind-mastery and magicka.

Your first task in all that you will learn at the Cosmic College, is to breathe correctly, in every waking moment. The key to doing this is playing an active role whenever you are conscious of the breath and reinforcing the behavior until it also becomes subconscious and automatic.

Let’s Get Started: Breathing in through your nose and out of your mouth, use your stomach muscles to expand your belly. This allows for the relaxing and opening of your diaphragm, which pulls the air into your lungs. Do not think of using your lungs as the primary muscle. The true breath comes from deep in the belly. It will feel strange at first, but with practice you will notice more and more how natural and healthy this feels. Try a few rounds of this, maybe even taking a few minutes getting comfortable with all the physical aspects of the breathing. Take note of how you feel in your mind and body as you go.

As you start breathing correctly, you will notice several things;

1. A near-instant relaxation begins to take over in the mind.

2. A lightweight and energized feeling throughout the physical body.

3. Increased awareness of the your neglected needs. Breathing deeper means connecting deeper to your experience. Tension, dehydration, injury and stress will all be made more obvious. As a result, you will be able to tend to these needs better.

4. Flashes of various emotions: negative emotions that you have been neglecting and positive emotions that have been drowned out by tension and the associated shallow breathing.

5. A sudden increased awareness of your surroundings which engages all of your senses. Sounds become crisper, sights sharper and brighter, the intensity of smells increases and you may even begin to feel the slight movement of air flowing over your skin.

6. A sharpness of mind that will help you to think more critically, less emotionally and in a more organized way.

7. Better health over time. Deep breathing oxygenates the body, giving it more energy and enabling it to heal better and quicker.

Things You May Struggle with at First

You will also notice that you tend to fall back into your old patterns of shallow breathing and mouth breathing. This can and will happen anytime you forget where you were in your conscious breathing exercise or meditation. It might happen because you get a rogue thought or have to take care of a pending task.

By the time you remember to return to deep breathing, you will find that you have reverted back to breathing shallow breaths that barely seem to reach the lungs! You may also have noticed that you have an overactive mind that likes to throw you off-course. A random worry, a negative scenario, self-argumentation and many other types. All of which cause you to forget to breathe deeply.

This will pass as you practice and normalize correct breathing. Your mind and body will get adjusted and eventually create new, habitual patterns. Though it will take some time and discipline. In addition to the many techniques and tools I provide in the following sections, consider looking through the Cosmic College library, where you will find a variety of additional helpful items, like “The Power of Totems” series.

Shallow Breathing: Why does it happen?

Modern Anxieties: Much of shallow breathing is the product of anxiety. In turn, shallow breathing facilitates anxiety! It may start as something small you are worrying about. You get lost in the ruminations of that thing and fall out of what is called, the present moment. You might have heard of it.

The Present Moment is about being here now. Many have told you this, but few have properly explained it. If anxiety is worry of the future, then depression is sadness about the past. Both are unresolved tension and neither exist in the present. If we are being pulled into a past memory we still feel negative feelings toward, or if we are constantly gaming out nightmare scenarios in the future based on our expectations, then we are not with our mind or body in what is happening now.