Breathing: Stress

[Exploring Life] What makes you hold your breath? describes the importance of optimizing our breathing pattern in order to promote healthy digestion as well as calming the nervous system. The authors recommend that the stressors that are the root cause of holding the breath be identified as they happen. This brings us to the threshold of that which is in our awareness, and that which lies just outside of our awareness. The focus of subtle learning here is to train breath awareness so that we pay more attention to how we are breathing throughout the confluence of everyday life.

In What Is Stealing Your Breath? a subtle learning process is presented, which I would like to expand upon here. The subtle learning process for eliminating breath holding and optimizing breathing is threefold:

1. Attention: We must first bring our breathing into attention so that we begin to observe it throughout the day and notice how it changes relative to the experiences we are having. This requires a significant amount of mental effort since breathing is an unconscious event. However, if we have developed bad habits, such as holding the breath, then our unconscious can unfortunately embrace those bad habits as well. By paying attention to our breathing patterns throughout the day we can begin to develop conscious knowledge of those patterns. Retrieving this knowledge from the realm of the unconscious to the first task in learning to free the breath from holding patterns, and therefore improve our physical and mental health as well.
2. Strategic Interruption: Once we develop the skill of paying attention to our breath throughout the day, we are then in a position to strategically interrupt the habit of holding the breath. When our attention is triggered by holding our breath our conscious mind becomes immediately aware and interrupts the holding by commanding deep breathing. What would have been holding our breath is transformed into a deep breath in the precise moment required. Repeating this process over time eventually breaks down the original habit of holding the breath and replaces it with the more productive habit of deep breathing during moments of stress.
3. Awareness Training: An active meditation process can be used to explore and investigate the root causes and reasons for holding the breath. For example, during meditation we can focus on specific circumstances and situations that incline us toward holding our breath and reveal the essential problems within. In this way, the physical aspects of learning to optimize breathing during times of stress now become mindful opportunities to understand ourselves more deeply. This deeply personal understand is the foundation for personal growth and development.

One of the most challenging aspects of this learning process is that is seamlessly integrated into the natural fabric of our experience. This is the reason that the development of attention is prerequisite. Subtle forms of learning do not have a predetermined scope and sequence of knowledge and skills to be acquired. Instead, subtle learning originates in the moment to moment improvisation of experience; it is exclusively focused on the awareness of the present moment.