Meditation for Busy People
Meditation is not just for those who can set aside hours a day or weeks each year for retreat. Mark Thornton, the world’s first executive meditation coach, introduces you to a powerful meditation that you can incorporate into your busy life—to find relaxation, calm, and greater productivity.
Our lives are lived at warp speed.
Our hectic schedules are crammed with crises, to-do lists, issues marked urgent and overflowing in trays, unpaid bills, a sea of unread email, and deadlines with due dates close to last Christmas. Our agendas have everything in them but “relax.” Whether an executive, single mother, or factory worker, we have all been affected by the increased pace and complexity of life. More than ever, we need to create calm quickly and profoundly. We need to feel connected to life, in the middle of our frantic days. What’s the solution?
The secret is centuries old. We can do more by relaxing more. We can go faster by slowing down more frequently. Deep inside yourself, now, lies a space that is always calm. Far away from everyday events, at your core, lies a place of quiet, calm, serenity, and stillness. Even by reading these words you can begin to relax and journey to the mystical place that sages and saints call the “ocean of calm.”
The goal of meditation is to show you how to access this place whenever you need to. Feeling connected to life and your core can be an everyday and effortless activity. It’s not just possible; it’s the way it should be. You can be super busy, super successful, and super calm at the same time. No matter what you do, there are simple, quick, and sure-fire ways to swim in the ocean of calm.
Formula One racing cars need frequent pit stops; otherwise they run out of fuel. Your mind also needs to slow down quickly to refuel, before speeding up again. We will learn a few meditations here that will provide you with the tools you need to access the ocean of calm, like a pit stop, to reenergize, gain perspective, enliven your spirit, and head out again—all in less than a New York minute!
I trained with a number of meditation masters over twenty-two years and learned a range of techniques to relax effortlessly, deeply, and, above all, quickly. I was amazed to find that even as a busy C.O.O., I was able to meditate for a total of an hour each workday, without changing anything from my daily schedule.
Let me repeat that: I was able to meditate for a total of an hour each workday, without changing anything from my daily schedule.
I still kept all my work hours. I attended the same meetings. I didn’t have to leave early from or arrive late at work to meditate. I didn’t have to sacrifice “time at the gym” or “relaxing with friends” to become calm. Specifically, I learned ways to create calm while moving about in the world, without setting aside time to sit cross-legged in a quiet room. If this sounds impossible, keep reading!
My new career has been teaching major corporations about finding calm. I’ve spent more than 3,000 hours learning and teaching these techniques in the past year alone. After I left J.P. Morgan I spent a year with thirty different spiritual teachers, in more than seven different countries, to find the best techniques for super busy people. In the past five years alone, I’ve done more than 5,000 hours of learning and teaching meditation. I’ve been exploring meditation for more than twenty-two years and created meditation groups in New York, London, and Melbourne.
Is this meditation for you?
This meditation is designed for a certain audience. See if the following applies to you:
If the above is true, then these meditations for you!
Why Meditate … and Why Now?
You may wonder whether meditation has any application in your world. Perhaps you think meditation is a practice only for people who have renounced the outside world and can afford to spend hours each day sitting silently.
But the truth of the matter is, we need meditation now more than ever. The practice of meditation can help you reduce the stress that all of us feel as a result of the hectic pace of modern life. With the technique presented here, you can remain calm and centered no matter what challenges your workday presents, and you can practice these techniques without changing your already busy schedule.
And guess what? When you remain calm and centered, the world is a different place. When stressful situations arise, the skills learned in meditation allow you to let go of the anger, frustration, and obsessive thoughts that so often arise as a result of stress.
Yet stress is so much a part of daily life that we often don’t even see its subtle and far-reaching effects. We don’t see how it makes us feel disconnected from our hearts and robs our life of joy. The meditation presented here will provide you with the tools you need to transform that stress into calm.
The Curse of the 60,000: An Exercise
What’s the first thought when you first wake up in the morning? When you at last get to bed? Do you wake up full of aliveness and delight? Or do you feel tension, stress, worry, and concern?
At a seminar for a Fortune 100 company, I led participants in the following exercise. It’s simply an attempt to identify the content of your mind. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Take out a pen and paper and do a quick brainstorm of your most common thoughts. Obviously you have good and bad experiences, but what are the most common things you think about every day? What do you think about when you walk down the street? Or on your commute? Or when you walk to get lunch?
Once you’ve jotted down some of your common thoughts, I’d like you to look for the common threads or categories of thoughts. For example, if you are frequently anxious about something on your to-do list, write down “anxious” as the category. If you are worried about picking up the dry cleaning, then write “worried.” If you’re afraid about your job prospects, write down “afraid.”
Take a few minutes to quickly write down your list.
Here’s the list the executives in the seminar provided:
This is quite a depressing list. These were highly successful business people, and yet these negative categories of thought were what most commonly filled their minds. This is what preoccupied them when they woke up, walked down the street, or commuted to work. Although one woman wrote “Joy,” on closer questioning it was not an everyday state of being. It’s depressing just looking at it. But it gets worse.
You have 60,000 thoughts a day. That means you think the above thoughts 60,000 times every day. That’s not the most depressing thing. The thoughts you think today are largely the same thoughts you thought yesterday. And the day before.
Take the above list and multiply it by 60,000. Now multiply that list by seven days a week. Then multiply that by fifty-two weeks. Multiply that by your age.
If your list is anything like those of the executives I worked with, then your daily condition is one of constant negative thoughts. Is there a way out of this mental trap?
Luckily for all of us, there is. The pattern of negative thoughts is precisely the condition this book solves. The various techniques of meditation are designed to give you micro-breaks from these thoughts of sixty seconds or less to not only break up this cycle, but to create a brand new cycle of calm, ease, and delight.
The Way You Should Feel
I believe your most common everyday experiences should be categories like:
This should be your natural state. Using micro-breaks, your walk down the street can be filled with “calm,” rather than “stress.” When you wake up in the morning, there can be a sense of “ease” rather than “anxiousness.” Your commute can be “relaxed” rather than “fearful.”
But that would be just “calm.” This book is called “super calm.” In creating super calm, “love, bliss, joy, compassion, delight, power” can be your most common everyday experiences. And that’s the answer to the question, “Why meditate?”
Guided Meditation-- The Power Breath
To give you a taste of how you can use the practice of meditation in your daily life, I will guide you through a powerful practice that will infuse your day with energy, mental clarity, and calm. You will learn to reap the rewards of this centuries-old inner art, even when you’re on the go.
Breath meditations are a key part of the major Eastern spiritual traditions. This technique is from the Tantric tradition, which emphasizes physical sensations to slow the mind and build energy. Tantra is one of the few spiritual approaches that harmonizes the five senses in the search for the Divine, rather than suppressing them. In our sensory rich environment, and especially for meditations involving movement to and from work, Tantra provides a rich tradition for using the senses to create calm anytime, anywhere.
Benefits
Technique
Before you begin, you need to expand your notion of how deep your breathing can be. Your breath can be divided up into four sections:
Your breath tightens and contracts when you are stressed. This exercise develops your capacity to breathe from the lower belly first, then the upper belly. The suggestion is to do this practice at home and then use it elsewhere as required. There are four stages to this technique.
The aim is for each in-breath to reach this same amount of exaggerated expansion. The breathing is being done correctly when you can almost feel the in-breath move your genitals.
Repeat this relaxed and deep breathing ten times.
Tips
How this works: In order for your system to experience stress, your physical body needs to contract in specific ways, which causes specific emotions. For example, anger and fear nearly always require your stomach muscles to tighten and contract. By keeping your breathing in a deep and relaxed manner, the same emotions are experienced very differently; they seem to have a lower intensity and pass quicker. As soon as you start to feel stress, the power breath can increase your feeling of calm.
Noticing what happens to your breath is a key to understanding what’s happening in your emotional world as well. In my experience, I noticed that my breathing stopped when I wanted to hold onto or push away certain situations. My breath became a barometer for the emotional states I wanted to avoid and those I wanted to last longer.
The power breath is extremely useful in increasing your energy, as you continue to breathe in stressful situations.
Some Specifics
Note: I use this technique before every business meeting to quickly reduce and manage stress. It allows my voice to come from a deeper, more powerful place, and my system feels more energetically alive and grounded.
Common Problems
Guided Meditation
This is a technique I use before nearly every business meeting to quickly reduce and manage stress. In some way, it reduced the stress and made me come from a more powerful place. My system felt more energetically alive and grounded.
Here are the benefits:
There’s a great quote from an Indian sage named Ramesh Balsekar: “A newborn baby breathes from his belly. A sage also breathes from his belly. Only modern man does not.
A great yogi once said, “He who controls his breath, controls... And I want you to fill in the blank here. He who controls his breath controls what? His body? His breathing? Himself? The full quote is-- “He who controls his breath controls the universe. That’s how powerful these simple techniques can be.
It’s a great way to start to build some of those qualities that you want, some of those heart connection qualities.
Here’s the technique. There are four easy stages. First of all, we need to expand our idea of how to breathe. And the first tip is simply to allow your breathing to slow down. That’s an easy thing to do. Start to slow the pace of your breathing. And secondly, I want you to start to change the shape of your breathing. I want you to start to breathe now from your belly, from lower down in your body, from your abdomen.
And the third step, to really get your breath down into your belly, is to deliberately start to relax the muscles in your abdomen. And with each breath in and out, you can just start to allow that area of your body, where we hold so much tension, to start to relax.
A great way to do this is to place your hand just below your navel. And with each breath in, just gently try to move your hand so you’ll be breathing so deeply from your abdomen. You can actually feel your hand being moved. Take a few breaths like that now.
Good.
And now I want you to use your abdominal muscles to actually force your belly out. Use the muscles to actually make your belly protrude even more. So as you push your abdomen out, the goal is that you’ll start to look almost pregnant and full. You’re using your muscles to force your belly out. What that does is to allow you to take in even more air and more oxygen into your system.
So for the next few breaths, use your muscles to actually force your belly out. Yes, it does look a little bit ridiculous. But, trust me, no one’s watching.
I’m doing this to give you a sense of how deep your breathing can be. And so for the next four breaths, just allow those muscles in your abdomen to relax again. You’re still aiming for each breath to come into as full and round and soft and deep place as before.
The goal here is to do this as many times a day as you need to-- whenever you need to. For your first time practice, try breathing like this for three or four minutes, so you get a sense for how deep your breathing can be. And it will be completely different from the way we normally breathe, which I call survival breathing-- in and out. This is more conscious breathwork. Deliberately expanding the belly, making it full and round, and energizing the system.
Here’s some tips to do this. First, remain easy and relaxed in your approach. When I train people in courses, many people are working really hard to do this. And the invitation is for you to relax about this. Now in the technique we deliberately use muscle groups to expand our belly. That is to give you a sense of how deep your breathing can go. And after you’ve done that just relax back into deep breathing.
In order for you to experience stress, your body has to tighten the breath, contract it, narrow it, make it smaller and more shallow. So by breathing deeply, you’re breaking this pattern and it does shift now the way you experience stress.
The second thing that I find incredibly interesting with this is that when you put your attention on your breathing, you can actually monitor your emotional world. Now let me explain that. I notice that every time I stop my breathing, I was either trying to avoid some uncomfortable emotion or I was trying to hold on to a good emotion.
So whenever I had stress or fear or concern, my breathing would stop, because it was making itself more tense. And same whenever I had very, very intensely good experiences. So the practice is to breathe no matter what. Breathing through all the emotional flavors and colors. It magnifies the good feelings and it minimizes the impact of the negative ones.
Meditation is not just for those who can set aside hours a day or weeks each year for retreat. Mark Thornton, the world’s first executive meditation coach, introduces you to a powerful meditation that you can incorporate into your busy life—to find relaxation, calm, and greater productivity.
Our lives are lived at warp speed.
Our hectic schedules are crammed with crises, to-do lists, issues marked urgent and overflowing in trays, unpaid bills, a sea of unread email, and deadlines with due dates close to last Christmas. Our agendas have everything in them but “relax.” Whether an executive, single mother, or factory worker, we have all been affected by the increased pace and complexity of life. More than ever, we need to create calm quickly and profoundly. We need to feel connected to life, in the middle of our frantic days. What’s the solution?
The secret is centuries old. We can do more by relaxing more. We can go faster by slowing down more frequently. Deep inside yourself, now, lies a space that is always calm. Far away from everyday events, at your core, lies a place of quiet, calm, serenity, and stillness. Even by reading these words you can begin to relax and journey to the mystical place that sages and saints call the “ocean of calm.”
The goal of meditation is to show you how to access this place whenever you need to. Feeling connected to life and your core can be an everyday and effortless activity. It’s not just possible; it’s the way it should be. You can be super busy, super successful, and super calm at the same time. No matter what you do, there are simple, quick, and sure-fire ways to swim in the ocean of calm.
Formula One racing cars need frequent pit stops; otherwise they run out of fuel. Your mind also needs to slow down quickly to refuel, before speeding up again. We will learn a few meditations here that will provide you with the tools you need to access the ocean of calm, like a pit stop, to reenergize, gain perspective, enliven your spirit, and head out again—all in less than a New York minute!
I trained with a number of meditation masters over twenty-two years and learned a range of techniques to relax effortlessly, deeply, and, above all, quickly. I was amazed to find that even as a busy C.O.O., I was able to meditate for a total of an hour each workday, without changing anything from my daily schedule.
Let me repeat that: I was able to meditate for a total of an hour each workday, without changing anything from my daily schedule.
I still kept all my work hours. I attended the same meetings. I didn’t have to leave early from or arrive late at work to meditate. I didn’t have to sacrifice “time at the gym” or “relaxing with friends” to become calm. Specifically, I learned ways to create calm while moving about in the world, without setting aside time to sit cross-legged in a quiet room. If this sounds impossible, keep reading!
My new career has been teaching major corporations about finding calm. I’ve spent more than 3,000 hours learning and teaching these techniques in the past year alone. After I left J.P. Morgan I spent a year with thirty different spiritual teachers, in more than seven different countries, to find the best techniques for super busy people. In the past five years alone, I’ve done more than 5,000 hours of learning and teaching meditation. I’ve been exploring meditation for more than twenty-two years and created meditation groups in New York, London, and Melbourne.
Is this meditation for you?
This meditation is designed for a certain audience. See if the following applies to you:
- You are a busy person.
- You have an interest in meditation but do not have a great deal of time.
- You want stuff that works now!
- You have a preference for action and quick results over theory/philosophy.
- You are successful and know there is something more, even though you may not know what “more” is.
- You are more likely to wear a suit than beads, sarongs, and kaftans.
- You are currently more familiar with laptops, PCs, cell phones, and personal organizers than the inside of temples, shrines, mosques, ashrams, and quiet country retreat centers.
If the above is true, then these meditations for you!
Why Meditate … and Why Now?
You may wonder whether meditation has any application in your world. Perhaps you think meditation is a practice only for people who have renounced the outside world and can afford to spend hours each day sitting silently.
But the truth of the matter is, we need meditation now more than ever. The practice of meditation can help you reduce the stress that all of us feel as a result of the hectic pace of modern life. With the technique presented here, you can remain calm and centered no matter what challenges your workday presents, and you can practice these techniques without changing your already busy schedule.
And guess what? When you remain calm and centered, the world is a different place. When stressful situations arise, the skills learned in meditation allow you to let go of the anger, frustration, and obsessive thoughts that so often arise as a result of stress.
Yet stress is so much a part of daily life that we often don’t even see its subtle and far-reaching effects. We don’t see how it makes us feel disconnected from our hearts and robs our life of joy. The meditation presented here will provide you with the tools you need to transform that stress into calm.
The Curse of the 60,000: An Exercise
What’s the first thought when you first wake up in the morning? When you at last get to bed? Do you wake up full of aliveness and delight? Or do you feel tension, stress, worry, and concern?
At a seminar for a Fortune 100 company, I led participants in the following exercise. It’s simply an attempt to identify the content of your mind. Here’s what I’d like you to do. Take out a pen and paper and do a quick brainstorm of your most common thoughts. Obviously you have good and bad experiences, but what are the most common things you think about every day? What do you think about when you walk down the street? Or on your commute? Or when you walk to get lunch?
Once you’ve jotted down some of your common thoughts, I’d like you to look for the common threads or categories of thoughts. For example, if you are frequently anxious about something on your to-do list, write down “anxious” as the category. If you are worried about picking up the dry cleaning, then write “worried.” If you’re afraid about your job prospects, write down “afraid.”
Take a few minutes to quickly write down your list.
Here’s the list the executives in the seminar provided:
- Stress
- Tension
- Unconfident
- Anxious
- Depressed
- Aloneness
- Lack of peace
- Concern
- Worry
- Sadness
- Anger
- Frustration
- Helpless
- Joy
- Rage
- Terror
- Unease
- Fearful
- Wary
- Constantly vigilant
This is quite a depressing list. These were highly successful business people, and yet these negative categories of thought were what most commonly filled their minds. This is what preoccupied them when they woke up, walked down the street, or commuted to work. Although one woman wrote “Joy,” on closer questioning it was not an everyday state of being. It’s depressing just looking at it. But it gets worse.
You have 60,000 thoughts a day. That means you think the above thoughts 60,000 times every day. That’s not the most depressing thing. The thoughts you think today are largely the same thoughts you thought yesterday. And the day before.
Take the above list and multiply it by 60,000. Now multiply that list by seven days a week. Then multiply that by fifty-two weeks. Multiply that by your age.
If your list is anything like those of the executives I worked with, then your daily condition is one of constant negative thoughts. Is there a way out of this mental trap?
Luckily for all of us, there is. The pattern of negative thoughts is precisely the condition this book solves. The various techniques of meditation are designed to give you micro-breaks from these thoughts of sixty seconds or less to not only break up this cycle, but to create a brand new cycle of calm, ease, and delight.
The Way You Should Feel
I believe your most common everyday experiences should be categories like:
- Relaxed
- Centered
- Grounded
- Confident
- Peaceful
- Calm
- At ease
- Delighted
- Open
This should be your natural state. Using micro-breaks, your walk down the street can be filled with “calm,” rather than “stress.” When you wake up in the morning, there can be a sense of “ease” rather than “anxiousness.” Your commute can be “relaxed” rather than “fearful.”
But that would be just “calm.” This book is called “super calm.” In creating super calm, “love, bliss, joy, compassion, delight, power” can be your most common everyday experiences. And that’s the answer to the question, “Why meditate?”
Guided Meditation-- The Power Breath
To give you a taste of how you can use the practice of meditation in your daily life, I will guide you through a powerful practice that will infuse your day with energy, mental clarity, and calm. You will learn to reap the rewards of this centuries-old inner art, even when you’re on the go.
Breath meditations are a key part of the major Eastern spiritual traditions. This technique is from the Tantric tradition, which emphasizes physical sensations to slow the mind and build energy. Tantra is one of the few spiritual approaches that harmonizes the five senses in the search for the Divine, rather than suppressing them. In our sensory rich environment, and especially for meditations involving movement to and from work, Tantra provides a rich tradition for using the senses to create calm anytime, anywhere.
Benefits
- Reduces stress
- Energizes the system
- Can be used anywhere
- Significant benefits in less than a minute
- Great for lowering stress before presentations, during meetings, and when meeting people
Technique
Before you begin, you need to expand your notion of how deep your breathing can be. Your breath can be divided up into four sections:
- Upper chest
- Lower chest
- Upper belly
- Lower belly
Your breath tightens and contracts when you are stressed. This exercise develops your capacity to breathe from the lower belly first, then the upper belly. The suggestion is to do this practice at home and then use it elsewhere as required. There are four stages to this technique.
- Stage 1: Relax all the stomach muscles and take a deep breath into the lowest part of your belly. Keep the upper chest and lower chest still.
- Stage 2: Place your hand beneath your navel. Breathe so your hands move first.
- Stage 3: Gently and easily allow your stomach muscles to naturally expand your belly so that it becomes round and full. Loosen your belt/pants to allow this.
- Stage 4: Let the lower belly fill first and then allow the upper belly to fill with air. Again, keep the upper chest and lower chest as still as possible. Any movement in the upper chest should be slight and only after the lower and upper belly have been completely filled with air.
The aim is for each in-breath to reach this same amount of exaggerated expansion. The breathing is being done correctly when you can almost feel the in-breath move your genitals.
Repeat this relaxed and deep breathing ten times.
Tips
- Remain easy, soft, and relaxed in your approach. Effort and contraction and tension are not required for this practice.
- Our habits tend to be deeply ingrained in breathing shallowly. It is extremely easy for meditators to do this a few times then revert to their habitual breathing. Notice and rise and fall in the upper/lower chest to guide your attention back to expanding the lower belly first.
How this works: In order for your system to experience stress, your physical body needs to contract in specific ways, which causes specific emotions. For example, anger and fear nearly always require your stomach muscles to tighten and contract. By keeping your breathing in a deep and relaxed manner, the same emotions are experienced very differently; they seem to have a lower intensity and pass quicker. As soon as you start to feel stress, the power breath can increase your feeling of calm.
Noticing what happens to your breath is a key to understanding what’s happening in your emotional world as well. In my experience, I noticed that my breathing stopped when I wanted to hold onto or push away certain situations. My breath became a barometer for the emotional states I wanted to avoid and those I wanted to last longer.
The power breath is extremely useful in increasing your energy, as you continue to breathe in stressful situations.
Some Specifics
- Attention is narrowed to the breath. This reduces your focus on stressful thoughts.
- Slower breathing physiologically slows your mental activity. Slow your breath; slow your mind.
- Relaxing stomach muscles results in stressful situations being experienced in a more relaxed manner.
- Deep breathing increases the amount of oxygen in the bloodstream, which increases your feeling of energy.
Note: I use this technique before every business meeting to quickly reduce and manage stress. It allows my voice to come from a deeper, more powerful place, and my system feels more energetically alive and grounded.
Common Problems
- “I can’t pay attention to my breathing and focus on what’s happening during a meeting. For meetings/ presentations, this technique is best practiced before you begin, as this reduces pre-presentation stress. During the meeting/ presentation the practice can be dropped and the mind can focus on the content of what’s happening. The benefits of the meditation can be achieved from one or two simple breaths and can be used whenever you feel the need to become grounded. With all techniques, use them as long as they are practical and useful.
- “Won’t I be embarrassed with my stomach protruding so far out? Despite our cultural addiction too the aesthetics of a flat wash-board stomach, most people don’t notice this.
Guided Meditation
This is a technique I use before nearly every business meeting to quickly reduce and manage stress. In some way, it reduced the stress and made me come from a more powerful place. My system felt more energetically alive and grounded.
Here are the benefits:
- It will reduce stress.
- It can energize the system.
- It can be used anywhere.
- You can get significant benefits in less than a minute.
There’s a great quote from an Indian sage named Ramesh Balsekar: “A newborn baby breathes from his belly. A sage also breathes from his belly. Only modern man does not.
A great yogi once said, “He who controls his breath, controls... And I want you to fill in the blank here. He who controls his breath controls what? His body? His breathing? Himself? The full quote is-- “He who controls his breath controls the universe. That’s how powerful these simple techniques can be.
It’s a great way to start to build some of those qualities that you want, some of those heart connection qualities.
Here’s the technique. There are four easy stages. First of all, we need to expand our idea of how to breathe. And the first tip is simply to allow your breathing to slow down. That’s an easy thing to do. Start to slow the pace of your breathing. And secondly, I want you to start to change the shape of your breathing. I want you to start to breathe now from your belly, from lower down in your body, from your abdomen.
And the third step, to really get your breath down into your belly, is to deliberately start to relax the muscles in your abdomen. And with each breath in and out, you can just start to allow that area of your body, where we hold so much tension, to start to relax.
A great way to do this is to place your hand just below your navel. And with each breath in, just gently try to move your hand so you’ll be breathing so deeply from your abdomen. You can actually feel your hand being moved. Take a few breaths like that now.
Good.
And now I want you to use your abdominal muscles to actually force your belly out. Use the muscles to actually make your belly protrude even more. So as you push your abdomen out, the goal is that you’ll start to look almost pregnant and full. You’re using your muscles to force your belly out. What that does is to allow you to take in even more air and more oxygen into your system.
So for the next few breaths, use your muscles to actually force your belly out. Yes, it does look a little bit ridiculous. But, trust me, no one’s watching.
I’m doing this to give you a sense of how deep your breathing can be. And so for the next four breaths, just allow those muscles in your abdomen to relax again. You’re still aiming for each breath to come into as full and round and soft and deep place as before.
The goal here is to do this as many times a day as you need to-- whenever you need to. For your first time practice, try breathing like this for three or four minutes, so you get a sense for how deep your breathing can be. And it will be completely different from the way we normally breathe, which I call survival breathing-- in and out. This is more conscious breathwork. Deliberately expanding the belly, making it full and round, and energizing the system.
Here’s some tips to do this. First, remain easy and relaxed in your approach. When I train people in courses, many people are working really hard to do this. And the invitation is for you to relax about this. Now in the technique we deliberately use muscle groups to expand our belly. That is to give you a sense of how deep your breathing can go. And after you’ve done that just relax back into deep breathing.
In order for you to experience stress, your body has to tighten the breath, contract it, narrow it, make it smaller and more shallow. So by breathing deeply, you’re breaking this pattern and it does shift now the way you experience stress.
The second thing that I find incredibly interesting with this is that when you put your attention on your breathing, you can actually monitor your emotional world. Now let me explain that. I notice that every time I stop my breathing, I was either trying to avoid some uncomfortable emotion or I was trying to hold on to a good emotion.
So whenever I had stress or fear or concern, my breathing would stop, because it was making itself more tense. And same whenever I had very, very intensely good experiences. So the practice is to breathe no matter what. Breathing through all the emotional flavors and colors. It magnifies the good feelings and it minimizes the impact of the negative ones.
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