Connecting with our breath - a meditation practice session
1. Posture
2. Abdominal breathing
- This is how babies breathe. As we grow up we get more conscious of our belly or breathing in general and breathe from the chest instead. Abdominal breathing is more relaxed and has a lot of benefits.
- When you breathe in, your tummy pushes out or grows bigger like a balloon and conversely, when you breathe out, your tummy pushes in or contracts into a smaller space
- Practice or check this first with your palms by putting your palms across your belly and check if it expand all around including sideways as you breathe in.
- You can also check this while lying on your back and checking if the tummy goes up when you inhale
3. Focus
- Observe carefully the airflow of your breath in and out thru the nose
4. Breath timing
- For beginning a meditation practice and beginning the breath focus work it is a great idea to time via counting the duration of the inhalation, hold, exhalation, and hold process.
- There are many different theories on this and many ways of counting but what I recommend here is to count 5 seconds of Inhalation, 7 seconds of holding the breath in, 5 seconds of exhalation, and 3 seconds of hold after exhalation. 5+7+5+3 = 20 seconds total cycle.
- The way to count every second is to mentally say 1001,1002,1003,1004,1005 to count to 5.
- The counting has to be done mentally not spoken out.
- To start with we can do 30 such cycles each of 20 seconds. 20 * 30 = 600 seconds = 10 minutes.
- To count the cycles you can use your fingers. Different ways of counting with fingers or ideally using a mala or Rosary bead necklace
Namaste!
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