Simple Stress Relief

My dd is the early riser in our fam­ily.  It wasn’t a sur­prise to me when I found myself up and watch­ing the local news with her early this morn­ing.  I was inter­ested when they started to talk about a new way to reset the brain.  I knew what was com­ing next.  Sure enough they started to dis­cuss the sci­en­tific ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion and the numer­ous venues using it to improve per­for­mance.  Ath­letes, busi­ness exec­u­tives, patients with a range of dis­ease includ­ing can­cer are using med­i­ta­tion to change the func­tion of the brain, improve their per­for­mance and con­cen­tra­tion and heal their bodies.

None of this was news to me.  I’ve been prac­tic­ing and study­ing med­i­ta­tion for 11 years now.   I lived at a zen tem­ple for four years.  I have done count­less three-day, five-day and seven-day silent med­i­ta­tion retreats.  Silent as in no talk­ing to, look­ing at or com­mu­ni­cat­ing with any­one.  It is safe to say I have a fair amount of expe­ri­ence with meditation.

Just to be clear my rela­tion­ship with med­i­ta­tion is not with­out con­tention.  Although I love the ben­e­fits of med­i­ta­tion, I can come up with a mil­lion rea­sons not to sit on the cush­ion.  It has noth­ing to do with being fid­gety.  In gen­eral I am not the type of per­son who can’t sit still.  I can totally spend a day doing a movie marathon of Star Wars or The God­fa­ther.  What I strug­gle with is my brain going a mile a minute.  I can’t stop the numer­ous voices in my head telling me all the things I need to accom­plish or remind­ing me of things I would rather stay unno­ticed.  It has been a great deter­rent for my prac­tice over the years.

This knowl­edge left me mildly inter­ested in the news seg­ment I was watch­ing.  I was grate­ful to see it being pre­sented to the main­stream pub­lic.  The effort they made to make it acces­si­ble to any­one who might be inter­ested.  The news­caster was cor­rect that you don’t need robes, incense or a reli­gious inter­est in this sim­ple but effec­tive practice.

I was sur­prised how­ever when I had an Aha! moment, as Oprah would say.  One state­ment the news­caster made really struck home for me.  It brought me right back to a talk by my zen teacher last year.  She asked us what we, as zen stu­dents, do when some­thing chal­leng­ing was pre­sented to us.  It was a sim­i­lar les­son on the news show.  The news­caster said, “It only takes one breath to make a difference.”

One sim­ple inhala­tion fol­lowed by a nat­ural exhalation.

Breath

Exhale

The mind is reset.  You can feel your energy shift and begin to soften.

Breath

Exhale

The ten­sion in your body and mind releases.  This sim­ple shift of focus changes the actual func­tion­ing of the brain increas­ing self-awareness and com­pas­sion and dimin­ish­ing the effects of stress.  The body comes with a nat­ural auto­matic stress reliever built right in.

Next time you are feel­ing less cen­tered than you would like, try this.  See how it brings you back to your cen­ter and alle­vi­ates the stress you are feel­ing.  It may not elim­i­nate the sit­u­a­tion or your reac­tion to it but it helps you to soften your­self.  It gives you a chance to re-balance your­self.  It allows you the oppor­tu­nity to take yet another and another cleans­ing breath.

You take your breath with you every­where you go.  Use it to cen­ter your­self and relieve stress in any moment.

I would love to hear about your expe­ri­ence with the breath.