A is For: Awareness Through Breath
Your journey begins with awareness. When you suffer, your awareness narrows like a dark tunnel with only a dim light at the end to be seen, if that. As you set your intention to heal, your awareness grows. The tunnel widens and light filters in, even as you continue to get hit with pain sensations, because you begin to recognize how expansive and powerful you really are. The first step of expanding awareness is to recognize that you are more than just the pain signals or the challenging emotions and beliefs you carry. You are more than just your mind or your racing thoughts. Awareness sets the stage for healing because all tools and practices flow from the awareness of possibilities within you. Awareness itself is a practice not a pill, an art not an algorithm. Awareness does not happen only in one moment and remain on like an eternal lightbulb; it is more like a pair of prescription glasses meant to be worn at all times, but easily misplaced or forgotten, narrowing your view of yourself, others, and the world as a result. The practice of awareness is the practice of remembering. There will inevitably be moments, many moments in fact, in which you forget how expansive you truly are no matter how many times you have remembered. Therefore, the practice of awareness is also the practice of forgiveness. You remember, you forget, and you remember again. One of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to facilitate the process of remembering is the breath. The breath activates your vagus nerve, brings safety to your nervous system, and reconnects you to your body. Your breath contains the essence of life that is available to you in every moment and yet so easily forgotten. Breath holds the key to unlocking your awareness in every moment and remaining connected to the present. The present moment is where all peace, all creation, all healing, and all experience unfolds. As you breathe, you remember awareness. As you remember awareness, you become present. In the present, you are expansive.
Therefore, the A in D.A.N.C.E. is for: Awareness Through Breath
When you let the conditioned fear patterns in your brain lead, you live strictly in the past or projected into the future. When you expand your awareness with the breath you notice the sensations occurring in present time. With practice, your breath invites you to dance with your experience and let the fear-based stories fall away for the moment. The breath reminds you of your safety and your power to be with any specific mental or physical states that arise. At any one time, you may notice a physical sensation, a thought, or an emotion, but never is one of these things the entirety of your mind body experience. When it comes to pain symptoms, your brain will always prey on them like a fly drawn to a piece of fruit. Pain or discomfort represent juicy morsels of opportunity for your brain to activate its learned fear and doubt patterns, sucking you down into familiar places of despair and hopelessness. In such moments, you must remember that you are not defined by these patterns. With breath, you notice other sensations and experiences taking place in your body alongside the discomfort. With expanded awareness, you recognize that the story of urgency or panic taking shape is not necessarily true but merely a brain-driven reaction to the sensation. The power of the breath provides the strength and courage to be with and move through whatever experience is showing up and, ultimately, to transform it. Learn to dance with your body while loosening the controls of your mind.
Have you ever tried to dance by thinking through all of your moves? Does it look graceful? Even if you are a professional dancer with planned choreography, you rehearse it enough times to know it in your body so you can relieve your thinking mind. Your breath provides the natural rhythm or soundtrack for your life and your body has more innate intelligence than your brain. Therefore, it is most beneficial to remember in any moment that you are an embodied being and the pathway to safety and ease is through your breath.
It makes logical sense if you have been neglecting or avoiding your body-based experience in order to avoid the pain or discomfort. Your brain’s mechanisms of protection revolve around thinking and escape. It is very powerful in the area of problem solving and it attempts to use this hammer when everything looks like a nail. However, the brain also remains primitive in a lot of ways. The fear-based mechanisms of survival move you into a state of “fight or flight” as a reaction to perceived danger or threat. What do you imagine is the first result of your brain’s stress response? Your body tightens, your lings constrict, and your breath - along with your awareness - narrows. Athletes, emergency care specialists, and other professionals in high-intensity situations all train specifically to control the breath in order to remain calm under pressure and optimize performance. In moments of complexity, you may believe you are best served by “figuring things out” with the mind when in actuality you are maintaining a state of dysregulation in your nervous system and running through loops of fear-based thoughts. Though logic and reason are surely useful, your answers for the body do not live in the thinking process. Even Elon Musk needs to be with his embodied experience if he wants to learn about his emotions states, activate relaxation, and release pain. Logic and reason play a role in how you can shift your thinking and practice conviction, but the process of actually being with your experience requires present-focused awareness, and the best tool for that is your breath.
Breathwork is a beautiful area of healing because of how integrated it is. It acts as a meeting place for knowledge across the spectrum of traditional western science and cultural, yogic traditions dating back centuries. The overlapping information from various sources is the greatest form of conviction in a given healing practice. As a result, there are many, many effective breathwork techniques and many more to be discovered. Check out the “Resources” section of my website for a few of my favorites across the spectrum of healing traditions.
The answers to your unfolding experience live within the body. The body, though also a container for the memories and lineages of your past, is attuned to your present experience at all times. The breath is your key to expand your awareness and access this state of presence always available to you. I invite you to practice dancing to the rhythm of your breath.