Tag: breath of life

Barefoot Breathing

“Many of us are blind to the ways that the earth supports us. We seldom even feel our feet on the ground. Take your shoes and socks off, massage your feet, pull your toes apart, play with them. Then simply stand with bare feet on the earth. Sense the earth’s energy rising up through your feet. Let the earth help energize you. And let it breathe you.”—Dennis Lewis

Over a week ago now I took a mid-week journey to a place in nature outside of Austin that I had never been to before.  Pedernales State Park turned out to be an amazing sanctuary for me and reminded me of the sacredness of our connection with the Earth and the natural elements.  Dennis Lewis in his quote above is right on when he says that we seldom even feel our feet on the ground….essentially our connection with the earth.

Stepping barefoot from rock to rock in the shallow part of the river the destination of a large flat rock was reached.  For over an hour, lying face up to the sun with feet dangling onto smooth rocks beneath the running rivers surface, I breathed in the sound of running river water overlaying the deep quiet of nature without man made sounds.  My feet, heart and soul found peace….found home.

Having grown up in San Diego with it’s wonderful beaches I naturally was a barefoot girl and morphed into a barefoot woman that actually hates for her feet to be confined in closed shoes.  Thank goodness for the warm weather of Austin where I can wear the simplest of footwear most of the time!  What has the seldom felt barefoot against the earth done to our natural connection with nature and even the way in which we breathe?

Our senses diminish, we forget how to breathe from our very toes, and our feet forget how joyful it is to be fancy free to explore what we are walking upon or touching.

The many acupuncture and pressure points in the feet are a key to our health.  If they are hardly ever stimulated by remembering the feel of earth, rock, sand, meadow or even the bark of a tree then we forget….we forget how intimately connected we are.  Without this connection and stimulation we forget who we are, and we forget how to breathe from the roots of our being.

This week try the practice that Dennis speaks of above in the quote.  Pay attention to your feet with love and patient attention.  Stand barefoot upon the earth surface of your choice, close your eyes, and allow the earth to breathe you!

WEBSITE:  www.ResonanceWithLife.com

OTHER BLOGS BY GAYE ABBOTT:
www.WildlyFreeWoman.com
www.NaturalWealthJournal.com

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath Preview, Reviews and purchase links can be found here:
http://resonancewithlife.com/daily-breath-book/

The Two Breaths – Foundation of Being

“This reflection comes from a conversation with a gifted photographer I met. His story helped confirm for me that we live a life in every breath. In truth, each heart-breath is an atom of life-force being born one more time. We as human beings have the incredible burden of sensitivity, but the incomparable reward of being awakened over and over again.

At a gathering in San Francisco, I met Marco, a careful and patient photographer from Santa Clara. When asked what surprised him during the last year, his voice began to quiver. He’d witnessed two breaths that had changed his life. His daughter’s first breath. Then his mother’s last breath. As his daughter inhaled the world, it seemed to awaken her soul on Earth. As his mother exhaled her years, it seemed to free her soul of the world. These two breaths jarred Marco to live more openly and honestly. He took these two breaths into his own daily breathing and quickly saw their common presence in everyone’s breathing. Is it possible that with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.”

—excerpt from Seven Thousand Ways to Listen by Mark Nepo

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WEBSITE:  www.ResonanceWithLife.com

OTHER BLOGS BY GAYE ABBOTT:
www.WildlyFreeWoman.com
www.NaturalWealthJournal.com

BOOKS BY GAYE ABBOTT:

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath Preview, Reviews and purchase links can be found here:
http://resonancewithlife.com/daily-breath-book/

Life Is Breathing

“Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.” ~ Albert Einstein

In a time when we are becoming more and more conscious that everything is connected we are moved ever closer towards the reality of an ever expanding universe.   This is humbling and at the same time wondrous!

One single exhale can extend out into the spaciousness of all that is around you.  The next inhale can allow that vast amount of space to enter into your body and awareness creating a sacred place to rest in and be nourished from.

There is nothing to do….just sensing and opening.  What a miracle the breath is…reminding us that we are ALIVE as well as sensing sacred beings.  Let us not forget this.

Let us LIVE this…

LIFE BREATHING


All around us everything is breathing
Listen carefully 
for you may miss the soft exhale 
of the flower on the vine.


Or the inhale of rich brown soil
 from the earthworm beneath your foot.
Butterfly wings waft the air
 towards you as an offering


While bird songs are heard 
in a series of exhales


As the tree that shelters 
releases a leaf to the ground
Chimes move in the breeze
 creating the sound of the breath 
in notes sung in tune


with the expansion and contraction
 of the Earth – all in union with
 your next inhale….. and exhale

Be present to life breathing around you


mindful of the artful ways that
 breath pulses among the 
minutest of cells and atoms


woven amidst the field of being 
that captures each one of us within the next inhale

All breathing for and with each other


An exchange of intimacy that 
connects us in levels so deep
 that even the whale in the ocean depths
 senses into the next breath


that you will take.

Be still for just a moment

and listen 
to the symphony of breath 
that fills every moment
 with the exquisite pleasure


of being Alive Now. 

Life is breathing.
  Listen….listen

~Gaye Abbott  11/11/2011

(Excepted from Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath, pg 94)

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WESITE:  www.ResonanceWithLife.com

OTHER BLOGS BY GAYE ABBOTT:
www.WildlyFreeWoman.com
www.NaturalWealthJournal.com

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath Preview, Reviews and purchase links can be found here:
http://resonancewithlife.com/daily-breath-book/

The Best Is Hidden

Here it is 2am in the morning and I am wide awake.  I want to let you know that this is unusual for me.  Most nights I not only fall asleep within minutes, but stay soundly asleep all night.  Could it be a beautiful dinner with fine wine and what I call “bordering on erotic” food preceding turning out the lights?  Or might it be that the hidden is coming to light and is calling me to write, paint, dance or sing it’s song, not willing to let me rest until I pay homage to it’s messages?

Reaching into my book case a brand new and waiting to be read book falls off the shelf into my hands.  I open to the acknowledgements and read the following – “There is a Sufi expression, “the best is hidden”.  …. My teachers are like the jasmine whose flowers only release their fragrant secrets as the day-times brilliant sunlight gives way to the evening’s subtler shifts of light and energy.  The only way to honor them is to breathe them in and experience peace.”  James O’Dea, Cultivating Peace

How many times in a day do we stop and honor the subtler parts of the experiences we are having in the moment?  Even now at this early hour of the morning I feel the delight of fingers moving on the keyboard recording the thoughts that weave their way through me and back out to you. I don’t even know where they will take me or what your experience will be once you have read them. The pure adventure and unknown of it delights me.

Perhaps these hidden moments lay in waiting like the jasmine flowers, or the many teachers that move in and out of our lives – until just the right moment in time when we are the most susceptible to their encouragement to breathe them in –  forever changed within the embrace.

This week choose to be vulnerable, open and aware to what may lay hidden within the next breath.  Be willing to let go and say YES to whatever the experience may be.  Resistance does not live here.  The best of living an open life does….

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Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath Preview, Reviews and purchase links can be found here:
http://resonancewithlife.com/daily-breath-book/

Embrace The Moment – Emaho!

Once again yoga class has given me a gift!  For some the gift might be preparing a delectable meal, painting a picture, running a marathon, writing an inspired sentence, or even having a very connected conversation with someone.  For me today in yoga class it was about EMAHO!  Emaho is a Tibetan invocation for auspiciousness; an expression of joy, wonder and amazement.

How many times during a day do we embrace the moment?  What an amazing practice this can be.  When it comes to the breath we can either use the breath to stay in the moment of an experience….or we can allow the breath to BE the experience.  There is a distinction here.  In the former we are using the breath as a focus to quiet the mind…or watch it as the case may be.  In the latter our moment IS the breath – how it moves in the body, what is expanding and releasing, ….the actual joy and wonder we feel when we are breathing fully and enjoying every single second of the body of the breath.

Let’s take this a step further.  Instead of focusing on how we are breathing, how about focusing on the very miracle that we are simply breathing and ALIVE!  Our attention often goes to the details of what is wrong in our lives, our bodies…or our relationships.  What if we tipped that on its head so to speak and consciously decided to be thrilled to be right here, right now no matter what is going on!

Experiment this week to see if simply loving the fact that you are breathing changes how you perceive the moments of your life.  Might the food that makes its way to your taste buds delight you with its textures, colors, form and abundance.  Might the simple act of walking have an entirely different impact on your consciousness.  Or sudden immersion in a conversation totally giving the person that is speaking your undivided attention. 

Hold your hands in the air and allow your body to sway, undulate, jump, twist, be at rest to notes that mold their way into music that moves you.

It is not so much about HOW your are doing things in your life…but that you are being within those moments with as much of your attention as you can possibly pour into them.  Distractions are a plenty in this over stimulus life of ours.  Can the fact that you are reading this now as a breathing alive person turn you on in a way that, up until now, you have avoided?

As we age we may want to grab onto the moments and hold them to us – like a held breath.  Or sometimes the moments are pushed away because of some aversion deep within that is resting in judgement and the past.  Would you like to practice something different?

Mantra for the week:  I am thrilled to be breathing right here, right now!

That is all we have.  EMAHO!  Exapand it into everything – the light and the dark, the joy and the pain…. in your one wild and precious life!  NOW, put your hands up in the air and…..

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WEBSITE:  www.ResonanceWithLife.com

OTHER BLOGS BY GAYE ABBOTT:
www.WildlyFreeWoman.com
www.NaturalWealthJournal.com

Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath Preview and Reviews can be found here:
http://resonancewithlife.com/daily-breath-book/