Tag: breath

The Sacred Geometry of Life

P.C. Turczyn - Malestrom

All around and within us lies the beauty and sacred patterns of life.  As visionary artist Pamela Turczyn states in her artist statement “Ancient teachings and quantum theory teach us that the universe is comprised of vibrations consisting of light, sound and information. I believe that everything carries a unique identifying vibration, somewhat like a genetic code. “

The strands of our DNA, the cornea of our eye, snow flakes, pine cones, flower petals, diamond crystals, the branching of trees, water crystals, a nautilus shell, the star we spin around, the galaxy we spiral within, the air we breathe, and all life forms as we know them emerge out of timeless geometric codes or geometrical archetypes.
Spending an entire afternoon exploring sacred geometry I was lead in what seemed like spirals of understanding as I delved deeper into the patterns of life.  It makes sense that even our breath is moving in patterns that support sacred design and breathing space to thrive in.  If this is so, then I wonder if we place ourselves in architecture built upon the patterns of sacred geometry; immerse ourselves in visionary art; create gardens that reflect back to us the fabric of our being; and seek out practices that open and align us with our deepest knowing and understanding of these geometric archetypes  – that the mystery of life will reveal more to us, and we will come to a greater understanding and functioning of the fullness and resonance of who we are.

Chalice Well Gardens, Glastonbury

As Bruce Rawles (www.geometrycode.com) states, “It is this principle of oneness underlying all geometry that permeates the architecture of all form in its myriad diversity. This principle of interconnectedness, inseparability and union provides us with a continuous reminder of our relationship to the whole, a blueprint for the mind to the sacred foundation of all things created.”
There are many sites dedicated to Sacred Geometry – some of which will give you theory and mathematics, and others that will take you into the heart of creation.  I invite you to take a peak at Charles Gilchrist in the video and P.C. Turczyn at the blog link below.  Here are two amazing artists that are reminding us of the interconnectedness of life by “using sacred geometry as expressed in nature, light, color, rhythm, sound, and intention.”


Sacred Geometry: The Golden Mean with Charles Gilchrist

Lillian Sizemore, mosaic artist, educator and independent scholar, has written a comprehensive article for her blog/newsletter about the work and unique studio practices of Pamela C. Turczyn. Follow this link for the article on her blog and then visit Pamela’s website from there: http://sfmosaic.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/pcturcyzn/

Other Blogs by Gaye:  www.WildlyFreeWoman.com

Life Flower


Ecstatic Breathing – Birthing the Breath

This week I was privileged to view a video that stunned me with its beauty and sacredness.  If you go to the dictionary, ecstatic is described as “in a trance like state of great rapture or delight.  Showing or feeling great enthusiasm.  And….a person who has periods of intense trance like joy”.

In this video you will view a woman giving birth in the most sacred and natural of ways – the way in which it was meant to be.  The most important component in these hours of “labor” was breath, and the sounding that birthed from the breath.  There is no doubt that there is pain involved as you watch this beautiful woman in her birthing passage, yet it is the breath that washes the pain through and expands the stressful process of birthing through “sounding out breath” into an ecstatic state.

I invite you to watch this video now and then come back to see what you can do to practice “sounding out” your breath.

Dr. Chris Northrup posted this link on her twitter feed.  It’s a video of a woman going through labor and birth – an ecstatic birth experience.  The video is 18 minutes long.  I say take the time to watch the entire video.  It is worth every moment spent whether you have ever given birth or not.

You’ll find it here: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=149916791692395&ref=share

Sounding Out Breath Practice:
Last week we talked about how the breath is such an integral part of being able to sing with your full being and voice.  A big part of the healing power of singing, sounding, and chanting is that they work to regulate our breathing. When we sing, whatever the words of the song, we tend to “sound the breath out” until it’s time to inhale. The more often we sing, the better our breathing as it expands our capacity to not only bring in more life giving breath, but also intimately supports the letting go within the exhale.

Chanting adds to this the inherent power of certain sounds. Sounding the breath out with ooooommmm has long been practiced to deepen meditative states. And aaaahhhh, the sound that people often make when feeling pleasure or satisfaction, can be used to intentionally generate healing energy in the body.  This sounding out breathing also “turns on” the parasympathetic system in the body which signals the relaxation response, and stimulates the “feel good” chemicals of the endorphin system.

PRACTICE:  With a long slow inhale
 let the air out through the mouth with a
 long sustained sound of aaaaaahhhhhh . . .
Breathe all the way out, until it’s time to inhale
.  Then breathe in through the nose a long slow inhale
 and sound the breath all the way out
 with a long sustained sound of aaaaaahhhhhh . . .Pause for a few moments noticing any feelings or sensations.
Now continue for several more breaths,
 breathing in through the nose, 
filling yourself with energy, and sound out the breath
 with a long, gentle aaaaaahhhhhh . . .

then experiment with a fuller, more powerful aaaaahhhhhhh….changing the texture, sound, and vibration as you feel so moved.

Practice this daily whenever you feel stress or you feel “stuck”.  Breathe into the stress or the frustration and release it with a long slow exhale –  sounding whenever you are able, and experimenting with types of sounds and perhaps movement.  This will become an automatic response to stressful or difficult situations as they happen – and can lead you into a place of ecstatic breath.  Enjoy the moments…birth the breath…    

OTHER BLOGS:  www.WildlyFreeWoman.com

Songs Are Thoughts Sung With The Breath

“Songs are thoughts sung with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices”.

“There are so many occasions in one’s life when a joy or a sorrow is felt in such a way that the desire comes to sing. All my being is songs, and I sing as I draw breath.”

— Orpingalik  (Inuit poet and shaman)

From the beginning of time humans sang their stories.  Sacred, playful, joyous, sensual, blues, gospel, or wild – song has woven our history on this planet.  It was at a “Song Weavers” event last weekend that I realized that it is rare that I break out in song myself, and certainly don’t sing with my friends or my community.  It was also at this event that I discovered how tight my singing voice actually was.  Yet, within the space of a couple of hours I also realized how easily, within the company of others, that voice can be released and played with.

The video below instructs us on how to breathe for singing.  Watch and listen carefully and notice that this breath strengthens and expands our diaphragm muscles and relaxes the upper chest, neck and facial muscles –  secondary breathing muscles that are often used in tight, contracted, chest breathing and stressful situations.   The emphasis on lengthening the exhale with the hissss sound allows us to find our ground of being, relaxed voice, and our full expression.  This also builds and expands our capacity for breath and thus for LIFE.  Practice this and then let loose with a song, a sound, a tone!

P.S.  For those of you that are Carol King/James Taylor lovers here is a treat – they are back together and are touring.  Not only do they love to sing the “hits” –  we love to sing along with them!

BREATHING SPACES – Within and Without

“Breathing is one of the simplest things in the world.  We breathe in, we breathe out.  When we breathe with real freedom, we neither grasp for or hold on to the breath.  No effort is required to pull the breath in or to push the breath out.  Given the simplicity of breathing one would think it was the easiest thing to do in the world.  However, if it were truly so easy there would be few unhappy or unhealthy people in the world.  To become a welcome vessel for the breath is to live life without trying to control, grasp, or push away.  And how easy is this?  The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.”

–   Donna Farhi, The Breathing Book, pg 5

Did you know that from birth at the first breath, you take approximately 7,000 breaths each day which over a lifetime totals about 500 million breaths.  In your final moments you exhale for the last time and the breath defines that moment.  What will we do with these approximately 500 million opportunities in a lifetime to live our life fully?

There is a wise Chinese proverb that states, “Life is in the breath.  One who half breathes, half lives.”

We all are breathing in some fashion, even when we are not aware of our breath, but the normal patterns of breathing are usually shallow, restricted and contain many holding patterns.  These reflect deep imbalances in our systems.  When our breathing patterns are weak, we may have low energy and find ourselves easily fatigued and more emotionally stressed.  When our breathing patterns are deep and strong, we have increased endurance, stamina, and a sense of well being.

Sometimes we can have difficulty with our breathing because of physiological processes that we have set in motion by the way we have treated our bodies over the years, or we can have emotional holding patterns that literally have us “stop breathing” or “hold our breath”.  Sometimes it is both of these things intimately connected that contribute to our not breathing – not living – as fully as we are meant to.

Last week I came in contact with a woman who has been a smoker in her life.  She arrived at our clinic with a fairly severe upper respiratory challenge.  There is a special machine called an oximeter that measures the amount of oxygen traveling throughout the system in any given moment.  Normally people will record between 97-100%.  This woman was at 84% – way below the accepted level for a healthy system.  Her acute symptoms were addressed at this visit, yet there was an underlying process that was going on within her.

She was terrified that she might die the same way her adult son had just a year before from the new strain of flu going around – in his case causing bronchial pneumonia.  She was still in grief around that death.  At her next visit this week she remained with low oxygen saturation levels and even after a test walk to get her coughing to bring this level back up, as had happened last week,  her levels did not come back up.  Instructed to put oxygen on her, I was readying the mask and tank with my back to her – and then I turned around.  The fear that was in her face and body hit me strongly from across the room.

Putting the mask down I walked over to her, put my hands on her shoulders, looked in her eyes and said to her  “relax into your breath”.  In that moment of contact and connection I saw the fear lessen and she started relaxing her entire body while thinking the thoughts that she could breathe freely and easily.  Being still connected to the oximetry machine we watched as her 02 levels steadily climbed to 92% – an acceptable level to allow her to leave the office without oxygen according to protocol.  We talked about “biofeedback” and the power each of us has to shift our biological processes by our direct attention and focus.  For her it was enough to shift out of the pattern and is a powerful beginning to her opening to her life force if she so chooses.

Yes, this woman has diminished her lung capacity by her history of smoking and may even have emphysema.  But, she also has a very strong emotional response to her breathing challenges and in fact said to me that the stresses in her life had her “not breathing”, or in some instances “not wanting to breathe”.  What a gift for her to know that if she choses to live fully that she has the power to change her patterns of breathing by relaxing into her breath – into her life – and finding more ease where before there was none or very little.  This may be an on going challenge for her, but I believe in the power of the human body to regenerate, rebuild, and redirect into the harmony of balanced health that is the human bodies built in blueprint and directive.

As Donna Farhi says in the quote above – take a look at how we approach and live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings.

Watch your breath…. it is a wise teacher.

Become a container that welcomes the breath……

Gaye Abbott, RYT

INSPIRATION

Humpback Whale

“Your true support system is in each breath that you take.  It is your inspiration: the movement of air that spirals in and out of your mouth and lungs each second of every day.  It is the breathing-in of your Divine Self; your connection with Divine Mind.

And it doesn’t stop with you.  The breath you draw at this moment is the same breath I am drawing.  Wherever you are – whether you are in America or Fiji, Venezuela or Japan – you are breathing the very same breath.

Think about it for just a moment.  There is nothing between the air surrounding you and the air surrounding me.  It carries on in one seamless, invisible network of nitrogen, oxygen and other gasses.  It covers the whole Earth, permeating everything: even the waters of the ocean (there’s just a little more hydrogen down there) and the miles of frozen tundra.

It binds us together as surely as the moon draws the tides across the planet: moving to an unseen tune: guided by the Divine Design.

We are all inspired by the same force of life.

And it doesn’t stop with us humans, either!

The breath that is filling your lungs at this second is the very same breath that swirls around the lungs of the jaguar in the deepest corner of the rainforest and expands the bronchial tubes of the albatross as it wings its silent way far out to sea.  It inspires the tiniest pigmy shrew, which must eat every two hours if it is to survive.  It gives life to the seventy-foot whale, which must eat more than a million shrews could eat in their whole lives with one gulp of its gargantuan mouth!  

It gives colour to every plant and substance to every crustacean.  It touches us all in this instant.  We are all connected: always.  We just have to wake up to who we are.  And to do that, you must take the leap of faith that you took with that very first breath.  You must follow your own inspirations. “

Richard Cawte, Ph.D.   Excerpt from a new book being released soon!  Divine Path –  Stay tuned !!!   www.richardcawte.com

I start this post with Richard’s quote above for many reasons.  This past couple of weeks for me has been driven by “inspiration” and fueled by “intuition”.  Reaching Richard’s website by what I call “divine providence” as I explored one day, I was so taken by the work he is doing in the world that I wrote him an e-mail of gratitude.  Out of that e-mail has come a meaningful and delicious connection that has inspired me tremendously already, and has me more often utilizing my intuition and creative inspiration at every opportunity that I can.

As I read the passages that contained the excerpt above, tears streamed down my face.  To wake up to the immense interconnectedness of all living things is almost more than one can hold.  I do know that your breath – which is your inspiration and your creative expression in the world – is shared by all, including the earth and all of nature – expanding out into the immense universe.  We create it all by our thoughts and the actions stemming from those thoughts.

I invite you to take in the deepest, most expansive breath that is possible for you in this moment and remember….. as you exhale and come to that still pause at the end …. right before the next inspiration  – who and what you are sharing this breath with.  We in-spire each other….

Gaye Abbott, A Breath Inspired Writer

Other Blogs by Gaye:  www.WildlyFreeWoman.net