Tag: Gaye Abbott

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/

Breath Technique or Practice Breath Awareness?

In January of this year, with full joy, I launched a book on the breath entitled, Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath: Weekly Breathing Spaces to Delight, Rest and Reflect In“.  It was a birth that had been in gestation for quite a long while…and the actual delivery left me filled with grace and a joyful satisfaction that I had courageously said YES to what I am passionate about without holding back.

For me, it was an action of awareness.  Awareness that I had something to share with the world that every single person could benefit from.  This action of awareness has taken me into the joys of writing and sharing with essentially abandon to the process of creation.  Mining the depths of something that continually fascinates and feeds me – the breath – and expanding that passion to other areas of interest is a “practice of awareness in the moment”.

Just today I received an e-mail from a dear friend which moved me to write this post.  Below is an excerpted part of what she wrote to me and a portion of my response.

“I don’t know if I told you but I carried your book in my bag for a long time.  I would read it at work or in the evenings when I was home and had more time to savor the delightful passages.  My issue is that I get started on a breathing/meditation program but the enthusiasm only lasts for a couple of weeks or months;  then I taper off and before long I have stopped my practice. “ R.B.

“I have a bias R.  To me any “breathing exercise” or “technique” is really only beneficial if it creates a state of being consciously aware of a full embodied breath from moment to moment.  There are many breath techniques that can be immensely beneficial, however are they sustainable and do they shift our awareness to be present in our daily moments of living?

I have learned to simply take 5 minute (or less) “breath breaks” scattered throughout the day to check in. Scanning the body brings awareness to any tension in the body, holding of the breath, or shallow breathing….. without judgement.  Taking a few fully engaged breaths expanding and releasing all of the primary breathing muscles – diaphragm, intercostal (between the ribs) and abdominal, reminds me of being present NOW no matter what is happening,  and allows me to feel alive not just in my mind! The body loves this attention!!

This breath practice of awareness has now become a “habit” in my tool bag that I carry with me everywhere.  I say, if the breath allows us to be more present in the moment to what is happening, and deepens our participation and awareness in that moment, then it has done it’s job (more than merely keeping us alive that is..:-) What a great tool to enliven our life moments!” G. A.

FOR BREATH IS LIFE, AND IF YOU BREATHE WELL YOU WILL LIVE LONG ON EARTH  –  Sanskrit Proverb

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

Website:  www.ResonanceWithLife.com

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

Exhale and Relax…..

Here we are in the last month of summer and Fall is looming ever more closely.  Here in Austin it remains in the 100’s and will stay quite warm through most of September.  Summer for many often means taking time off for rest, recreation and travel, but there is a frenetic quality to this warmest season of the year that leaves a lot of people “burnt out” and over stimulated.

Being able to relax your body at will is a life skill that adds not only to in the moment joy, richness and satisfaction, but also to overall health, well being and longevity.  What if there was a tool that you had at your disposal every single moment to inhabit a calmer place even in the midst of stress and life challenges?

Rick Hanson Ph.D. author of Buddha’s Brain (which is an excellent book by the way!) gives some ways in which to activate the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) – rest and digest – that calms down the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system in his book Just One Thing(27-28). Three out of five tips listed are all about the breath!

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*”Do several long exhalations, since the PNS handles exhaling.  For example, inhale for a count of 3, and exhale for a count of 6.”

*”For a minute or more, breathe in such a way that your inhalation and exhalation are equally long; count mentally up to 5 for each inhalation and each exhalation.  This creates small but smooth changes in the interval between heartbeats – since the heart speeds up slightly with inhalation and slows down slowly with exhalation which is associated with relaxation and well being. (Kristal-Boneh, et al 1995)”

*”Relax your diaphragm – the muscle underneath your lungs that helps suck air into them – by putting your hand on your stomach, just below your ribcage, and then trying to breathe in a way that pushes your hand half an inch or so away from your backbone. (This is especially helpful if you are feeling anxious).”

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As you attempt to fit in a few more summer activities and find them more stressful than enjoyable remember that your exhale will stimulate the rest and relaxation response in your body and mind.  It doesn’t take long to simply take a few conscious breaths with an intention of lengthening the exhale and relaxing the diaphragm.

You might be surprised at how easy it is to simply exhale and relax….

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/