The Breath as Informant
July 29, 2016

What does your breath have to say? Well it’s coming in, it’s going out. But if you learn how to read it, you can see that there’s more than just in and out. It’s telling you the shape of your mind right now, the shape of your body. And you can change the breath to put these things into better shape.

So every day make sure that, at least once a day, you do a very thorough survey of the breath energy in the different parts of the body. Make it your daily physical check-up.

The breath can help with a lot of minor ailments here and there. When things aren’t flowing well in different parts of the body in terms of the breath energy or in terms of the blood, you can open them up a little bit. Where you’re tensing up around a pain and actually making it worse, you can relax.

At the same time, you look at your mind, because the breath is like a mirror for the mind. The times when greed comes in or anger comes in, there’ll be a slight catch in the breath. You want to detect that before it spreads and settles into the body.

So try to be on top of things and use the breath as your informant to get an idea of what’s going on. But to learn what it has to say, you have to stay with it for quite a while. As with any relationship, you have to ask questions and see what it answers and see what it doesn’t answer. Get to know what is its code. What is it telling you?

If you take the time to look, you find that this resource we all have as long as we’re alive—the breath is coming in, is going out—has a lot more to offer than just keeping you alive. It can also help the health of the body, help with the health of the mind.

So take some time to get to know it because there’s a lot you’re going to learn.