“Be aware of your breathing. Notice how this takes attention away from your thinking and creates space.” – Eckhart Tolle
Day 2-Notice Your Breathing Throughout Your Day
In Day 1 you’ve experienced how it feels to be sitting in silence for one minute. This helps You set a good vibe, a centered, grounded space for the day about to begin. The next step is to insert these moments of stillness as often as You can in the middle of your busy, agitated life. The easiest way to do this is to notice your breathing.
How to do this: Today is all about giving yourself seconds of stillness as You go about your chores. The easiest way to do this is to stop for a few seconds and notice your breathing. Do this as often as you remember, especially when you feel overwhelmed by the many things you have to do.
You can practice this anytime. I suggest to try it in the moments when You are usually rushing off to get somewhere:
-when getting in your car stop and notice your breathing before stepping on the acceleration
-before getting out of the car once at your destination
-while doing the “smallest” actions: pouring a glass of water or drinking your coffee
-while waiting: in the elevator, for the bus, for a friend to arrive and so on.
My experience with it: ever since I’ve read Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, I’ve took this simple advice and started applying it as often as I remembered. I’ve found this to be like a magic trick that helps me:
- reduce stress
- deal with the moments of feeling overwhelmed when facing “too many things to do and I don’t know where to start!”
- center myself when I talk in front of a group
- get back in the now when I notice my mind going around like a crazy monkey
- stop me from re-acting when faced with intense negative emotions
Because my aim is to be feeling centered and grounded most of the time and not only in the morning, or when doing Yoga or when meditating.
And also to have an easy to do, efficient “magic ” trick to apply in the moments when I am most inclined to lose myself: during stressful, challenging situations or dealing with negative emotions, mine or someone else’s.
This exercise proved to be very efficient for me. I am so looking forward to be hearing how it worked for You. Let me know in the comments bellow.
If you liked this article, feel free to share it with your friends. Sharing is caring because it is learning from each other and helping us grow together.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s exercise! 🙂
With all my love,
Raluca
PS: Thank you for being part of this, I really appreciate it! 🙂
I like that the first things you decided to write about are in fact strong, foundation building habits.
As of today’s exercise, I experimented this a while ago. I’ll write about it in the hope that it further inspires people who read Raluca’s blog.
It was a 55 days documented experiment, with the end purpose of cultivating breath awareness, that would ideally be kept through the hole day. I was inspired to do this after reading that “one cannot be truly aware of the breath and aware of his thoughts at the same time, as mind can only focus on one thing at a time”.
It ended up to be more difficult than I imagined it would, but with some interesting results. As a measuring tool I used a bracelet very similar to the knitting abacus you find online (http://knittingabacus.com/ablet-knitting-abacus-orange-wood/) for keeping track of how often I was … losing track of my breathing through the day. The bracelet was very useful, and looked good as well. 🙂
In the beginning I was forgetting about my breathing 90+ times a day, with periods of up to one hour of totally doing something else. On the short occasions when I was aware, this lasted no more than a few minutes tops. Yet by the 50th day, I was “only” forgetting to consciously breathe about 10 to 15 times a day, and reaching up to half an hour sessions of constant breath awareness and a lot more silence on the inside, while doing regular activity with relative ease.
The benefits of doing this include enhancing emotional awareness, an increased sense of well-being and much better communication.
Thank you and have a wonderful day!
Ovidiu, thank you very much for sharing your in depth experience with the awareness of breathing practice. Impressive your 55 days experiment!
I am curious if you continue up to this day, after the experiment is over, to be almost all the time aware of your breathing.
Thank you for being around and sharing! 🙂
While I’m not all the time fully aware, there were some changes that happened during that experiment that have remained to this day.
I believe the most beneficial of these was the development of a deeper breathing than before (I’m referring to the “normal”, shallow breathing that I used to have, that only involved the upper chest cavity). I think this reconditioning happened as a consequence of conscious breathing – because when you do it consciously, you tend to breathe deeper than you would otherwise; and doing this consciously for a longer period has the effect of training the subconscious mind, where routines lie. Also, a fun fact: did you know that babies and young children normally breathe deeply, with full diaphragm movements. But is seems somewhere along the way (as stress lurks in, perhaps) we tend to lose this normal way of breathing. 🙂
Till next time …
Day 2. Although it was hard to focus on breathing because of my active mind, the exercise was so easy and effortless that focusing and refocusing were natural. It surprised me. Thank you for this second day, Raluca.
So happy to hear your experience with this, Soledad. Thank you for being a part of this and for sharing 🙂
Raluca,
This beats millions of guided meditations. Let breathing permeates the day.
Boon