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Chaos: How using the breath can rescue us and restore stability

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Chaos seems to be everywhere today. Humanity is very adept at creating disorder. It gets itself into a fine mess and then makes the mess worse. The most powerful nation on Earth elected to the most powerful position on Earth a man whose mission is, apparently, to create chaos. British prime ministers are far from exempt, as recent events show. From everywhere, reports of human tragedy, much caused by other people, continually reach our eyes and ears.

chaos breath

News of chaos creates inner disturbance

Reading about disturbing events, or watching or listening to reports about them, can very easily upset our equilibrium. Unless we have a very thick skin, we cannot completely isolate ourselves from what is going on in the world. Compassion for the suffering others are enduring is natural and right. But chaos can stir up all manner of other feelings, too. We may feel horror, indignation, anger and disgust. Without denying those feelings, we must find a way to restore our inner stability.

Breathe in calmness and let go of chaos

Breathing is one of the simplest remedies. When we are agitated, the breath tends to become shallow and a little faster. Tension in the abdominal muscles prevents deeper inhalation and so the chest does most of the work. This makes us feel ill at ease. Our qi or energy dissipates as the stress response works through the body. Chaos is inside as well as out. (See the previous post for discussion on inside and outside.)

Fortunately, we can reverse this. By training ourselves to breathe more slowly and a little more deeply, we can initiate a calming response.

A simple technique

Here is a simple technique. There are others but this is delightfully easy and works quickly.

  1. Place one hand flat on your abdomen at the navel then move it down about an inch (a couple of centimetres) and rest the other hand on top – palm to back of hand.
  2. Breathe gently, feeling the rise and fall through your hands. If your abdomen pushes against your hands as you inhale, this is good – it means your diaphragm is helping to draw air into the bottom of the lungs.
  3. As you inhale, imagine drawing in calmness from your surroundings. As you exhale, let go of chaos. Imagine it being absorbed into the earth.

If we practise this for a minute or two, and maybe two or three times a day, we will soon notice that the way we breathe affects how we feel. Events in the big wide world may still continue but inside chaos will quickly subside.

Books and ebooks available.

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Passion is life: why we are dead if we don’t have it

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Passion is not something we get very excited about very often. Let me re-phrase that. Passion is something we don’t get excited about often enough. Why? Because without passion there is no heat, no fire and no life. A person who chooses not to be passionate about life is like smouldering coal or damp firewood. The energy is there, inside – but produces little warmth. When we are like that, we are half-asleep. Something in us is slumbering and needs waking up.

Passion is light, life and fire

When we are enthusiastic about something, it is as if we have thrown a switch. The lights come on, our eyes sparkle and our skin seems to glow. We feel good, don’t we? When we feel passionate, it is as though we have become more alive. Our speech is more animated and we have the power to motivate. Passion is good! Or is it? Is it just trouble ahead?

passion fire

Emotions are not bad

I have met many people over the years who want to become “more spiritual”. In their quest, they have come across teachings that describe emotions as being problematical. So following that logic, they decide that they need to train themselves into overcoming them. Or avoiding them. They aim to become the colourless sap of the tree instead of being the glorious effulgence of the tree itself. The error there is that if we do that, instead of allowing consciousness to flow, we tend to block it. In blocking the flow of consciousness, we also obstruct the natural flow of energy in and around us.

Love life and all is good

To have passion for life is not to let the emotions run riot. Rather, it is about letting our natural inner light do its job of illuminating what we do. And all we have to do is be interested and love. We don’t need to make a drama out of mindfulness or turn it into a tough discipline. Just loving what we do, being genuinely interested in others and our world will naturally generate mindfulness. Let the awareness expand and fill the senses. Be natural, be life, be alive. It’s so much better than being dead.

This theme will be explored further in our evening workshop Mind – The Way to Bliss on Monday 3rd April 2017. More information.

Read more on passion in life in the book Awakening Heart: The Blissful Path to Self-Realisation

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True love: cosmic glue that heals

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True love is rare. We often associate love with romance, relationships, affairs, broken hearts – many scenarios which can form the setting for emotional pain. This is not the pain of love, in spite of what people often say. It is the pain of attachment. True love is free. There is no attachment, there are no strings.

True love heals

true love universalTrue love is an incredible energy, present throughout the entire cosmos. It has the extraordinary capacity to heal at every level because it unites and makes things whole, just like glue. For us, love is limited only by our consciousness. The mind narrows with our beliefs, fears, prejudices and emotional pain. Fortunately, even these are healed or resolved if we allow ourselves to open to this wonderful and mysterious force.

Love is universal but its expression differs according to the conditions that exist. The love of a matriarchal elephant for the rest of the herd, protecting and nurturing, is likely to be very different in expression and experience from that of many human beings, for example. But nurturing and protecting are two aspects of love that we can easily understand and relate to.

True love is an expression of all-that-is

True love is an expression of totality – of everything in, throughout and beyond the universe, both manifest and true love helping handtranscendent. Love may then be understood as something more than an individual expression. Love becomes limitless and expressible at every level and, rather beautifully, must be intrinsic in absolutely everything.

If we can understand love as some extraordinary, amazing energy or force that permeates the whole universe and beyond, that holds together, brings together, heals, forms and builds, then inevitably we must begin to understand that it is far more than sentiment or emotion.

We can love more than we think we can

Love as we may experience it as human beings is only the most dilute expression of this cosmic energy. Love is inexhaustibly bigger than we are. However, we can develop our capacity to express it. It’s quite easy. We can start by being kind to everyone we come in contact with.

The cosmic proportion of love is less easy to comprehend or imagine. But we might grasp the fact that it cannot apply to some things and not others.  Love does not discriminate – it cannot. That should be our aim, too.

All that glitters…

Because we mistake some emotions for love, we often cause ourselves pain. There are few people, if any, who have not experienced them. These emotions look like love and feel like love but are fake, just like fool’s gold. They may glitter for a while but they are not the real stuff. The real stuff is simple, straight, and comes from the heart.

Adapted extract from Awakening Heart: The Blissful Path to Self-Realisation

Staffordshire: Limited space left on Advanced Meditation workshop

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Tranquillity: the body, mind and emotions

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The special relationship of mind and body in tranquillity

To enjoy tranquillity, it is helpful to understand the special relationship of the mind and thetranquillity body mind emotions body. In many respects, at least in theory, the two may seem quite distinct. But the mind is only experienced and utilised through the brain and the nervous system, which are most definitely aspects of the body. We know only too well from our own experience that if the mind is agitated, there is a feeling of disturbance in the body. It is also difficult to maintain a calm mind if the body is upset.

Sometimes the chemical balance of the body may be upset through illness, wrong food or exposure to pathogens, for example. This can strongly affect our thinking and our moods. Conversely, it is also true that if the mind is calm, the biochemical balance is much better, the immune system is stronger and our energy is better.

Meditation, yoga and t’ai chi

Tests on meditators have shown the very close relationship of a calm mind to reactions in the body. Within minutes of starting to meditate, the breath rate slows down, the blood pressure drops and there is greater coherence in the electronic waves produced by the brain.

People who take up arts such as t’ai chi and yoga, find a calming effect on the mind and improvements to health and well-being. These are just two examples but they help to reinforce the understanding and appreciation that there is more than just a tenuous link between mind and body. The connection is a very direct and close one.

The significance of this link is that it can be deliberately utilised to bring about serenity. If we do nothing, it is like piloting a rudderless ship. So we need to find a way of harnessing body and mind that is easy to do.

Kama-manas: the marriage of mind and emotions

If there is a link between the body and the mind, there is an even stronger tie between the mind and the emotions. In fact, they are so closely intertwined that some schools of thought regard them as one – kama manas  (literally desire-mind). For our purposes, we can think of the mind as the generator of thoughts and perceptions.

The emotions are feelings that rise up and influence our thoughts. Sometimes they can result from our thinking. Suppose, for example, we are angry about something. We experience the feeling of anger, and we are also have a stream of thoughts which are mainly negative in character. The two things, the sensation of the angry feeling and the stream of angry thoughts, are separately identifiable as feelings on the one hand and thoughts on the other. Together, they disturb our tranquillity.

Do feelings and thoughts have to go together?

We can certainly think logically, without being swamped by feelings, so thoughts in themselves do not depend on feelings or emotions. But can we have feelings or emotions without thoughts?

Probably we can but not for long. For example, we might have a vague feeling of anxiety or sadness for which we can’t pin down a reason. Within a very short time, though, that feeling will normally colour our thinking. Desires, too, can seem to come out of nowhere and suddenly we can experience a craving. Immediately, our thoughts run towards whatever it is we crave.

Conversely, thoughts can evoke emotions. We might be thinking about something that happened in the past or on some future event and feelings can arise based on the memory of past experience. Many of our thoughts are based on our beliefs and, though we may not care to admit to having any, our prejudices. Almost inevitably, these charge our emotions.

Intelligent tranquillity

The importance of all this is that it has a very direct bearing on serenity and tranquillity. If we want to experience peacefulness, we have to be able to do something about our emotions. We have to be in charge tranquillity emotionsof them rather than be ruled by them. This doesn’t mean suppressing our feelings but it does mean using our creative faculties and intelligence so that we can deal with feelings and emotions as they arise without being swamped by them.

As the mind becomes calmer this becomes easier to do for two main reasons. First, because the mind is clearer, fewer emotions are evoked by the way we think. Second, because mind and body are more settled, we are more aware of emotions as they arise and so more able to pacify them. This puts us on a firm path to serenity.

From The Great Little Book of Happiness

For online meditation tuition, my Meditation Course contains four approaches to inner peace and tranquillity.

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Barriers to our natural joy

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Recognising barriers to our natural joy

When we cannot feel our natural joy, it is due to barriers caused by internal signals. If we have had a bad or fearful barriersexperience, for example, a memory of it is stored. When something triggers that memory, our horizon is overshadowed, as if by clouds. In energy terms, we close up. Our heart centre shrinks and becomes pinched. We become joyless. Maybe we feel hurt or a little numb. If we are strong, we might be able to masquerade a smile but inside we know we are not smiling. Our perception of the world changes and so do our responses.

What happens then? We often compound our difficulties by jumping to wrong conclusions and making false assumptions.  Sometimes, we may say things that are hurtful or inappropriate. Perhaps we don’t say something when we should – barriers hold us back. Generally, our reactions go against the flow of life rather than with it. In the body, there may well be a stress response so our sense of well-being drops; and if the reaction continues, our immune system takes a knock, too. Our experience of life takes on an unpleasant and joyless hue, which adds to the muddy residue in our memory bank.

Break down the barriers

It is possible, though, with persistence and with time, to overcome the triggers. As a first step, we need to be aware when they have arisen. That may sound obvious but actually most of us go from one moment to the next with fluctuations in temperament. One moment we can be happy then we’ll hear something, see something or just have some thoughts which cause our feelings to dip. But rarely do we intelligently look at why that dip took place. We might see it in others more than in ourselves – a shadow passing across the face, for instance. If we can look at our own dip in mood with the light of the mind, so to speak, it can be quite revealing.

The dip comes because our perceptions are wrong.

We suffer from countless emotions but they can all be said to have their roots in one of three main categories:

  1. attachment and desire (which arise from I want, I like etc.),
  2. aversion, hatred and dislike (from which anger and jealousy arise, for example) and, most important of all,
  3. ignorance as to our own nature (which deludes us into thinking we are separate from everything else in the universe).

The easy way

The easy and intelligent way of looking at an emotional response it is not to analyse its historical causes, some childhood incident perhaps, but merely to identify the emotion that is present. If we are hurt by a remark or by the way we have been treated, for example, we can say or think to ourselves, “A feeling of being hurt is present.” Keep saying it to yourself and eventually the feeling will subside. The important thing is not to apportion blame or cause – that’s the ego’s trick. Simply identify the feeling.

With practice, we might find a realisation dawning: that the feeling of hurt actually arises from attachment or pride, or perhaps both. Again, we don’t try to judge that; instead, we merely say to ourselves, “A feeling of pride is present,” or whatever it happens to be. The vital thing, though, is not to judge; we want to become the observer of the feelings so that they become weaker and lose their power over us, and not get wound into them.

Gradually, these barriers will weaken and eventually dissolve. Then we can find our true purpose in life: to vibrate happiness.

Adapted from Chapter 3 of The Great Little Book of Happiness

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