Conscious Breathing

Exploring Breath Work may help you find a deeper understanding of and better experience with the Principle and Sutra Exercise for today (Friday).

There will always be situations and circumstances in your life when someone will cross some personal boundary, triggering a emotional response. You can use Breath Work to help release that tension and diffuse those initial feelings of anger and fear.

Here is an idea for using Prayer Beads as "Breath Beads":

Begin by creating a quiet or sacred time each day to do your deep breathing. Hold your beads in your hand while sitting in a chair with both feet on the floor. Scan your body for any areas of tension or holding. Once you have identified these areas, take in a big breath of air and release it with a sigh. As you take this 'cleansing breath', see the tension and the thoughts about your day leaving your body. Your breathing practice will take you through a series of deep breaths.

Begin each breath by inhaling slowly through your nose and exhaling through your mouth, as if you are blowing out a candle. Take a moment to pause at the top of every breath and after every exhale. Use your thumb and forefinger to slide past a bead after you have completed a breath. Allow the beads to keep track of how many breaths you have taken so that all of your focus is on the way in which the breath feels as it moves through your body.

At any time during the day, when you need a meditative moment, or feel a need to step back from a situation or a person, run your fingers over each bead as you take a slow, deep, rhythmic breath. Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth as if you are blowing out a candle. Relax your body with each breath.

You can wear your beads, and be use them as a reminder throughout the day to stop, take a moment to regroup, and let go of anything you are holding on to (whether it be stress, emotion or physical pain).

Conscious breathing can also be used as a tool that helps us to return to our center. Use the quiet intervals throughout your day to retrieve any scattered energy you have released. With each breath that you take, practice saying the following: on the inhale say, "Receive", and on the exhale say, "Release". Use your breath to bring in Peace and on the exhale release anything you no longer need (i.e. fear, anger, judgment, etc.).

If you are experiencing physical pain, picture the breath going directly into the affected area. Pain is a result of blocked energy. See the breath dissipating the congested energy and bringing light into that part of your body.

Using breath work can assist you in being more present and grounded. If used consciously, breathing can help us to release old patterns and behaviors. It allows us to pause and make choices from a calmer place instead of being at the effect of the circumstances in our life.

If you don't have prayer beads, or if you don't want to use your rosary or mala for anything other than prayer, any necklace or bracelet made with beads of a manageable size can be used, or you could create your own "breath beads."

Intention for Today

The intention for today's exercise is to help you find a deeper understanding of and better experience with the Principle and Sutra Exercise for today (Thursday).

A working definition for intention is: “to have in mind a purpose or plan, to direct the mind, to aim.” Lacking intention, we sometimes stray without meaning or direction. But with it, all the forces of the universe can align to make even the most impossible, possible.

Without our dreams all we have is our present reality. Reality is not a bad thing. We have to know where we are so we can design the appropriate strategy for getting to where we want to be. The challenge is our attitude around “reality” and being “realistic” and what being realistic has cost us. Often that’s our passion and joy, our hopes and dreams. Given the unknowns and sometimes craziness of life, there’s never been a more important time to dream and setting your intention is the first step.

When should you set an intention? You could set an intention every day. Your intention could be to work less and make more, or to find a new career that you are passionate about. It could be to get healthy and physically fit, or to spend more quality time with loved ones or alone. It can be specific and about something in particular or more like a quality, such as to be more relaxed or involved with life.

A Success Story: At seventy, Bessie set an intention to become a world famous photographer. Although many thought she was too old, she didn’t. She entered a photo contest where she won the first prize of $10,000. Her prize-winning photo toured around the world with a Kodak exhibit. She said, “We’re never too old to make a dream come true.”

Some Basic Steps:

1. Get clear about something you want and write it down.
2. Share your intention with someone in a way that will supportively hold you accountable to taking action.
3. Do something today to demonstrate your commitment to your intention.
4. Acknowledge that you did what you said you would, feel love and gratitude to yourself, and then, take the next appropriate step.

Questions to help define an intention:

1. What would I like to feel, experience or gain from today?
2. What stands in the way of me creating what I want to experience?
3. What resistance might I encounter along the way?
4. What am I willing to give up, compromise or surrender to have my intention be true for me?
5. What am I willing to commit to doing?

At the end of the day, take time to reflect in writing on your day’s experience. Think back over your activities and review your intentions to identify situations that match your list.

1. When did you feel love?
2. When did you have the experience you were looking for?
3. How did you manage the resistance factor?
4. Make a note of each instance where you were successful at creating your intention.
5. Practice develops awareness and with awareness, you can create the life you truly desire.

A Bonfire of Pure Love

Here are the links to the the Principle and Sutra Exercise for today (Wednesday).

Today, instead of posting anything new, I worked long and hard on my inner dialogue. Here are some of the things that I did:

I started out the day using this as my mantra: "I am a bonfire of pure love."

When I did my 20 minute meditation, I alternated between the bonfire of pure love mantra, and imagining and visualizing pure love consuming every cell of my body, transmuting all the "junk" into warmth and light, and then, every now and then I remembered to stick in the sutra for today "sat chit ananda".

For the rest of the day, every time I noticed myself having a negative thought, a stressful thought, or a painful thought, I went back to the "I am a bonfire of pure love." and used that mantra to totally consume and transform the thought and the perception that caused it.

So my day went something like this:

• Oh my god! You are getting so fat! What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you eat so much junk?
• But it doesn't matter now, because I am a bonfire of pure love and any excess is being burned away right now, transforming into pure energy, warmth and love. And as a veritable bonfire of love this all consuming fire turns everything I eat into energy and light, there is no excess that isn't fuel for the fire of love that I am.


• How the hell am I going to pay for that? What if it costs more than I have? What if my car breaks down totally? What if the transmission is next? How will I be able to afford christmas presents this year? Where is the money going to come from?
• Hey, it doesn't matter because there is no lack. I am a veritable bonfire of pure love. I can have what I need because what I need is drawn to me like a moth to a flame. I am warmth I am love.


• Those assholes! They are cutting down even more trees! Why can't they just leave the trees alone! We need trees. What about the birds that lived in those trees? What about the squirrels and the little beings that depend on the cover and the safety of the branches of those trees. How would how would those redneck mother f--krs like it if somebody came and chopped their house down and burned it? Huh? huh? huh?
• I am a bonfire of pure love! I consume them in my love. They are - the men, the trees, the machinery - they are consumed by the flame of pure love that I am. I see only love. There is only love.

And how did it work for me?

I took my car in to get the windshield wipers repaired. When I had called earlier, they told me that if the wipers had popped off the rocker arm it would be $89 minimum to repair; and that if the motor itself had to be replaced, then I was looking at upwards of $275 to $300. (That's where the whole "how the hell am I going to pay for that" dialogue came from.)

So, I had my oil changed, and all my fluid levels checked... a routine maintenance, and asked them to fix the windshield wipers. I figured that if it cost me a total of $120, my check wouldn't bounce, and if it was more than that, my check still wouldn't bounce, but my electric bill, my house payment, and my telephone would all be overdue and possibly shut off. So, as I sat in the waiting room, I concentrated on remembering that I was a bonfire of pure love and that any hinderances to my safety and comfort were being consumed, transmuted, transformed... etc etc.

After an hour or two, the mechanic came out to tell me the car was done, and that a string had gotten tangled around the windshield wiper motor and popped the rocker arm off, and that it was now fixed. What a relief! I loved him intensely! And then, I went to pay for it and I loved him even more, because the bill was only $30. Yes. $30! They fixed the windshield wipers for free! Now, how cool is that? This love thing works!

Energy Contacting Others

Today's essay is targeted for a deeper understanding of and better experience with the Principle and Sutra Exercise for today (Tuesday).



Energy is continually created and exchanged through contact. Beings who are open, interact, intersect, interfuse, interlace, interchange, interest more than people who are closed - tight - isolated.

Healthy relationship is an inter-relationship, verbal or non verbal commun-i-cation. Vitality in a flow, to and fro, an invisible, feelable, connecting intercourse between energy beings, in various ways, on a multitude of levels.

Or for that matter, openness can become direct contact with any external-internal source, thoughts, feelings, food, flowers, work, play, anyway, it all depends on the degree of separation and unity.

At the opposite extreme, contracted, subject - object relationships are unconscious, automatic, and defensive, closed off. Not really alive or real because the current, the ongoing, ingoing, outgoing experience - energy - feeling is blocked off.

The excessively defensive individual is buying safety and security at the expense of minimizing vitality and life; only letting experience be partially or hardly at all, continuous contraction, supression, and inhibition, a trickling expenditure of energy with little or no return.

Contact on the other hand, for example, between two or more sensitive, aware, interconnecting beings is stimulating, recharging, regenerating. A perpetual, perpetuating glow, a flow that moves back and forth, that recycles, that nourishes. When this exchange becomess more fully open, there is less and less sense of separation. In stillness, activity, or conversation, the other ultimately becomes the self, and the self becomes the other, and what is, is.

Meditative love is only one of many ways, openings, to ultimately join with any - every - no - thing to become, to be, unity, consciousness, energy, fully with one's self.

In an I - thou flowing union, boundaries dissolve, and you - it are one. Whether it is contact with the sun, the ground, the sea, breathing, touching, people, emotions, contemplation, or action, it is all energy.

Contact is some degree of totality, and ultimately it can be at-one-ment, communion. You become the flow. This point is meditation, the experience, essence is tantra, realization that you are love, wisdom, all. The perfection that is, always was and always will be.

~from Energy Ecstasy
by Bernard Gunther