Breathing

Breathe in through your nose and draw your breath down into the area just below your navel, allowing your stomach to expand as you breathe (Baby Breath) and filling your lungs entirely with each breath before exhaling through your nose. Breathing is the most important part of meditation and Kundalini Awakening.

From our birth until death we breathe more or less continually, yet for the most part we do it without any awareness of our breath and its effects on us, and believe it or not most people in the western world do it wrong!

Take a moment right now and feel your breath. Pay attention to the air as it flows in through your nostrils and down into your lungs. Don't think about anything or do anything other than just breathe.

1. Are you taking a relatively shallow breath and just filling the upper lobes of your lungs?

2. Does your stomach move out as you breathe?

3. Do you feel the bones of your ribcage expanding and opening with each breath?

For most people the answer to 1 is YES and the answers to 2 and 3 are NO so lets expand this exercise a bit.

Draw your breath down to a point about 2 inches below your navel (the body's center of gravity). When you do this you'll feel your stomach expand and push out in front of you. Most westerners usually keep their stomach pulled in and their chest out, so if you do this you'll have to relax your abdomen. Just take a moment and be aware of your breath as it flows down into your center.Now as you inhale and draw your breath down, also let your ribcage expand. You'll feel your floating ribs at the bottom of your ribcage spread and move, and you may get a few pops out of your spine also. Now just take a few moments and breathe this way. Don't think or let your mind wander, just breathe.If you've never meditated before then congratulations, you just did! It's exactly that simple.

There are many benefits to proper breathing. The extra oxygen in your system means that your heart doesn't have to beat as fast, which lowers your pulse and your blood pressure. Drawing the breath down into your center also helps to massage your internal organs, providing more oxygen to them as well as helping to release the accumulated stresses that build up there. The long term health benefits are immeasurable and have been repeatedly proven for thousands of years.

Breathing is by far the most important part of the kundalini awakening exercises, although it sounds so simple. Paying attention to the breath is the beginning of opening up your awareness and it's use in meditation is seen in every culture on the planet.

Take some time to practice this, as it's the foundation for everything that comes next. If you have to dedicate your meditation time to breathwork for awhile then that's good, as we all proceed at our own pace.

I recently read a translation of some of Jesus' teachings from the original Aramaic (the language he actually spoke, although he apparently wasn't literate) and it was very interesting to me that in Aramaic they used the same word for wind, breath and spirit. Those with a Chi Kung background might find it interesting to take another look at the New Testament and insert the word breath every time you see the word spirit.

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Robert Morgen is a Reiki Master who currently holds aBlack Belt in Hoshin Roshi Ryu. He's the founder ofthe Kundalini Awakening Discussion Group, the DruidsCircle Discussion Group and the (offline) DruidsCircle in Lakewood, CO. You can find more info on allthese at; www.druidscircle.info

He's also the founder and Executive Director of the Windhaven Foundation for Sustainable Living.

He writes a regular column on subtle energy for Fight Times Magazine and a twice monthly column on Kundalini Awakening at Alumbo.com.

In addition to teaching about energy work and Kundalini Awakening he donates time to teach about Renewable Energy, Alternative Building and Creating Sustainable lifestyles in various Public Schools.

He travels and teaches as much as possible and you can find out how to attend one of his Kundalini Awakening seminars at his website at; www.windhavenco.org

His new book "Personal Mastery: Develop Your True Inner Power By Awakening Your Kundalini" is now available at http://www.lulu.com/RobertMorg