Don't breathe out, just let it go

Breathing is one of those things that we do every day, but around which a surprisingly large amount of things happen. This is an area of great interest to meditators as we get to unpick our glossy perceptions of how breathing works. We might think that we are sucking air in by somehow gathering the air molecules in through our noses and mouths by force of will, but, in reality, our internal muscles pull down our diaphragm creating a vacuum into which our lungs expand - drawing air in as it does so. You might find this is at odds with how you think breathing works - an interesting place to start your investigations. Breathing out is simply the relaxation of the muscles allowing the diaphragm to push the against the lungs and squishing the air out again.

Once we accept this view of breathing (the contraction and relaxation of muscles) then we can get a good deal of bonus relaxation on the out breath. There's no need to push it out, we can simply let our muscles relax and allow it out.  We can attach some nice ideas to this out breath - we feel ourselves letting go, giving up control, releasing, calming, relaxing. If we keep our minds focused on this relaxing idea of out breath, then our minds begin to let go too. We feel everything relax. We might get a sense of joy at being able to do this simple relaxing. This will further enhance the experience. Then pleasure might start to arise out of the entire body all by itself and then we are nicely on our way to something wholesome and refreshing.


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