breathing – Thoughts From The Passenger Seat

In the title are three types of meditations I do in my Peloton daily meditation. 10 minutes in the morning and the same meditation for a week with a different instructor.

I’m not crazy about breathing meditation because I feel like my breathing is wacky and on any given day, I have trouble with deep breaths. I call it Anxiety Breathing and have had it all my life. I panic when I can’t draw in a really deep breath. Most days, I’m fine. It must be all these meditation classes I’m taking!

Funny story #1 – I would be in church and would be breathing just regular breaths and I would go to inhale deep and if I couldn’t I would panic (internally, but there were plenty of times in life when I was little I’d freak out at inappropriate moments!), and just say over and over, “ok, wait, wait, just breath and they next one try!”. Sometimes it worked sometimes it didn’t.

Funny story #2 – we took swimming lessons at our town pool growing up. I think it was the Intermediate group we were being taught the crawl. You know that one where you take a breath and stick your head in the water and then turn your head and exhale, inhale? Well, I would inhale, do a few strokes and when I would turn my head, I would never breathe in or out! I would just continue to hold my breath and then flounder about. No coordination whatsoever!

Unfortunately, last week and this week are 10 minute classes of breath work! A lot of deep inhales and sighing out of my mouth, along with box breathing this week.

Maybe it’ll make me a better breather. But I’ll never be a better swimmer.

This week’s mediation with Dennis Morton on Peloton is again, visualization. I think it’s all month actually!

He says to imagine a door – make it double doors – and as you breathe in bring yourself closer to the door. As you breathe out, the doors open and you go through them. Over and over again.

This is hard for me because I just want those doors to open and to come out on the other side, like to a babbling brook, not to another door!

My doors are big doors, with rivets framing the edges and a metal pad where you would put your hand to push it. Sometimes they are blue and remind me of the double doors leading out to the stairwell at my elementary school. There’s a rectangle window in each one so you can see if someone is on the other side.

Sometimes they are doors like in my mudroom, stained wood with rain glass in the window panes you can’t see the mess on the other side. Except they open out, and would crack me in the head.

What would your door look like if you wanted to bust through one while meditating?

Tag: breathing

Breathing, Meta, and Mantra

Opening Doors