Observe your natural breath to bridge the mind and body and calm your nervous system through awareness.

English

This short meditation helps one forge a nonjudgmental relationship with their breath, recognizing it as life, a nervous system tool, and gift. This is also a part of a larger meditation series incorporated in this teacher's Reiki Level 1 and 2 Courses. (1)

Breath Awareness Exercise

Hello, my name is Eden, and I am a therapist, Reiki teacher, and meditation guide. Now whether you've found this meditation through one of my Reiki courses or just through the web of life, welcome. These meditations are intended to deepen your relationship to your intuition and gifts, and facilitate an understanding of your own internal landscape. Each meditation is also a tool that can be offered to yourself or a client, so I invite you to notice what shifts within you before, during, after, beyond the meditation, cataloging the effects with words and feelings and sensations, just letting yourself take note. Allow it to be personal and universal. Let's begin. Wherever you are, just allowing yourself to find a tall spine. Maybe that's laying down, maybe that is seated. Just allowing yourself to grow a little longer, a little taller. And if you'd like, you can close the eyes down. And just taking a moment here to relax any little muscles in the body that you notice are tense and that you don't need to maintain this posture. Can you just stack your body in such a way that the muscles can relax? And just turning your eyes inward now, even if they're still open, just moving your attention inward to your breath. And just taking a few rounds of breath to notice what the breath is doing. We release any need to change the breath, shift, judge, be prideful in the breath. We just notice the breath. Noticing where it naturally travels to. The depth, the width. Maybe you notice a texture of the breath or little hiccups within the breath as it moves in and out. Can you just notice the breath? This breath, letting every breath be new, meeting each one. The breath is such a tremendous tool because it is the only thing within our body that is always happening, even when we aren't thinking about it, asking it of ourselves. And we can control it. We can ask the breath to slow or to speed up, to go deeper, more shallow. We have control of the breath. This is how the breath is one of our biggest tools to link the body to the mind. The mind can control it, but the body is always letting it happen, even when our mind forgets about the breath. This breath, the one that's moving through you right now, this breath is the gateway in to calming the nervous system, to getting to know your inner landscape a little bit more, to instilling change in your reactions, in your body, in your mind. Without necessarily even needing to know exactly where that reaction comes from in your past. Relaxing the body, relaxing the breath tells our nervous system that we are safe again. And there is recalibration just in that small action over and over again. So again, just noticing this breath as it exists within you, no need for it to be any different than it is. However the breath is showing up for you, just taking a moment now to thank it. Thank you breath. This is life in its most pure form. Being with your breath, being with this life force. And then gently releasing any focus you have on the breath, maybe taking a moment to just wander around the body, maybe noticing any shifts or steadiness, changes, newness. Familiarizing yourself with yourself as you are right now. Maybe noticing anything moving through the mind as well. And then whenever you are ready to rejoin the day, gently blinking the eyes open or just letting the eyes refocus into the space around you. Welcome back.