Diaphragmatic Breath: Regulating Stress, Facilitating Meditation with Nikolas
21.09 20:30-22:00
A deep calm breath clears and opens our body and mind. Its patient rhythm steadily dissolves tensions and entanglements, leaving ready clarity only. It’s essential for both our stress regulatory system and transformative mindfulness meditation. It is the breath that enables us to relax all awake into the given.
In this workshop, we will practice diaphragmatic breathing that allows us to go deep by relaxing. With Taoist and Zen techniques, also used in apnea-diving, we will study the relationship between the breath and the mind’s activity and learn to send the breath into the lower belly, the hara.
Diaphragmatic, abdominal breathing will strengthen your meditation practice and help you calm yourself when stress overwhelms in daily life. The breath, the Buddha said, can lead us all the way. We follow.
„When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is limitless.
We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door.“
– Shunryu Suzuki, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind