Week 5 - Meditation (Breathing)

I accidentally did Wednesday’s assignment on Tuesday. Forgive me.

I made an effort today to pay attention to my breathing. Know what the problem is though? Once you pay attention to your breathing, you start breathing differently. It’s like saying, “Don’t think about an elephant.” I got you, didn’t I? But I tried…

In a team meeting with a parent today, I found myself getting dangerously close to dozing off. While in this state I took short, big deep breaths through my nose, followed by long, slow exhales (also through my nose). This is how I breathe whenever I’m really tired. I’ve noticed it before. I’m no physiologist so I couldn’t begin to guess why, but it is a very relaxing, soothing way to breathe for me, despite the fact that I know it’s “wrong.”

Then, I checked my breathing after a barrage of angry students came to see me having just received their progress reports. I wish I could have paid attention to my breathing while those kids were in the room yelling at me, but I was a little distracted at the time. Instead, I caught myself the second after. At this point, I was taking a lot of long, slow breaths in through my mouth that felt like the reached deep down into my lungs. Like my sleepy breaths from above, I find these soothing. Even as I relive them now I can feel them reaching deeper into my chest and really filling my lungs more than my typical breathing. There’s something about these deep mouth breathes that makes me feel healthy and alive, like I’m getting all the oxygen I need. Maybe it was a direct response to a short period of time where my breathing was impeded by stress. Maybe when the kids weren’t in the room I wasn’t breathing enough at all, and my body was reacting.

Finally, I was just doing some reading and I was trying to pay attention to my breathing at the same time. I ended up losing track of what I was reading, but doing a really nice job taking long breaths in through my nose, and out through my mouth (the way I had always been taught). Again, SO relaxing. I think that reading puts me in a relaxed, meditative state anyway, so once there it was really easy and natural to adopt “correct” breathing patterns.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that attending to breathing is relaxing in and of itself. Much like waves crashing in and out or white noise on the TV, it’s a smooth, uninterrupted pattern that seems to sooth. How could this apply to dialogue? Well, if the sound of even breathing can relax me, I assume it would do the same for others. Leaving breaks when speaking can give people time to breathe and to hear your breath. This chapter talked a lot about the importance to taking time to let ideas float out there and the importance of silence in a dialogue, and maybe modeling good breathing habits, or even taking breaks mid-thought to breathe more deeply, could allow some of those spaces to grow and be filled with something comforting, thus improving the lines of communication.