The Breathing Exercise that Changed My Life. Thank you, John Amaral!
I’m doing a 7-day free challenge on line put together by the chiropractor and energy practitioner John Amaral. It’s called Fight-or-Flight to Flow, and yesterday was day 4.
What a day it was!
First of all, this guy put together all of these teachings, all of these videos, out into the world for free. If you want an individual session with him, the charge starts at $2,500. I know because I asked, and so free even more than usual feels like a big Thank you, Jesus! That’s a miracle.
The lessons in the first three days were tremendously informative and helpful, but today I am focusing on day 4 because I don’t want you to overwhelm you with information. This one exercise is powerful, and I think if you take the time to practice it, you might be as excited as I am about the potential for feeling like your very best self pretty much all of the time, if that’s a goal of yours.
So here’s the exercise:
Lie down and focus on your heart. Open your arms wide on the floor so that your heart has room to open. Know it’s there. See if you can feel it beating. (Heartmath has done a lot of research showing the vital communication between the heart and the brain, and that organization teaches the power of coherence. Dr. Joe Dispenza also teaches about this, and so if you’re more interested in learning about the power to be found in waking up the vital connection between the heart and brain, you can check out the links below.)
Know that the heart has its own magnetic field, a loving field. Breathe in and out and see if you can sense the energy your heart emits.
On the inhale, imagine that this loving field of energy expands from your heart past the walls of your body, your house, your town, your country, your planet, your universe. Imagine the love in your heart reaches for the edges of infinity. You are loving it all.
On the exhale, imagine all these places you have touched are sending love back to you on the energetic wave of your breath. Feel all this love enter your heart as you exhale.
The breathing pattern is interesting because it’s the opposite of how I am used to imagining love coming out of my heart—and there is something magical about sending energy out on the inhale—it’s sort of like swimming upstream, and my heart loved the exercise! My heart wanted to inhale and inhale and inhale! I finally had to yawn to get my intercostals and my diaphragm to stretch. I need more space to breathe!
Imagine loving EVERYTHING in the universe and beyond! Imagine saying YES to your life, to all life.
Here’s something I discovered: I have done brain spotting before with the therapist Lesli Johnson. It’s a way of working with past memories partly by paying attention to how the eyes move. When I was doing brain spotting I could feel little blips, like skips on a record, as my eyes tracked from one side of the room to the other. I felt similar blips or skips as I imagined my heart’s energy expanding out. I didn’t know WHAT it was skipping over, but just as when you take a broad knife and frost a cake, I could feel bare patches in my energy. Like: I’ll say yes to this but not that.
Off and on today, I have tried to breath this way to get the energy emanating from my heart smoothly flowing from the center of my heart out into infinity. The return is easier for some reason—perhaps partly because the return target is smaller: all that love aiming back on the snap of the exhale to my heart’s middle. It has been a such a sweet day! I feel so…content. Happy. Like a being reaching for wonder, touching it.
Here’s the thing: I think this exercise may be a way of addressing past memories or traumas without having to put them into language. I can feel the energy smoothing things out, telling my brain it can rewire, helping me get closer to a loving state, to the way I was born to be all those years ago.
What happened was that both my guts and my brain calmed in a way that neither usually did, my abdomen in particular, when I meditated and focused on releasing, letting go, healing, or just relaxing those parts of my body! What if the heart is the gateway to peace in the gut and brain?
Thank you, John Amaral, for your teachings and your generosity.
Happiness and wonder.
xoxo
