But this is not all. Pot Belly Breath This is the first and most common breathing techniques to any esoteric practice in the world. You do not need to sit with your legs crossed with the soles facing you from your thighs. This is nice if you have the body and the frame and flexibility. If your legs fall asleep, this does nothing good for your circulations and the focus on your breathing and meditation gets disrupted. But you did need to sit. You need to sit upright. Posture is something that absolutely necessary for you to breath properly and to communicate with your body. It is definitely useful for communicating to the world that you care for yourself and you are in charge of your self. You need to sit comfortably. If you are on the ground you can put the soles of your feet together or stick one or both of your legs straight out. If you sit in a chair sit with both feet on the ground, your thighs level and your back free from the back of a chair or a wall. This may take some getting use to, to find the right chairs so that your legs are not dangling, or not feeling like you have to hunch forward otherwise falling backwards. You need to sit straight up, from the top of your head, down through the center of your pelvis. Follow the back of your ear to the top of your head. This is where the plates of your skull come together. In yoga this is called the aperture of Brahma. If there was a string attached there and you were as straight as possible your spine should be straight down to your pelvis. There would be a line from the top of your through your torso to your perineum between your genitals and your anus. The next step is to have your shoulders separate and back. Not so far back that you hurt your back or is uncomfortable. However, your chest is naturally able to be out and full of air. You are to learn how to breathe from one muscle not over 400. The diaphragm is the one muscle that we breathe from birth. It is the most efficient muscle to breathe with. As people get older they have a tendency to breath from the chest. If you watch people, people who are emotional breath with their chest exclusively, and to try to get them to do anything else makes them exceptionally uncomfortable. With your chest out and open you will breathe with maximum capacity. You then relax your abdominal walls, your posture will support you with a minimal effort. To check how you breathe, you can put a hand on your stomach and the other on your chest. Practice until your chest stop moving. The first breathing is to breath in at a count of 4 and then out by 4. Extend it to 6 then 8 maybe you can get to 16. The breathing I want you to do is, breath in for a count of 4, hold your breath comfortably for a count of 4, then slowly breath out for a count of 4. Extend the count, the same way as before. If you find that you cannot comfortably hold your breath or breathe out for that count, bring the count down. What is this doing for you? You are relaxing most of the fascia in your body. You are working fascia that will radiate a flow of electrical charges to and from the center of your body. Your organs will relax. The complex flow of energy that comes from chest breathing is not flooding your body, and we have emotions to counter react every wave of electromagnetic activity that this would cause. It is a dynamic that we have developed an emotional attachment. It is a cycle of emotional activity. When you breath with your diaphragm you can break that cycle. When you have emotional activity we tighten up parts of our body, and breath differently. We do it without ever thinking about it. Body Awareness When you breathe with the Pot Belly Breath, the goal is relaxation but awareness. It is to be the awareness of you and your body, and to know the difference. The second goal is to understand yourself, without the body. This is not to say, killing oneself, or deny the body. However this is one of the first practices for Liberation or Moksha in Hindu or Buddhist to achieve nirvana and eventually, stay in the bliss of God being part of the supreme consciousness. But when or if you leave your body, you will know your body, and most importantly know what you are. Each part of your body you can control how energy flows through it, temper it, store it, or discharge it. It is through the awareness of the subtle electromagnetic properties of the fascia, the organs, bones and muscles, that we can change the dynamics these charges. Secondly, when you alter a charge and controlling it, with muscle tension you can align tissue, stop flows, and organize water molecules into a laminar stack. Such conditions are more than likely to organize hydrogen and other molecules to have dipolar moments that effect electro-weak effects. First thing to learn is to relax your body. When you are comfortable with your potbelly breath and it becomes a natural process, relax each part of body. Start from your toes and with each incremental breath, ascend up the body, foot, ankle, leg, knee, thighs, hips, lower abdomen, upper abdomen, back, upper back, torso, neck, fingers, palm, wrist, forearm, elbow shoulders, neck, jaw, ears, eye, and the crown of your head. At each in breath, take the sense of that part of the body up to the next part. At the hold breath, relax and detach. At the out breath be aware of that next part of the body. By the time you reach the crown of your head, it will be like a miniature self, sitting on or in the top of your head. This takes some months of practice; with diligence this is relatively easy. Start now. The part to still and quiet the mind is the harder part, but with simple things keep in mind, you can accomplish this. Stray thoughts will come to the mind while you are in this state. They will be clear or fuzzy. Patanjali ( a great yogi master and writer) describes the wrong thoughts, as dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations. There are others. This is the great opportunity to organize your thoughts. The first part is discernment and judgment. Judgment with each thought that comes to mind, order it. If the thought is your own, own it and tell yourself that you will think about it when you wish to. The thoughts that are not your own, say these are not mine, and dismiss them. The emotions and words of others that are not yours, rob them of the emotion, know where they come from and choose not to react to them. This is a great healing technique. You will have to process them eventually. But when you gain the strength of knowing yourself, and knowing that those processes and emotions don’t belong to you, you can choose to emote differently and change those processes. If you noticed, this is a tool for untangling your mind from the clutter and abuse, which you have accepted from others over the years. Once you have done this, the memory and emotions of abuse, neglect and a myriad of other things have an ever-lessening affect. The other thoughts that keep happening and which are persistent are your personal attachments. Here you must discern and discover why you have these attachments. Once you are aware of why they are in your life, you can place that thought by some label that you can manage it. As you choose to process information this way, you choose to be aware, and to ask questions about what you perceive and why. As you tidy and order the how, the where and why you feel and think about things you become aware of yourself. And let them go, albeit temporarily. You relax deeper and further. Impermanence, this concept is useful to detach yourself from many annoyances of the day, and things that we cling to. This concept helps you to think in a way that extends you far beyond your current lifetime. Consider this, as time goes on, work, cars, and houses will all go away. Even stone monuments many get worn away in time. Eventually all things will disappear. Even the earth will be a cinder when the sun becomes a red giant. What is important in the now? Each breath nourishing the body, the slowing heart rate, the body and mind becomes harmonious. To come back to your daily or normal awareness, take in breaths thinking of positive or God energy, or an aspect of nature that made you feel happy complete and invigorated, breathing into your miniature self slow expanding it back into your body. Use your potbelly breath, and then add after your four count out breath, an additional four count of holding your breath while your breath is out. When you do this imagine the energy being pushed and held to all parts of her body. As you are breathing out, imagine you are almost filling that miniature self with energy like filling a balloon filling your body. That additional four count breath focuses an awareness of holding your energy to all parts of your body. The positive or the highest good that you can imagine will change as you grow. This is practice; to connect with what you remember is wholesome and good. But I cannot quiet my mind it stays too busy. This is where you can use your mind. There are other techniques. Obviously they steady count usually for beginners starting with the number 4. Counting is helpful 4 in, 4 hold, think of what you want to attain, (god, goddess, alignment with the elements, etc.) 4 out that which you attained and reached out to no imagine being absorbed into the body, pushing bad stuff out. Then 4 on the end of the out breath, watching how and if the energy is held, and what is moving. You wait on the end of the out breath part until you manage the in breath, hold and out breath, repeat. Counting and focusing on energy like that (called bubble breath) and if on the expansion you are aware that you are expanding your sides, the kidney area and back, is called Bell breath. This is where you use brain, and get it trained. And like anything else it takes practice. As thoughts do arise, judge them. First are they your thoughts, if they are echoes from people, the day etc., and not yours dismiss them. These are not my thoughts. The thoughts that arise that are yours categorize these thoughts are yours and when you will think about them. Journal them, and pick one to focus one on after you sifted enough of them where you subconscious is ordering them. Categorize these thoughts, into pigeon holes or buckets. Give them a handle for you. Emotions, same thing, are they your feelings or images or echoes from others or their influences. Not mine, ... good bye. What is that feeling from? The question, now it is a thought linked with a feeling. Categorize it, and or journal it. Meditate on how you feel about it and pick a different feeling and think through from one feeling to another. This is training your mind not to be a prisoner to an emotion, and training your mind to switch to another emotion you have control over and have practiced thinking about it. This is useful for breaking emotional cycles in ones behavior and trains your mind to have control over the feelings and choose how you want to think about it. This teaches you self control, mentally and emotionally. This teaches you to order your thinking. And once you are able to change your feelings and link them with positive thought processes, you are now ready to quiet your mind more. This takes practices and may take months or or a year or so. Diaphragm breathing if you link this self control to diaphragm breathing, all you have to do is to choose to breath that way, and the control is turned on. As you develop this control you can work on quieting your mind, and what you may not realize also your emotions. The diaphragm breathing will stroke your vagus nerve and moderate your bodily activities and slow them down. Especially when you, your mind, conscious and subconscious knows that you will deal with the thoughts and feelings as they arise, you can put them in that deal with later box, and you will. You will find that you will be quieting your mind, emotion and your body. Now you can still use your mind, now that it has a subconscious and feeling connection. You just built it. Each breath, focus on one inch of your body from your toes to your heart, your fingers to your heart, and your heart to the top of your head. Feel how they feel, feel also what is you and not you, breath in you breath out what is not you. Feel the feeling of each part of you as it connects the next inch. Feel the changes as it flows through your body. Feel the rythym that flows through your body. Pay attention to what is you. All you have to do is have one diaphragm breath, or even if you practice the holds on the full or empty breath, you can feel what is not you. That is an energetic reading. It is a passive reading, and you can pay attention to what is you and the reaction to what is not you. Knowing your body is the baseline, and following what is not you and where that energy is from, develops your psychic ability. As you can see, your mind will always be active, busy but in a new constructive trained manner.