Posted by finelinebob on August 17, 2006, at 1:31:34
In reply to Therapist vacation week, posted by Tabitha on August 16, 2006, at 23:40:35
Breathe.
Get rid of any distractions -- turn off the TV, close the office door or take a break if you live in cubeland and leave for 15 minutes. If you can't get rid of them, get so many of them they fade into white noise (I work near Union Square in NYC -- a perfect place for generating white noise).
I'm no yogi or anything like that, so I'm not gonna say chant something or empty your mind. That sort of thing takes years to learn anyway if you want to do it well, so just breathe and let your breathing fill your thoughts.
How fast are you breathing? How slow can you go?
Where does the air come from? Where does it leave? All the meditation teachers and physical trainers and other breathing experts I've heard say in through the nose, out through the mouth. Give it a shot, or turn it on its head. So long as you keep breathing.
How do you start? Do you breathe up from your collar bones? I always thought that was the way to breathe deeply since you get to puff out your chest if you do that and, being a man myself, that looks rather manly man-ish ... until a tai chi teacher reminded me that we use our diaphragm more than anything to breathe. So try breathing down into your stomach. Then slow it down. Then add breathing up from the collar bones to catch the top of your lungs, too. And slow down some more. But keep breathing.
Now, just as you've got yourself breathing as fully and as slowly as you can, get it all out of you. Drop your collar bones. Push your diaphragm back up into your chest. Slowly. Then get ready to breathe again, deeply and slowly.
When you've got that handled, do this: when your lungs are full of air, pause a moment. No, don't stop breathing, don't hold your breath, don't tighten back up trying to see how long you can pause. Just pause and think for a second or just a millisecond what a wonderful, marvelous thing it is to be able to just breathe without having to worry about anything else.
If you get that far, you'd better check your watch or whatever to see if you've "overdone" it. If so, then whoever "needed" you will just have to deal. If you have more tme, take a look around you for some more marvelous, ordinary things. Things you wouldn't notice unless you looked for them.
Or you can go back to breathing again.
poster:finelinebob
thread:677312
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060808/msgs/677328.html