25 February

The health benefits of good breathing are really amazing. The problem with being told to ‘breathe deeply’ though is that you kind of have to stop what you’re doing to do the deep breathing. There’s a reason you weren’t breathing deeply in the first place, that’s the thing you need to address. What I realised is that breathing is part of everything else you’re doing. You hold your breath or hyperventilate when your whole body is doing something badly. YOU are held, not just your breath. If you let yourself be aware of what all of your body is doing, when you do anything, you’ll start to notice these patterns of tightenings. The magic is, that awareness is all you need. You don’t need to try to un-tighten yourself, if you do that you’ll zero in on the areas that feel tight, as if they’re separate to the rest of you. They’re not, they’re part of a wider pattern of balance. Just like noticing you’ve been leaning on one leg makes you automatically shift your balance, all of those tightenings will right themselves, if you keep that awareness of your whole body in all of your activities. And your breath will return to its natural slow depth.