Gaining distance from stress through breathing

A friend recently asked me the following question. "I hear meditation can help relieve stress? Do you have any info on how to do it properly so it's effective?" It is true that meditation can relieve stress. There are many forms and styles and they all work to one extent or another. There are some purely for relaxation and others for enlightenment. I will share with you one meditation that I use with some of my clients to help reduce stress.

A useful approach to this meditation is to think of the mind like a ship sailing in the sea. Sometimes the seas are calm, but most of the time the seas are full of waves from the storms that come and go constantly. So when the sea is calm its easy to navigate and sail a ship even with the occasional rogue wave, but when it is choppy or full of monstrous waves it is very difficult to maintain control. This is what happens with our minds and how we respond to stress. If we are calm to begin with, and something stressful in our world happens, its easy to sail on through. But if we are agitated and stressed out to begin with, we are in no position to sail on through but are at the mercy of the storm. So we are going to use meditation to calm the sea of our mind.

We first put our attention on our breath. We use the breath to calm down the mind. We feel the air at the base of our lungs and follow it up to the top of our throat. We then watch it as it goes out through our nose down to the floor below, just about to touch the ground. Then we watch as we inhale that same air comes back up into our nose and back down our throat. Finally it reaches the bottom of our lungs. We then start the whole process over again.

Each time we do this we count( in our heads). So the first time we count one, then breathe in and out, now 2, and so on up to 10. Once at ten we start back over again. We do this 3 times. Then stop, take a short break and continue if we like, if not we carry on with our day.

I could spend hours with someone explaining how to do this. It is simple yet very complex. The key is just to do it. Don't try to get it right or perfect, just do it.

This will calm down the mind. The more you do it, the calmer your mind will be during the day. If you do it a lot, you will start to notice a permanent change in your ability to handle stress.

It is also great to do right before you are about to go into a situation you know will be stressful.

Til next time.

Wishing you the best,

Dr. John Zipp