That last sentence is full of judgement: You are beating yourself up for not being good at breathing.Enchanter wrote:Robysue, I will read over your whole post in a bit. But I saw where you said to just breathe and not judge. But that is what I tried to do. I'd just sit there and notice myself. But the only thing that came about was I would notice how I wasn't good at it and notice how bad it made me feel.
But there's no right way or wrong way to breathe if you are NOT forcing yourself to breathe. Whatever way your body wants to breath is GOOD ENOUGH. Your job is to simply notice it without judging.
On any given day when I'm doing conscious relaxation I will notice the some of following things without judging them:
- Today my breathing is kind of irregular. Today my left nosrtil is completely blocked. Today my throat is scratchy every time I inhale, but it's not as scratchy as when I exhale. Today the breathing is very rhythmic. Today the breathing is shallow. Today I'm doing a lot of chest breathing. Today my exhalations are longer than my inhalations. Today my inhalations are about the same as my exhalations. Today my breathing is coming from the diaphragm. Today it's easier to exhale than inhale. Today I'm sleepy and I think I just snored.
Read that list carefully. Objectively speaking some of the patterns I notice are positive patterns. Objectively some are negative patterns. But when I'm doing relaxation, I don't worry about whether I'm noticing positive or negative patterns in my breathing. I just note what "is" without judging it or trying to fix it. (With the exception of snoring in a public yoga class; which really makes relaxation hard because I lose my focus due to worrying about the snoring.) And usually, but not always, by the end of the ten minutes of relaxation, my breathing has changed without any conscious effort on my part: When I manage to really relax my body and all my muscles, my breathing naturally slows down, becomes more regular, and becomes more diaphragmatic. But some days I just don't get as fully relaxed or there's something else going on (like allergies) that prevents my breathing from ever getting to slow, regular, deep, diaphramatic breathing. And guess what? On those days, I just accept that I didn't get as fully relaxed and my breathing was what it was.
In other words, I don't judge my breathing. And I don't judge myself based on the objective quality of my breathing. Judging my breathing is pointless: All it would do is make me feel worse on the days that the breathing is somewhat irregular or shallow or coming more from my chest than my belly. The breathing is what it is, and as long as I allow it to relax as much as it can relax on any given day, that allows my body to relax as much as it can. And that's the goal: Getting the body to relax as much as it will naturally relax on any given day. Some days the body will relax more thoroughly and more easily than on other days. That doesn't mean some days are successes and some are failures. It just means that my body is functioning differently on some days.
These are signs that you are trying too hard to control the breathing AND what you want to get out of the breathing AND that you are allowing yourself to JUDGE what you are noticing about your breathing and your body AND that you are allowing your judgment about your breathing to tell you how you should feel about the whole experience.It would be great if I could notice how much it's helping me. All I noticed was that I couldn't inhale and exhale evenly or easily, no matter how much I noticed. It's a vicious cycle.
You have to be patient. You have to learn how to NOT judge. You have to learn how to NOT dictate what you want to achieve in the relaxation process before hand. And you have to realize that learning how to relax and how to breathe without judging while relaxing is a process that never fully ends. It's NOT like learning a new technique in weight lifting where you can expect real mastery after a finite amount of time. The point of relaxation and breathing (without judging) is to learn to listen to what your body has to tell you today. And what your body needs to tell you today will likely be different than what your body needs to tell you tomorrow or what it needed to tell you yesterday.
If you aren't inhaling and exhaling evenly or easily, that's ok: Just note it without judging. And learn to notice it without trying to fix it. Over time (as in weeks and months) the breathing will more than likely start to even out and become deeper as you really learn to relax your whole body. But as long as you're worrying or thinking about problems while trying to relax, the breathing is going to reflect that tension. And you may find that you can't turn your mind off just because you're trying to relax or meditate. (That happens to me a lot.) And when that happens, it's important to simply notice, but not JUDGE, that you're having trouble turning off the voice in your head and allowing your whole mind to focus on what your body is physically doing and how your body is physically feeling while you are lying down completely relaxed.
Letting go of the desire to "Judge" the breathing and the quality of the relaxation can be as hard (or harder) than learning the mechanics of doing the relaxation itself.
The point of relaxation is not to "make the breathing great". The point of relaxation is to learn what your body has to tell you today about how it's feeling and what it needs.See some people all they have to do is take notice of their breath and they start breathing great.
And it's not that simple. Even for the people who make relaxation look that simple. No matter how many times you do conscious relaxation and no matter how comfortable you are with doing it, there are days where things are going on in your life that make it really tough to focus on your breath and to get the body relaxed. And you notice the breathing has all kinds of strange patterns that usually aren't there. And the muscles just won't fully relax. And your brain just won't shut up the internal conversation and focus on the breathing. But those are the days that you get the most out of relaxation: Even though it may objectively look like a "failure", your body more than likely got more out of the less than perfect relaxation session than usual because your body was holding in a lot more tension and stress than usual.
