By Rachel Tracy
Today as I wake, I am grateful for breath. Breath is the vehicle for life and for transformation. It is the wisdom wind of purification and with awareness can transform anything or breathe life into it.
I am grateful for breathwork. While at the Paititi Institute we worked with our breath from the Tibetan lineages and Andean lineages. From the Andean perspective, we worked with breath consciously to shake out any held fear or disturbing emotions in the body. We breathed through the centers with specific shaking movement as a means to help clear and reset the nervous system. From the Tibetan perspective, we breathed together rhythmically to a mother and child drum beat, returning back to our true nature and purity. Returning back to the child being held in the mothers womb. A true remembrance and cathartic process.
I am grateful for practices like Tonglen. This is the practice of breathing in hard feelings and emotions and then breathing out with the feeling or emotion that will create balance. For instance, breathing in anger and out with peaceful calmness; or breathing in with dark and heavy and out with light. This practice showed me so clearly we have the capacity through the heart and relaxation with breath as a vehicle to purify and transform anything with ease. It showed me that with conscious breath and acceptance, we all are able to be vehicles of transformation.
This also works the other way. In the Bon tradition there is a practice called the 9 breaths of purification. If you look up Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, you can find him leading the practice. It is an amazing balancing and centering approach where we breath through the three channels to purify ourselves of impurity’s and allow them to be dissolved into pure consciousness. Breathing in the wisdom breath and out with disturbing emotions. Here our breath is wisdom wind and can purify anything.
Of course sitting and focusing on the breath in meditation like the shamatha practice in the Shambhala lineage allows us to notice thoughts as they arise and then choose to return back to our source of life, the breath. In this practice we notice thought in a feeindly way, allow them to be and then returning back to the breath as the point of awareness. This practice calms the mind and returns the practitioner back to center. It’s an act of being with and also in taming the mind.
One more amazing meditation I learned from an elder and wisdom keeper named Alaya Love is the heart breath meditation. This is breathing and tracing the breath through it’s cycle and focusing on the heart and high heart. It allows us to find that space of consciousness between the breath. Also focusing on the heart while breathing deeply brings our awareness back to a space of love and from that space we can radiate this out into all of humanity and become the sources of light we truly are. It brings us back to our infinite source of wisdom.
What I’ve seen is that across all wisdom lineages there is a practice of using breath as a conscious tool for truth and transformation. So thank you breath for the healing. Thank you breath for the transformation. Thank you for being a super power and direct access to source! Thank you breath for bringing life. Let us breathe together as one humanity.
With gratitude for this great channel.
Bio:
Rachel Tracy is a student, practitioner and teacher of wisdom traditions and lineages from around the world. Through her own transformational healing process, Rachel studied with many lineages and teachers globally and is now a networker of wisdom and healing modalities and traditions.