I’ve been meditating for a bit now, and I’ve started to notice, my regular breath seems . . . weak.
I know part of meditating means just observing your breath, and that’s what I’m trying to do, but it seems like I feel better breathing through my mouth and when I breath through my nose, I just feel a little weaker.
It’s interesting because I didn’t notice this before. I never really thought much about my breathing before but if someone asked me, I just told them I was a mouth breather and ended it there.
It’s interesting when I realized that the reason I may be a mouth breather is because I’m compensating for the strength that my lungs would need in order to breath through my nose.
Breathing is important because it makes us aware of the natural fight-or-flight response of our bodies and the relaxation that comes during the exhalation.
We are designed to experience both tightness and freedom, and this design is ingrained down to our breath, probably the most common activity most of us commit to.
That’s probably why meditation practice starts with the breath, since if we don’t learn to master the one activity that really incorporates most of the time we spend on Earth—even during sleeping :o—how are we supposed to be able to focus and get things that are less important done?
Increasing my lung capacity is where I’m sort of going with this. Stamina training will help me breath with strength instead of weakness and I’m sure that improving my breathing will help all other areas of my life as well, from intellectual pursuits to athletic.
I’m most likely going to do this through HIIT training in the gym, but also through continuing to maintain this awareness of the breath—which will automatically set in motion an improvement of lung capacity, just because I’m focusing on it—as well as some sort of breathing exercise, like apnea training which is what I’m experimenting with right now.
Breathing seems . . . important, and I’m definitely going to be spending more time to get this done right 🙂
Raghav Mehra 