Meditation Skill 00

Slow, diaphragmatic breathing creates a gap in the stress response, calming the conditions that support the experience of stress and anxiety and creating a relaxation response that carries over into daily life. With regular practice, breathing with your diaphragm throughout the day will become normal for your body, and you will find that your reactivity in stressful situations will become much lower.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone (set to Do Not Disturb) and place it behind you. 
• Meditation Length: Meditate for 20 minutes daily.
• Benefits: This Meditation Skill will teach you how to desensitise your mind's tendency to respond with stress and anxiety in daily life. It will also help you make diaphragmatic breathing a natural part of your practice, in preparation for mindfulness of breathing.

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Explanation:

• YouTube: Video Instructions.
• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• A supportive 14-Day Introduction Course to Calm can be found here.

I recommend practising this meditation to retrain your stress-breathing patterns and lower the experience of stress and anxiety for 3-4 weeks or until you naturally breathe in your belly, rather than in your chest. This breathing technique changed my life and the lives of many other people who were ready to develop an understanding of their mind and body to remove the conditions for stress and anxiety.

Tip: For insight (understanding), be curious about how breathing in your chest is related to stress and how it makes you feel. Also, explore slow, diaphragmatic breaths in your belly and how they transform the feeling of stress into an experience of relaxation and calm.

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Meditation Instructions:

1: Learn how to breathe with your diaphragm.

Start by lying on the floor. If needed, use a pillow under your head and a rolled blanket under your knees. Place both palms below your belly button, pressing slightly inwards so that you can feel the movement of your belly as you breathe. 

Slowly raising and lowering your abdomen will cause your diaphragm muscle to move and strengthen. Lay down and try these steps: 

• Gently raise your palms away from your body by slowly extending the lower part of your abdomen upwards. Then, lower your palms by slowly lowering your abdomen. 
• Next, notice that air is drawn in through your nose when your abdomen rises and expelled out again as your lower abdomen falls. 
• Take five slow, relaxing breaths by slowly raising and lowering your abdomen. Do this a few times until you are comfortable with the movement.

2: Gently slow down your breathing rate.

Slowing down the movement of your abdominal breaths will slow down your breathing rate, increasing carbon dioxide reabsorption and increasing the calming effect.

• Take ten more relaxing breaths, but slow down the raising and lowering of your abdomen. Keep this movement relaxed so that it feels comfortable.

3: Breathe from your abdomen into your chest.

Once you have done ten repetitions of breathing with your abdomen, the next stage is to learn to breathe from your abdomen up into your chest.

• Bring one palm to the top of your chest, leave the other below your belly button.
• Slowly breathe in from your belly button, extending your ribs out slightly and allow the breath to fill your chest like a balloon.
• At the end of the breath, allow your whole body to relax with a slow out-breath.
• Repeat ten times with slow, gentle breaths, free from strain.

4: Lie still and allow your breathing to happen naturally.

This final stage of lying still and doing nothing is important in lowering anxiety as it reinforces diaphragmatic breathing and will teach your body and mind how to relax deeply.

• Stop controlling your breathing, allow it to find its own rhythm and pace.
• If your mind wants to control your breathing, distract yourself by being aware of different parts of your body touching the floor.
• Lie still and allow your breathing to happen naturally. As you do, be aware of slow belly breathing happening by itself. Notice its calming effect.

Tip: At this stage of meditation, thinking about the past and future, mind wandering and falling asleep are not a problem; your main aim is to gently teach your body to breathe with your diaphragm muscle to settle stress and anxiety that may be present when you begin your meditation.

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1. Experiencing struggle and strain. 

• Be careful of over-effort or strain. Anxiety creates the desire to try to achieve, to control things within our lives, including something as fundamental as breathing. If you notice any struggle or strain, then stop what you are doing for a short while and allow yourself to relax before starting over. Breathing in the lower belly is enjoyable if it is done in a relaxed and gentle way. Avoid the urge to overinflate your belly or to try harder; slow, gentle movement is the key. Feel your way into this simple exercise. When the rhythm is correct, it will feel good, and the feeling of relaxation and calm in your body and mind will increase. This will offer you direction in your meditation. 

2. Feeling light-headed.

• Because you are not used to breathing so slowly, you may experience some light-headedness. Whenever you experience this, stop the exercise for a while and allow yourself to stay still until the symptoms settle down. Generally, after 10 seconds, this feeling will settle, leaving you feeling calmer & more relaxed. Once it has settled, you can resume your training. With regular practice, this light-headed feeling will gradually lessen and no longer happen. ***See your doctor if light-headedness persists*** 

3. Feeling like you don't have enough air.

• If stress breathing is normal for you, then you may feel as if you are not getting enough air when you slow your breathing rate. If this feeling arises, it's okay to take a few extra breaths to settle it down. Once your belly breathing movement slows down, the feeling of needing more air will gradually go away.

4. Your breathing feels tight.

• If you feel a tightness in your lower chest when you breathe in, you may be breathing in from the top of your chest downwards in an attempt to push your breath down into your belly. This will not work. The diaphragm muscle is dome-shaped and cannot be pushed down; it needs to be pulled. 
• It can be helpful to think of your diaphragm as an upside-down plunger. When you pull the handle downward the plunger will suck in air, as you push it back up it expels it. To engage your diaphragm muscle, raise the lower part of your belly slowly upwards rather than trying to push air down into your belly from your chest. Placing your palms below your belly button will allow you to feel your belly movement as you breathe.

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Progression in mindfulness of breathing can be accurately tracked by observing your ability to access the Meditation Markers. This can be done by developing insight into their associated Meditative Hindrances and changing the conditions that support them.

Insight: We begin mindfulness of breathing by creating the conditions that support Marker 00: Diaphragm Breathing, to lower the experience of stress, by developing insight into and weakening the conditions that support Hindrance 00: Stress Breathing.

Meditative Hindrance: 

Stress Breathing (00).

Short, shallow stress breathing in the chest.

Stress breathing refers to taking short, shallow breaths in the chest when the stress response is activated, preparing the body to respond to danger by fighting or fleeing. When we are exposed to stressful situations repeatedly or have experienced trauma in our lives, our stress response can habituate, and stress breathing can become our natural way of breathing. This habituation puts our mind and body in a hypervigilant and hypersensitive state, making the development of samatha calm very difficult in meditation. It is because of this that many meditators have trouble being mindful of their breathing. By changing our breathing patterns from stress breathing to rest and digest (diaphragmatic) breathing, our mind more easily enters a relaxed state, and the pleasure of letting go in meditation becomes more accessible.

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Antidote: Be curious about what it means to find enjoyment in taking slow, gentle breaths with your belly. Be curious about finding the sweet spot for you, where breathing with your belly feels free from strain and also feels like a nice and pleasant thing to do. This sweet spot, where you know how much to fill your belly and how slowly to move, is different for everyone. This is why you need to be curious about finding your sweet spot. A sign that you have found the right formula for you is that it will feel nice to do, your body and mind will relax, and after doing a series of belly breaths, your body will continue to breathe within your belly, by itself, for the rest of your meditation.

Tip: When retraining stress breathing patterns to diaphragmatic breathing, it is important to acknowledge that you are working with a habit. Because habit plays a role in stress and anxiety, you may find at first that diaphragmatic breathing (in your belly) only occurs for a short time after your meditation before it switches back to stress breathing (upper chest) again. This is normal and a part of the process that requires clear yet kind repetition of how you would like your breathing to happen throughout the day. When working with a habit, it's essential to maintain positivity and celebrate small successes, such as feeling a few moments of relaxation during meditation, rather than dwelling on what's wrong. This approach will only lead to increased stress and anxiety. 

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• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation on how to do it.

It can be helpful throughout the day, to ask yourself one question:

"Where am I breathing now? Is it in my chest or my belly?"

If your breathing has shifted up into your chest, then the stress response has been activated. This is okay; stress breathing and sensitivity to stress reactions are habits that can develop over time. Being a habit, there is an advantage, and that is that with deliberate exercises, you can change it.

How to reengage diaphragmatic breathing.

If you notice you are feeling stressed or anxious:

1. First, ground yourself by squeezing one hand in the other or feeling your feet on the ground.
2. Then place palms just below your belly button.
3. Press in slightly to feel the movement as you breathe.
4. Slowly extend your belly outwards, as you did in your seated meditation, to draw breath in through your nose.
5. Slowly lower your belly back to allow the breath to go out through your nose.
6. Breathe in and out in this way slowly for five in-and-out breaths, allowing your body to relax each time the breath goes out.
7. After five belly breaths, wait ten seconds and observe any changes within your mind, body and breathing for understanding (insight). This will help you refine your technique and gain insight into the relationship between your breathing patterns throughout the day and feelings of stress and anxiety.

Apply this method a few times per day. Not obsessively, but by just checking in at key times to see how you are feeling today.

Tip: Stress and anxiety can become habituated, and when habituated, they can perpetuate themselves. The key here is to learn how to relax through your breathing, creating small gaps in this stress habit. By noticing when you start stress breathing and bringing your breath from your chest by reengaging your diaphragm, you will begin to decondition the habit of feeling stressed during the day. When supported by the breathing pattern retraining in Meditation Skill 00, the experience of stress and anxiety will gradually weaken.

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You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 01: Body Relaxation when:

• You experience a feeling of relaxation and ease after taking slow breaths in your belly, and diaphragmatic breathing, in your belly, happens naturally during your meditation and for a while after you have finished meditating.

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