# BODY and BREATHING AWARENESS

## Touch – Body Awareness

Our sub-cultures' body awareness exercises prioritise the sense of touch; even how breathing feels by its tactile effects.

I believe animals sense and understand their bodies, mainly by smelling, tasting, listening, and seeing.

To start with, i want to review our ideas on body and breathing. Most of our modern ideas have been filtered by our adult abstract reasoning.

## Breathing

When i was young, every night before sleep, i would lie on my back, be aware of my breathing, feel my whole body expanding and contracting, and feel whole and at peace. This experience filled me with a wonderful feeling of reality and truth. (More true and real than anything i was meant to be learning in school.)

I thought that i breathed into and out of my belly, and this somehow caused the whole body to expand and contract. There was nothing mystical about it, i'd read nothing, i was just very naive.

In addition, the sensation was as though i was breathing in and out through my skin, rather than my nose; i knew this couldn't be true, but it felt so good that i just went with it.

My Childhood Experiences were so normal, habitual and enjoyable that i never even started questioning them.

## Science vs. Felt Reality

I was maybe lucky that i never had biology lessons. When i was around 17 (after leaving school) i started reading, and discovered much to my amazement, that we have lungs pumped by a diaphragm.

The anatomical science is good to know, but we seem to have forgotten the subjective feeling which has been at the foundation of every warm-blooded animals self awareness for at least 150 million years.

It is irrational to believe we breathe into the belly and that the whole body expands and contracts, but that's how it feels.

No animal or child could ever imagine that the air goes first down the wind pipe and then back up into the lungs.

To feel whole we need to be in touch with our feelings. Our culture's therapists know that it is necessary to acknowledge and work with the felt-reality of irrational emotions, in order to be whole. The same applies to irrational physical sensations and wholeness of body.

## Rediscovering the Basics

After long years of useless sidetracks, i started reconnecting with my childhood experiences again about 20 years ago... by observing animals.

Now i know it was not just as a result of breathing and the inner sense of touch – i was also aware with a sense of tasting, smelling, listening, and seeing inside my own body. I know this because i can recreate similar sensations by using all these senses.

Over the years i've spoken with a number of teenagers, who lie on their backs and experience a similar sort of peace and completion... it's a 'just being'.

It seems to occur sometimes spontaneously and then develop into a habit just because it feels good. It seems to stop when 'real' life begins, with the multiplicity of wants, sex, work, learning, and being an adult.

So, among the Questions for Children, the first i would love parents to ask their two to ten-year-olds is: "when you breathe, where does the breath go in your body?"

Contact is welcome with anyone, but particularly anyone who else who remembers, or still has naive experiences of whole-body-breathing.

Support Page
My Childhood Experiences

Please continue with Seeing With Closed Eyes

Back to Chapter Seven : Creative Dozing
Back to THE PANORAMA SENSES Priority Pages