The Easy 5 Breath Meditation To Shift Your Life
Originally posted on Mar 07, 2020 on medium.com/@shamandao
Photo by Victor Garcia on Unsplash
Five deep breaths.
That’s it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. All it takes are five deep breaths to begin to center yourself. Close your eyes and focus on your breath.
Our breaths can transform our lives.
I got off a call last night with a client of mine who told me she wanted to begin meditating this week as soon as xyz, were in place. I understood where she was coming from, I’ve been there. So have my former or present clients when I’ve asked how their meditation practice had been coming along.
Life should be simple, so should meditation. There is no need to make sure we have the perfect yoga mat with a meditation pillow and Snatam Kaur playing in the background, we just have to begin.
With five deep breaths. Master your five deep breaths and build upon that into ten deep breaths. Make that a habit. Next thing you know, five minutes of meditation will become easy and look at that, you’re meditating without exerting much effort, willpower or much energy. It’s become second nature.
Consistency. Commitment. Repetition. Show up every day. This isn’t about showing up for anyone but you. You are the beautiful unique being amongst the 7.7 billion people in the world. Most are searching outside themselves but how many people go inward to understand their truths? Not many. Become an outlier.
Start small. Compound it into a repetition until it becomes a habit. And if you have any ‘bad’ habits, those can be undone because they were created by the reinforcing actions of….you guessed it, you. If you want to construct an intentional life, where you live on purpose, first you must deconstruct it.
“Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.” — Benjamin P. Hardy
My client wanted to start meditating because her doctor wanted to place her on medication to ‘fix’ her and the situation at hand. “I don’t want to be on drugs, Dao,” she said. I listened to her traumatic story and what she’s been through and is going through at this moment. A pain that flowed through her as a mother and wife, vibrated inside of me as her words shot through the air and into my heart.
I am a fan of modern medicine when used in its correct fashion. When we begin treating the symptom instead of understanding the root cause, that’s where I disagree. She recently went through a very energetic and emotionally draining period in her life. One that left her running on empty and on the verge of a mental and emotional breakdown. She became a shell of the soul.
There are some times and places in our lives we can never go back to, but we can always go back to our breath.
Five deep breaths to center ourselves. To go inward instead of allowing all that is outward to affect us.
I’m not a doctor, but I can dissect and deconstruct the issue in a multiple dimensional way to get to its core, so we can build the solution from there. Plus, I can also allow her past loved ones to speak through me to ease her transition back to her normal and grounded self.
For the first time in a long time, she laughed and I was able to sense her confidence making itself present again. A part of her soul fragmented off during this traumatic event, making it even more difficult for her to come to terms with reality.
Her case is different from other clients, as all cases are. But the truth remains the same in the common thread of our own meditation practice. Start it off easy with less expectations. Just five simple deep breaths.
“When you wake up in the morning, sit up in your bed. Take five deep breaths before you get off your bed. That’s it. Start with that. Do that until you’ve mastered those five deep breaths,” I told her before we hung up the phone.
Oh, by the way, how’s your meditation practice going?
Blessed be.