Love and Breath

Two weeks ago, on Valentine’s Day, I had a chance to do a church service with my old friend Gregg Anderson. Gregg is the chaplain at the Aspen Chapel, and several times a year I join him in a dialogue on a theme, and weave it together with music.  Since it was a holiday to celebrate love, we took my song “Heart of Love” as the theme, and set out on the exploration to see what we could find out about the heart of love.

 

I won’t begin to attempt to define love, but I spent some time thinking, feeling and meditating on what I know about love.  Gregg said he believes it is part of the logos of life, essential to the fabric of creation, and that it exists, with or without us…in essence, love is God.  I came back to Bucky Fuller’s saying that “love is metaphysical gravity”, that which holds us together.  Martin Luther King, Jr., in his great speech “Beyond Vietnam” (which he delivered on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was killed), talked about love as “not some sentimental and weak response, but the force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life—the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”  King knew that love is the essence of non-violence and peace, and that it is absolutely necessary for the survival of humankind.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh writes about love from the Buddhist perspective, and talks about the “Four Immeasurable Minds” which are the components of true love:  Love—the intention and capacity to offer joy and happiness, with deep listening and understanding; Compassion—deep communication and awareness of suffering; Joy—dwelling happily in the present moment; and Equanimity—non-attachment, non-discrimination, even-mindedness, letting go.  True love needs all four.

 

For me, I discovered that I am as happy loving as I am being loved.  It struck me that love is very much like breathing.  Just as neither inhaling nor exhaling can exist alone as the “true breath”, I don’t feel that loving or being loved can be isolated as “true love.”  Love is active, and it generates more of itself.  In-breath leads to out-breath leads to in-breath, loving leads to being loved leads to loving…giving, receiving, love thy neighbor as thyself…  Eckhart Tolle said, “Love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality.”

 

How do I know love?  For me it is feeling connected to life, to that which is around me…feeling bigger than my small self.  Being centered, being present, being open and permeable, and doing what I can to serve life.  I feel it in my heart, physically. When I need more love in my life, I can start loving, and voila! There is love in my life!  Maybe it’s always there, it’s just my awareness that slips away.  I wrote a song once called “Love is Its Own Reward”…now all I have to do is remember I can start the process of being in love. 

 

And maybe everything we’ve ever done we did for love…

Breathing: The Way Back to Balance

“If you don’t like what’s happening in your life, change your mind.”

This brief quotation from the Dalai Lama reminds me that my experience of life changes as I do. As I change, I change the way I influence - and am influenced by - my surroundings.

How are you inventing your life today? How does the way you think affect your actions? And how might you become more aware of the process?

A centering breath is a place to start.

When you're stressed, in conflict, or otherwise under pressure, do you hold your breath? Most people do. When you stop the natural flow of air, you become tense and unbalanced, physically and emotionally. Your body, mind and spirit are disconnected.

One of the easiest ways to regain your balance is to start breathing again. Open your throat, relax your body and allow inspiration to take place. Inspiration–a great word, isn't it? Your breath is your life energy that connects to inner wisdom, resources and strength.

A good way to practice centering is to notice how often you hold your breath. The awareness will trigger you to start breathing again. The more you notice, the less you'll hold your breath, and the more relaxed and centered you'll be.

This practice will also connect you to your purpose–for the interaction, for the project, for the relationship. Your reason for doing what you're doing. Perhaps even your reason for being. When you stop breathing, you disconnect from your self and from the world. It's a natural reaction to stress or pressure. And you can re-pattern. With intention and awareness, you can create a new response that is helpful instead of not. Try noticing your breathing more often. And watch what happens!

Good ki!
Judy Ringer

Four Corner Breathing

Friend and colleague Tammy Lenski shared this centering tip with readers recently -- one more way to recenter when you lose your calm. She learned it from psychologist and attention expert Lucy Jo Palladino, author of Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload.

Four-Corner Breathing

1. Find an object nearby that has four corners – a box, your monitor, window, etc. In the unlikely event you don’t have something nearby, visualize a window frame in your mind.
2. Focus on the upper left-hand corner and inhale for a count of four.
3. Shift your gaze to the upper right-hand corner and hold your breath for a count of four.
4. Move your gaze to the lower right-hand corner and exhale for a count of four.
5. Finally, shift your attention to the lower left-hand corner. Tell yourself to relax, then smile.
6. Repeat 3 to 5 times to calm and focus yourself.

Enjoy other stories on centered living and ki moments on my Web site.

Good ki!
Judy Ringer

A Test of Center

Centering tests come in many shapes and sizes. My latest is a government solicitation for some human resource work that our company has been involved in. The federal government decided that a list of consultants would be drawn up based upon responses to a solicitation and contracts for the next five years would be awarded from this list. I received a heads up of this new way of doing business in early November. The solicitation was to be issued within a week and due in, at that rate, before the holidays.

Just the prospect of having to go through such a process was enough to slightly ‘uncenter’ me. I waited patiently for a week, two weeks, and then more. As I realized that I wasn’t likely to even see what would be involved until much closer to the busy holiday season, I could feel my anxiety rising.

The entire scenario degenerated as the days stretched out. The solicitation not only was late in being issued but had a number of conflicting directions and undefined terms in its 60 pages. As I write, deadlines are extended and everything is on hold while the Feds attempt to publish answers to the multitude of questions asked.

What is amazing and has helped me to often regain my center is what has happened in the midst of this process – the emergence of an actual online community around the preparation of this solicitation. An enterprising individual set up a wiki back in November and a core group of consultants impacted by this decision began sharing information and interpretations. We quickly learned that we were not alone in our experiences. When one person would voice a frustration, another would come forth with a more positive perspective or possible solution.

While I am sure that this process still has many mini tests of center left to throw at me, it is heartening to also find in it a reaffirmation of the power of connection and relationship in grounding oneself in the midst of chaos.

Power and Love - In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Part of celebrating MLK Day for me is thinking about how he was able to combine seeming opposites in ways that spoke to all of us. One of my favorite of his quotations is from a speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967. Adam Kahane bases his new book, Power & Love on the premise. I cite the quotation here in hopes you'll enjoy reading it and begin to think about its applications in your relationships and communication.

• Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. ... Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.
• 
  It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.
• 
  This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Have a great week!
Judy Ringer