The Slow Breath

Tony Crisp

Tony Crisp has taught methods of stress release to hundreds of people internationally. He has been recognised as having developed innovative methods of releasing deeply interior tensions. See Biographical Notes

The aim of the 'slow breath' method is to breathe naturally-abdominally-but to breathe as slowly as comfort allows. It must be comfortable, however, as the aim is to induce quiet of mind and emotions, and if you are struggling with the method it defeats its own purpose. So there must be no gasping for breath because you are breathing too slowly. Find a rhythm that is slow but not making you out of breath.

Therefore, slowly breathe in counting to see how long this takes. Then exhale to the same count. There is no need to concentrate on anything except the beautiful slowness of the breath. This takes practice, so do not hope to find the great quietness right away.

You need to use this slow breathing for at least ten minutes each day. Keep the practice running daily for three months. This insures real physical and mental changes. It also puts in place new habits, meaning that after that period you will find you will be breathing more slowly as a natural rather than induced pattern.

You must realise that you are gradually changing very deeply seated habits that have been with you a lifetime. Taking hold of the breath and controlling it is like taking hold of your nervous system, or body, and gradually altering the way it responds to events and thoughts. It is a bit like taking a wild animal and gently taming it. There should be no force or conflict involved. Gradually you will see that your way of dealing with, or responding to, difficult emotions, fears and stressful events, is changing. You feel more able to meet difficulties, allowing you to grow as a person, and be more creative.

With practice, one should begin to experience a dropping away of tension, disturbed emotions and thoughts. Sometimes it will feel as if something has literally fallen away from you, or as if the bottom of the spine is opening as the tensions there drop away. Eventually you will glimpse something that can only be described as a void or absence of all personal activity. There is a quiet peace and bliss in this, but it will at first only be flashes, secondary glimpses, growing gradually longer. This is achieved when all efforts and desires drop away - never by striving after it. By surrendering to this quietness you will be cleansed by it first - then it acts upon you producing growth of inner awareness.

The result upon your nervous or emotional conflicts is one of gradual calming, cleansing and leading towards peace. While we may find ease from tensions within months, such personality growths should be hoped for only in the sense of years. Like trees, we grow slowly, but there is beauty in it.

One of the greatest of Chinese methods of personal transformation suggests the slow breath as it basic technique. This is explained in the book The Secret of the Golden Flower. The aim is to gradually return one to the pristine awareness you were born with, free of the encumbering cultural traits and beliefs taken on during culturation and education.

See Cleansing.

Relaxation in love and life

Tony Crisp

Tony Crisp has taught relaxation to hundreds of people internationally. He has been recognised as having developed innovative methods of releasing deeply interior tensions. See Biographical Notes

As an example of a simple and effective relaxation technique, whatever position or situation you are in, take your attention to your anus and genitals. Notice in general what you are feeling, what the sensation is in that area. When you are aware of what is being felt, gently tense the area. I mean by this the sort of tension you create when you badly want to go to the toilet, but are holding back the impulse. Notice how the tension involves other parts of your body and feelings than those directly concentrated on. The abdomen and even the face may change. You may even breathe more shallowly.

After a few moments slowly let the tension drop. Let it melt not only from the anus and genitals, but also from the face and abdomen. Let the way it influenced your breathing melt also as you drop the tension. In fact let the feeling of ease pervade your whole body. Do this several times, tensing the face as well as the anus, until you get a clear sense of the difference between the tension and the melting open feeling.

Having done this a few times, if you have opportunity to move, even if it is only your head, make the movement while still allowing the feeling of melting tension to take place. Notice whether the pelvic area and face tenses again in order to make the movement, or whether you can let the movement flow out of the feeling of gentle pleasure in the pelvis and openness in the face. If tension creeps in as you move, stop, melt the tension, and start again. Replay it over and over until you can move freely without tensing the genital area.

If you have never tried this before, it is likely that without realising it, before you consciously tensed the area, there was already a tension occurring in the pelvis and face. In most cases this is reasonably slight, but sometimes there is are powerful habitual tensions operating unconsciously. By tensing the areas of face and anus and then melting the tension you started to become aware of the tightness, and to melt it. It is very important to carry this through into movement, otherwise you will only be able to relax while sitting quietly.

This simple process of tensing and relaxing the anus and genitals, and learning to express from the open condition rather than tension, can produce very profound changes in the way you experience sexual contact, and in the way you meet people and deal with your life in general. This basic exercise makes it very clear that if you cannot easily move without tensing your genitals and face, any activity, because it involves movement, and possibly movement in relationship to other people or a person, will be inhibited in the depth of your pleasure and spontaneity.

What we are aiming at is to develop the habit of awareness of whether you are tense or relaxed. By using the technique several times a day for some weeks, it will gradually be easy to recognise, through the physical sensations of your face and anus, whether you are expressing yourself easily, or through the limitations of stress and tension.

Summary of Melting Tension

• This can be practised in almost any position or situation in which you can take time to give awareness to your body and its sensations. To start with it will help if you close your eyes.
• Focus awareness on your genital, anal and facial areas. Gently tense the areas to create the sort of feeling you might have when holding back from going to the toilet.
• As the tension is held notice how the other parts of the body such as the abdomen, and breathing react. You may breathe more shallowly for instance, or some degree of tension occur in the face.
• Now slowly let the tension melt. As you do so again notice how the body sensations and tensions shift. Let the feeling of melting tension also permeate the whole trunk and face. Even after the feeling of melting tension diminishes let the open melting feeling remain.
• Repeat the tensing and melting several times slowly. It might be that you realise you have fairly persistent tensions in the pelvis and face – for instance ingrained social expressions. So repeat the tensing and melting until you can feel a definite difference between the two, and until there is a diminishing of any residual tension.
• Only when you have reached this stage try melting tension in the pelvis and then slowly move some part of your body such as your head or arm. As you do so focus awareness on the genitals, anus and face to observe whether tension immediately arises again. If it does, stop the movement, allow the tension to melt and slowly start the movement again. Tensions are often the result of habits, so repetition is important to develop a new habit. New habits take time to learn.
• If you can make a slow movement without the tension reappearing, explore everyday movements such as standing and walking. The aim is to be able to move without the tension - which is a sign of some degree of physical and emotional anxiety or stress reaction returning.
• Once you have the skill to move and remain relaxed, take this out into everyday life. Drop tension while walking along the street or when talking to someone. You will notice that your posture then changes, expressing a sense of relaxed energy. You will stand straighter, and meet others with more radiance. It doesn’t matter if you lose this once in a while and find tension creeping in. Take your awareness over your pelvis and face again and let the melting feeling spread once more.
• Using the melting of tension while in everyday situations is enormously important. Lots of people can feel at peace away from ‘the world’ or while not face-to-face in a relationship. To do the same on the street or in bed skin to skin is a skill of great value.
• This exercise is so important it is worth observing how the genitals and anus react to normal social activities like meeting someone, working or watching the television. If you continue to melt tension in the pelvis and face fairly often during the day for a couple of weeks it becomes a habit for your attention to flick over your body checking every so often. The result is that you learn to remain more deeply relaxed in fairly challenging situations.

The Arms Circling Exercise

For this exercise you need sufficient floorspace to move easily, or even lie full length if necessary. It also helps to have loose clothing.. You start by standing in the middle of your floorspace, giving yourself time to explore what you feel and experience. Start by circling your arms. Take the arms above the head, down the sides of the body with the arms fully extended, then upward crossing the front of the trunk. In the full movement the hands are then forming wide circles that cross the front of your body. This arm circling is simply to help you learn how to allow spontaneous movement. It is a way of working with the natural forces within you.

So, as you are circling your arms with eyes closed, bring your awareness to the shape your hands are making in space. As you become aware of the shapes the hands are carving in space, watch what feelings you have as to how you would like to move. Give yourself permission to doodle, to make any sort of shapes your feelings or body incline you to. Allow any sort of posture or movement, as active or quiet as you like. Allow sounds to accompany the movements if there is an urge to, and allow whatever feelings accompany them. Hold the attitude that what you are doing doesn't have to make sense. Nor does it have to comply with what other people might expect of you. Realise that you are allowing another part of yourself, perhaps a non verbal part, or a facet unknown to the rational mind, to express. With a non critical watching attitude, relax and let your body and feeling sense direct what happens. There is no need to fiercely concentrate in order to wipe the mind clear of other influences. But you may need to relax the part of the mind that always needs to know beforehand what you are going to do.

This is not like creative dance, in which there may exist a need to produce something pleasing for others to watch. With this exercise you need an open area in which your inner being can make its own adjustments, and movement and feeling has a chance to express outside of rational criticism and demands of everyday life.

Give yourself at least fifteen minutes in which to explore what spontaneous movements and feelings emerge. Below is a summary of what may happen in this practice.

1. Although the movements may at first appear haphazard and irrational, if you allow them to continue without criticism, they usually express - perhaps only over a period of several sessions - a particular theme or point.
2. Like a dream, the theme or drama often symbolises your life situation, or something within you, such as the remaining emotions or attitudes from past experience, or a creative realisation. Or the movements may be expressive of the body's own need to release energy or mobilise itself and its urges.
3. There are obvious stages or depths to the experience. Movement is often the first. Feelings and fantasy can then combine with the movement. Only with a few people do they occur without each other. If met in the right way the movements, fantasy and sounds can lead to insight into what is being expressed. In other words the symbolic movements, if that is what they are, can give way to rational understanding. This is not because one has thought out a plausible explanation for what happens. It is because your critical, conscious mind has watched the spontaneous working of what usually only occurs in sleep and unconsciousness. This gives automatic feedback to the unconscious mind and it can speed up its processing and problem solving. A communication takes place between the unconscious and conscious mind.
4. When you reach a stage that you can easily allow spontaneous movement, along with sound and perhaps feelings, you can dispense with the arm circling to start you off. You will find that if you simply stand in the open condition ready to let your body express what is at your core, it will begin.

The exercise is a way of entering into the usually unconscious processes of your being and working with them. Usually the only way we let go so fully and allow the spontaneous action of our inner nature is when we sleep and dream. But in this way you can open to your core while awake and be healed and taught by it.

Stepping Into Your Dream

Walk On Part - This is the simplest of the methods to gain further insight into your dream images and characters. It requires you to play with your imagination a little and go along with a fantasy, the sort of talent we all develop as children.

If you have a sympathetic audience it helps, but only if you feel okay in front of others. It is fine alone as well.

Stand with your eyes closed in the middle of enough space to move around. About two or three square metres is usually plenty. Imagine you are standing on the edge of your dream, like a film set, and you are going to walk into it. Before you actually step into your dream be aware of what you are feeling in your body and emotions. Your body and feelings are a screen upon which subtle changes and shifts will occur. It is this screen of body and emotions that will act as your monitor showing what responses your dream produces.

Now step into your dream. Literally step forward. Walk about in the 'film set' of your dream, watching what you feel, what memories come and what you fantasy. Talk with the characters, even step into their body and register what feelings and intuitions they produce on your screen of body and feelings. Speak what you feel and find to your helpers or to a tape recorder.

You can enter into anything in this way, whether it is an animal, a tree, the sea or a house. As you explore your dream in this way you can ask questions and your intuition will play its responses on the monitor of your body and emotions. The possibilities are that you enter the dream and explore its different places and people, or you relive the dream by acting it out.

The Inner Cleansing

When we open, through growth or other means, to the as-yet-unrealised forces of our potential within, the conscious self is changed by what gradually emerges. First comes purgation, which is a cleansing of those parts of self which put us in conflict, or out of harmony with our own inner processes of life, our own inner potentialities. In human terms this means that in purgation we go through the uncomfortable process of having our fears, hates, neuroticism, rigidities and self-centredness brought to the surface and melted.

This cleansing phase is a discharge of the many traumas, hurts, confusions and negative habit patterns you have taken in from events, parents and your culture. Life is often uncomfortable as these past hurts and patterns are washed out of your body and consciousness. It may take a long time to properly clear particular things within you. In terms of Eastern philosophy, it is a process of clearing your karma - traits not only etched into your nature in this lifetime, but take on from the long past.

The growth you achieve is not really separate from the cleansing. Each time a negative trait or attitude is cleared, you grow, your awareness expands, and you become capable of a fuller perception, of easier relationships. Also, the process of growth that arises expands your horizons of experience. This too can be uncomfortable at times, like being stretched. The narrow boundaries of awareness are gradually thinned and moved beyond. Difficult barriers that previously held you captive are passed beyond. The phase of Union emerges at first as a growing sense of touching a transcendent or wonderful otherness. You sense something immense and full of love. Eastern practitioners have called this SatChitAnanda – Being-Consciousness-Bliss. You gradually realise yourself as existing beyond time and space in a transcendent bliss stretching away from you in all directions. This is usually something that takes years to arrive at in any fullness, but is touched at any time in your opening to the inner process.

Some commentators of the process have called it a ‘current’. Aurobindo for instance wrote that to reach the “new country within us” we must first learn how “to leave the old one behind.” We do this, he said, by learning to quieten the constant chatter that goes on in our mind. We do it by in some measure making our conscious mind and body receptive. When we do this a current of influence works on us. It is this current, sometimes causing our very body to vibrate, that like a river, cleanses us.

The Keyboard Condition

Remember you are dealing with the dream process, and this process can create a spontaneous drama that involves your whole being. So in becoming lucid in the midst of such a dream environment you need to know how to ‘hang loose’ and how to slow or control the action. You need to learn how to allow the spontaneous dream action and how to stop it. But for many of us who have learned control from childhood up in controlling our bladder or emotions, the big lesson is to learn to relax and allow spontaneous dream action. But even this needs to be done in a particular way - with the question hanging - "What is this reflecting of myself? What information is contained in this dream drama?" So you need to learn to drop unnecessary tension, until you are like a keyboard ready to be played.

I find it helps if you create something of this feeling consciously, holding your body, your emotions, your sexuality, your mind, memories and imagination as if they were keys upon which the inner dream maker can play. In a sense you are seeking to create a condition similar to sleep. As you fall asleep you let go of your control over what you think, what you do with your body, and what you fantasy. Your ‘I’, your decision making self has relaxed and left the stage free for the dream maker to create its dramas. So, in beginning to access the deeper possibilities of lucidity such as intuition, you need to take on a similar relaxed state without actually losing awareness. At the same time you approach what you experience with the question of what lies within the symbols of the drama.

A simple test helps you to find out whether you are actually achieving this state of letting go and allowing. Try the following:

1. This is a simple and enjoyable technique which gives a direct experience of spontaneous movement. You need to stand about a foot away from a wall, side on. Start with your right side. You are going to lift your right arm sideways, but because you are near the wall you will only manage to lift it part of the way. So when the back of your hand touches the wall, press it hard against the wall as if trying to complete the movement of lifting the stiff arm.
2. Using a reasonable amount of effort stay with the hand pressing against the wall for about thirty seconds. Then move so you face away from the wall, and with eyes closed relax your arm and be aware of what happens. Try it before reading on, and use the left arm afterwards.
3. What we have done is to attempt to make a movement. Because the wall prevented this, the body was not able to complete the movement you asked it to make. Therefore a muscular charge built up in the deltoid muscle. When you stepped away from the wall the arm, if relaxed, was then free to complete the movement. So possibly your arm rose from your side as if weightless, thus discharging its energy. Some people need several tries before they can find the right body feeling to allow the arm its movement. It is easy to prevent it moving because the impulse is quite a subtle one. The point of the exercise however, is to learn a relationship with the energies and impulses arising from beneath usual awareness. The movement the arm makes, and how it feels to experience an unwilled movement, is so similar to working with the impulses within dreams, we are thus provided with an experimental experience of the real thing. Therefore it is helpful either to practice the technique until you can do it, or use it a number of times to establish your relationship with the feeling of it. This sense of allowing movement can then be used in the lucid experience to access things such as an intuitive response to questions, or in seeking healing.

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