Meditation: Slow Breath Dance
MEDITATION
Begin sitting or standing in a comfortable neutral posture. Find your breathing. When you are ready, inhale with one movement and exhale with the next. Repeat the same movement pattern for a while as you become aware of moving and breathing. Use simple gentle movements, like lifting the arms on the inhale and bringing them down on the exhale. As you continue, allow yourself to linger in time. Your breath can elongate and your movement slow. Over time, as you relax, you’ll feel an organic evolution in the progression of your movement patterns. Continue with this for a while. Afterwards, let your body move as it wishes.
Eventually, lie down and rest.
About Slow Breath Dance
Do movements that are easy, that are gentle. This is not for expanding muscular reach. Instead, we use movements that we feel lightly, and, as our attention clarifies, we feel and notice more and more of the entire motion rather than the end points. For example, we might turn our head to one side on the inhale then back to center on the exhale and so forth. Rather than aiming for the farthest part of the turn in order to feel a strong stretch in our neck, we attenuate the motion to better feel the entire act of turning. Slowing depends on the pace our breathing can manage. The idea here is not to force the process, but to aim patiently, gently towards slowing.
About Movement Mantra
Breath Dances in Dancemeditation are Movement Mantras. A Movement Mantra is a movement topic with salubrious or sacred qualities that have physical, universal, or natural resonance—turning, rocking, wave, vibration. In Movement Mantra, the topic, like a mantra, stays the same for the duration as the movements themselves gradually evolve, gently shifting over the half hour or hour of meditation.
The following is an excerpt from Sojourn the Inner Heaven, Dunya’s guidebook to Dancemeditation.
Her Breath
by Dunya Dianne McPherson
She let her breath sink oily and heavy into the bottom of her pelvis, then drew it up, hand-over-hand, along the center of her body. It made its quiet way into her head. where it spread, tickling the inside of her skull. Her breath touched its tendrils gingerly along this membrane, fine veiny lines of sensation, filaments or root hairs.
Her breath seeped out, drained down her neck and throat as if drinking itself. It whoosed down the tube of middle-ness, down, down and down into a deeper, dimmer space, behind the stomach, behind the fat, slick ropes and globs of guts, the underbrush of organs, those shades. She swam through snaky reeds, following her exhale that was emptier than common everyday breaths. It reached into a basement of itself. Empty. Beyond the urge to suck in.
She lay fallow. Hollow, dry. Then, not wanting to keep on endlessly breathing, she roused from stillness anyway. She lifted the gate a tad, let air ease in, like a secret, like an Unknown. It drew her embers from beneath ashes, took the tiny heat curled in her tailbone, tugged, tugged, as if digging up a resisting root, and swelled with sudden freedom upward, the warmth billowing on a rise of air.
Up the center, up and up the column, up into the winged lungs that fluttered, happy about breath returning sweetened with dark earth and volcanic fire, thick with organ murmur. Breath scattered into alveoli like puppies running on the heath. The chest, from front to back, shouted, “Hello!”, a trumpet of sensation echoing from rim to rim. Finally came a fluting through the throat. Fine notes, swollen with oxygen.
This was a true breath, a felt breath, not a mechanism, but a poem, not survival, but a flourishing. Breath delights in this castle, she knew, in the ornaments, the halls of splendor, the trick wall in the library that opens to a dark back corridor. She followed that story, the spiraling stone stairs. We were breathing there together last night, laughing, trembling, turned in on ourselves. It was an uncountable place, unspeakable. I was lost for a long time. I loved it. I’ll love it again.
"We were breathing there together last night,
laughing, trembling, turned in on ourselves.
It was an uncountable place, unspeakable.
I was lost for a long time. I loved it.
I’ll love it again."
FURTHER READING
To learn more about Dancemeditation
& Dunya's journey, explore her books.
love it.