My dear friend, discipline is the doorway to success and you have just entered it by streamlining your life beautifully. Instead of racing against time, you have now befriended time and blended your life to flow along with it. As you moulded your life and attempted to discipline your body and mind during the past few days, you have experienced how unruly your thoughts and feelings are and how difficult it is to control them. So, today let us understand a vital link that will connect us to our Soul and help us to focus our thoughts and feelings more easily. Where is this crucial link? It is always with us, filling us with life and energy. In fact, it is the very elixir of our life.
However, though we know that we can never live without it, very few of us cherish it as it should be cherished. This most vital link that connects us to our soul is ‘our breath’.
Unfortunately, most of us have taken this most valuable gift from God for granted. That is why our breathing has become very shallow and mechanical.
Though our breath is the most wonderful connector to our Soul, this kind of mechanical breathing will lead us nowhere. Only when we breathe with complete awareness does it become a powerful tool to bridge the gap between the mind and the soul.
When we cultivate this kind of heightened awareness of our breathing, we will directly experience this connectivity for ourselves. As we use it effectively to deepen our meditation, it transcends all barriers of time and space, name and form and catapults us to freedom and joy.
When we breathe scientifically, my friend, it has a direct impact on the mind and its relationship with the external world. Now, all of us normally understand the world through our senses, mind and intellect. However, these can often give us conflicting inputs which are difficult for us to assimilate and integrate.
We are then pulled in different directions by them and get sidetracked from our goal. For example, our senses may entice us to indulge by eating more of our favourite dish, while the mind and intellect warn us that this will be harmful to our health. So, we are tempted to succumb to this craving and break our own resolution to cut down on our calories. This will never happen when we breathe with awareness. In fact, far from distracting us, our breath actually propels us to meditate more powerfully towards our goal. It acts like a rope and pulley to access the vibrant energy around the Soul.
Integrating our senses, mind and intellect, it draws them into the well of the Soul for a revitalising dip in the nectar of bliss within us.