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Lying on the feet turned in, while breathing rhythmically

You could say there’s a hierarchy of degrees of conscious control in ourselves–our fingers and mouths the most consciously controlled; our legs less so, carrying us along without much thought wherever we want to go. And our breathing, even more so, takes care of itself while we’re doing other things. We’ll reverse that a bit in this lesson, making the breathing the subject of conscious control and monitoring, while we do quite unusual things with out legs…the hands and mouth can take care of themselves!

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Integrating Breathing and Action

This is the first of two lessons in the Integrating Life and Action workshop, March 2010. I keep talking in this lesson about how your breath “accommodates itself” to your actions and positions in the world. This strikes me as a little strange as I listen to it and do the lesson. Part of every moment of life is breathing and acting together–and you breathe differently at every moment, depending on your action and position. All that language that “your breathing” does something while “you act” reflects our sense that the latter is something we do while the former takes care of itself. But it’s all stuff we do, all together.

This is the first of a two-lesson workshop. The second lesson is Sphincters.

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