Posted on March 31, 2013 · Posted in blog

“Breathing is a physiological function, yet it’s period of requiring the environment is so frequent, and indeed continuous, that it is always on the verge of becoming aware, a kind of contact. And in breathing one sees par excellence that the animal is a field, the environment is ‘inside’ or essentially pervading at every moment. And so anxiety, the disturbance of breathing, accompanies any disturbance of the self-function; thus the first step in therapy is contacting the breathing.”


Quote from ‘Gestalt Therapy’. Perls, Hefferline, Goodman, 1952:  page 401

Taken partly from: ‘A Quantum of Gestalt’  Brian O’Neill, page 20


Breathing connects us to life, it is the most basic  function of our body to keep us in this dimension. I am stating the most obvious. We all know that we need to breathe in order to stay alive!

However, mostly we take our breathing for granted. We don’t think about it, we let our bodies get on with it so that we can continue being busy with our thought projections about our lives.

We ignore how we breathe, the quality of our breathing is dismissed.

Why is basic Mindfulness practice the Art of learning how to breathe consciously? Why is its fundamental method the simple application of focus on the in and out breath?

Think about it for a moment please.