Active Intension Breathing

In this practice, we use our intention, and the “energetic” part of the breath to breathe in through the pelvic floor of the body. The goal is to re-sensitize ourselves to the subtle flows of energy that exist within the body and deepen our connection to our internal messaging system through creating more conscious awareness in other parts of our bodies.

Practicing Active Intention Breathing:

Start by breathing normally though the mouth feeling and focusing on the air as it moves into you through your nose and out of your mouth.

Sense that there is the physical part of your breath that feels like normal breathing, and then the energetic part of your breath. The energetic part becomes stronger as you feel into the creation of your breath. When you are focusing on the breath, you bring a creation aspect to it as opposed to just letting it happen. You can develop more of a relation to the energetic part of the breath though your intention. As you consciously indent to bring the breath into your lungs, feel not just the air, but the intention and power of you creating the flow in this area of your body.

Another example of Active intention to help you think about it: (Intention is where you intend to cook pasta for dinner. Active intension is the energy you bring with you to cooking dinner, i.e. cooking with love. When you cook with love, it totally changes the energy around the food, giving it that special home cooked flavor).

After breathing normally for a while and observing the energetic aspect of the breath. We learn to shift the energetic aspect or active intention part of the breath to move more into the body, and breath into other parts of the body.

One of the best ways to do this to connect more deeply with the body and become more intune with the subtle messages of your body, is to feel as though there is a big bowl between your hips, resting on your pelvic floor. As you breathe in, allow yourself to start to feel as though the air is moving into you through your pelvic floor and filling up the deepest parts of your belly fully, and then slowly moving up your body, up your spine as you continue to breathe in. Hold for a moment at the top of the breath. To release, you can either feel the air then leaving out the top of your head, or moving back down into the earth. Feel into which seems right for you, in the moment.

The purpose of doing this is to reconnect with a gentle and subtle feeling of flow within the body. To re-sensitize our bodies, we want a world with very subtle methods of feeling, so our minds have to start tuning in more. It may be challenging at first to feel any “flow” or “movement” in the body in these newer areas at first and know that is totally okay and normal. Keep playing with it to become more attuned to the sensations. The purpose is to allow yourself to inhabit these areas of your body in a more conscious way, so your brain starts to register your internal sensations more consciously.

These practices are not about fully disconnecting from the mind. The mind is always there. The goal is to allow the body to come into stronger alignment with the mind and allow for deeper connection between the two.