The breath plays an important role in your mantra meditation practice. Actually breath plays an important role in your life!
Period.
The way you breath influences your state of mind, body and soul.
If you change your breathing you can change your state. There is a direct correspondence.
Think about the times when you were angry. Your breathing was probably quick, short and shallow.
Now think about those profound moments of relaxation.
How was your breath? Probably the opposite. Long and deep with a slow rhythm.
So if you change your breath, you can change your emotions, your mind and your entire state.
This is our starting point for mantra meditation. We want to work with our breath in a way that will induce the best possible state for our mantra meditation.
We want to breathe in a way that will slow our mind down, relax us and have us concentrated and focused in an easy manner ready for our mantra meditation practice.
There are many ways we can do this. But for mantra meditation we want to adopt a simple method.
Essentially we want to slow down the breath and our breathing rate and elongate the breathing. This will have the corresponding effect of slowing down our mind, our heart rate and emotions.
In time, if we develop our breathing to have longer breaths and better breath control, this means that not only does this have a better effect on our state, but we can enter into a deeper relationship with our mantra meditation practice.
We can enter into a deeper state because we ourselves are in a deeper state from the outset. But also it means that we can have a deeper contact with the mantra.
Because we are engaged in a deeper form of breathing, we can have a longer contact with the mantra. Having a longer contact with the mantra means that we can enter into a deeper contact with the sound.
Here lies the importance of correct and proper breathing.
However, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Proper breathing is actually quite simple.
Proper breathing is something we should be adopting as a matter of course in our lives to nourish ourselves spiritually, emotionally, energetically and of course physically. Proper breathing provides a host of benefits.
In posts to come I will write about how to breath for mantra mediation to facilitate this form of contact with sound.