Breath of Acceptance

Practicing Breath of Acceptance

Practice Breath of Acceptance in the same way you practice Breath of Relief and Breath of Awareness.

By now you should be developing some strength and resilience in your legs and back. When you are able to do three minutes of Breath of Relief followed by a short rest and three minutes of Breath of Awareness your back and legs are beginning to gain some strength. In the same way, add Breath of Acceptance to your routine until you are able to do each movement for three minutes with a short rest in between each movement.

When practicing Breath of Acceptance, allow your awareness to begin the exercise from a perception-position of duality, separateness. As you have your hands extended to the left and right, extend awareness energy from your core to each hand separately. Experience them as right then left or even right versus left. Allow your awareness to sense and absorb the differences in awareness with each hand.

Each hand represents the two polarities of yourself: right and left, dominant and non-dominant, north and south, male and female, idealized and devalued, Yin and Yang. Each hand has it’s own center of awareness and perception. Each hand has it’s own separate past history of interaction with the world. Each hand has learned different lessons from these interactions.

In martial arts, it becomes immediately clear that you favor one part of your body over another; the dominant hand tends to be much stronger, faster and more coordinated than the non-dominant. The dominant hand has received the majority of your attention and energy and as a result you have a better relationship with that hand; it responds faster and better to your conscious intention than your non-dominant hand.

The non-dominant hand has been starved for attention and energy and as a result, it is weaker, slower and does not respond as immediately to conscious intent. In some ways you could say the dominant hand is idealized while the non-dominant is devalued.

Train your attention to notice these differences in the way that you extend your hands, the way in which you sense the energy and awareness – or a lack of energy and awareness in your hands, how strong, connected and coordinated they feel.

When you pull your hands in toward your center allow your attention to focus on each hand separately and then together. Extend energy and awareness from your core into both hands simultaneously. What do you notice? Can you begin to sense a convergence of right hand energy/awareness with left hand energy/awareness?

Even as your palms approach each other notice how heat, pressure and energy flow out the silver dollar size vortexes intermix and flow into the vortex of the opposite hand. As your hands cross each other in the movement so that the right becomes the left and the left become the right, can you sense the energy-awareness exchange?

Can you imagine all of the experiences that have been stored in the right side of your brain and body flow out of your right palm and into your left simultaneously, as all of the experiences that have been stored in the left side of your brain and body flow into your right palm?

Breath of Acceptance is your body-mind’s natural way to integrate and synthesize the opposing, conflicting dualistic nature of thinking and perceiving that is so accepted in our society that it silently takes root in your body, even your muscle memory. Acceptance is awareness. Acceptance is also essential for transformation.