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Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Tuesday, December 28, 2010

One Million Breaths

"The beauty of your words, the charm in your actions, the allure of your movements all depend on the amount of silence you create within. Humans have the capacity to go deeper and deeper into that silence. The deeper you go, the closer you come to the Infinite."

--Amma

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Looking into the person I would like to be at the end of 2012, the path seemed to be one of greater commitment to the process of awakening. The best decision I could devise was a level of discipline that would demand near-daily excellence and focus for approximately an hour a day. That was the origin of the "Million breath" idea. There are qualities of mind and perception glimpsed only during my deepest meditations and flow states. Parallax between these and intense martial focuses, orgasmic states, ceremonial trances (sweat lodges, fasts, etc.), "Warrior sleep"-style trances and more implies a doorway to something beyond ordinary "creativity" or alignment. A million breaths over four years will give me the daily experience of slipping between my own breaths, between my heartbeats, into the silence.

While there are aspects of advancement I will not pursue (dissolution of the ego cocoon is...a little severe for someone with a six-year-old son) but this one is purifying without being destructive to my constructed self. It seems...a reasonable middle path. Yesterday I totaled about 550 by the time I went to bed. That included seated breathing, joint rotations, yoga, TacFit Warrior, martial arts motion, entering flow state, and finally pre-sleep preparation. Slept well and deep. Today and tomorrow are recovery days. I suspect that keeping track of my dreams would be informative.

Onward...

3 comments:

David Roel said...

Ego doesn't dissolve -- one's attachment to it does.

Steven Barnes said...

That's a perspective. The state and actions are beyond language, and there is always a gap between the description and the thing itself.

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