How to find resonance with yourself

My main task as a teacher is to guide my students' attention. This is the key to deepen their discovery and understanding of themself, and to opening up new possibilities of movement and behaviour. But attention can be fickle - quickly distracted or exhausted. To maintain our attention on something, we need to maintain curiosity about it. Not intellectual curiosity, but sensory, visceral curiosity. So how do we become curious about ourself, and maintain that curiosity?

Of the many techniques I use for engaging people's attention and maintaining their curiosity, one stands out as consistently the most effective with a wide range of people: synchronising movement with breathing.

This is not about using any special breathing techniques, simply about observing our breathing. And then doing simple movement in the same tempo as our breathing - for example, slowly rolling a forearm to turn the palm of one hand one way as we breathe in, the other way as we breathe out. The length of our breath determines the rhythm with which we move our hand. However long the inhale takes, that's the length of time we turn the hand for. However long the exhale takes, that's the length of time we turn the hand the other way. If our pattern of breathing includes a pause between inhaling and exhaling or between exhaling and inhaling, our hand pauses too. We let each breath take the time it needs, acknowledging that the rhythm of breath varies - it's not clockwork. We simply follow its timing.

This action of synchronising a movement of a part of us with the movement of our breath gives our nervous system an opportunity to reset. After a while this stops being an artificial, active, coordination between two movement patterns, and starts to blend into one single, organic, pattern. Our attention can gradually take in more of ourself and notice how different parts of ourself contribute to this pattern - even parts we didn't at first imagine would be involved in breathing or in turning our hand.

We can play with variations on this theme - for example, have the hand do a faster tempo than the breath, but still in harmony with it - the hand turning there and back on the inhale and again on the exhale. Or the hand could go in a slower tempo, taking an entire breath cycle to turn one way and an entire breath cycle to come back. Or any other variations of this kind that are interesting for us. We can also reduce the movement of the hand to a micro-movement - so small it is invisible, but still something we clearly sense from inside. The smaller and gentler the movement, the better it allows our attention to broaden to other parts of ourself.

I have observed with myself and my students how this kind of exploration readily leads to deep relaxation - a state of mind where sensory curiosity is wide awake and the mind frees itself of unbidden thoughts or distractions. As such it is an excellent addition to any meditative practice, and a great way to refresh and rebalance your system before exertion or performance.

How do you stay curious about your self? Please leave a comment.