Resting in One's Nature and Cultivating the Habit of Breathing Well

An Excerpt from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche's Summer 2023 Teachings at Serenity Ridge

Researchers and practitioners in the field of mind-body medicine have been talking about stress response versus the relaxation response. Or as I would call it, the pain response versus the response from the calmness of one's heart. At any given moment, observe yourself and the level of stress response arising within. How would you say it is? Are you calm and connected, feeling okay, feeling safe and feeling good? Or is it more like you are in pain and in denial of that pain? Or are you agitated and misidentifying it as creativity? Are you maybe looking for a conflict, reading bad news, interested in hearing gossip and interested in interfering in other people's business? Is your mindstate a little bit like that?

So just observe yourself and your general state at any given moment. It needs to be observed carefully for many reasons, first of all to protect yourself and second to protect those around you. There are consequences for your actions and consequences for the decisions that are coming from pain. However, when there is heart, when there is calmness, when you are breathing better, when you're feeling good, then you are seeing more and responding to the situation more from that base connectedness, from the heart, from calmness, from feeling safe. It's a better perspective for responding to the situation. And as a result it protects you, and it protects the other people and the situation.

It protects us on many levels, even down to the cellular. We are made up of 26 billion cells at birth, and these have amazing mechanisms to heal and to charge up and to grow and expand; they have all these qualities. But as we are getting older it seems that these cells are decreasing and not able to replicate as well as before, and their potentiality is not as strong and as vital as it used to be. What or who is causing that? Of course, we could say that it's the environment, but mostly we are the ones doing it to ourselves; we kill them, we destroy them, we interfere with them, we block them. We block their natural capacity to rejuvenate and reproduce. Primarily, we are the ones interfering with that.

It's a mistake to think that our body is given a certain amount of cells for our life, like a package deal, and then as the cells get used up, we have to work hard to continuously try to gain new cells back. It's not at all like that, it's just the opposite. Your cells are naturally doing really well; it is amazing work that they're performing. But every day we are paralyzing them. How? By being in our pain identity, and seeing through that pain identity, and responding from that pain, and creating more confusion from that pain, not only in ourselves but in others as well. And unfortunately while doing so, we very often think that we are doing something good. That's a problem, because actually if we knew we were going about it all wrong, then we would take a much more protective view of the situation. Unfortunately though, we very often believe that we are doing the right thing. And the right thing never comes from that pain.

In relation to the dzogchen teachings that His Holiness the 34th Menri Trizin has been giving us, let's say that this morning you wake up and the sky outside is clear, but you are obscured. Okay, so just notice that. This is what the teachings are saying; become aware of that. Being aware of that, then try to abide and leave it as it is. Of course it's difficult to leave it as it is through the application of effort. So in the moment that you are not feeling good, then if visualizing Sherap Chamma or Yeshe Walmo doesn't calm you, then at least think of something that does calm you, for instance, remembering something like a hug from your child. Beautiful. Just try to feel into that for a moment, keeping that image. Just holding that image for five minutes, that's enough! After I do something like that, I know that things are beginning to happen in my body. I know that afterwards I have better thoughts; I have a kinder perspective on situations that arise; I can let go of more things. We've all had those beautiful experiences that we can recall. Maybe with your children, your spouse, your siblings, even with your pet, whatever it is that helps you. Just calm down, that's all. Of course, first you must have the awareness to recognize that you're not calm to begin with.

All the moments in which we don't have to live with our pain will bring us health and healing. Of course, there will be a thought, an emotion, a circumstance, a situation that you have to deal with, sure, I get it! But it doesn't have to take up a big portion of your life. It can actually be a small, clear, decisive moment of your life. And then the other times, you can be the sky. Take it from nature, in the worst of thunderstorms, a lightning flash lasts only a quick moment and then it's gone, that's it. A flash of lightning can't possibly stay lit up for a whole day or whole week at a time! We could never imagine that happening. But for some people, that's just the case. For them, their lightning stays lit up continuously.

The teachings say to simply leave it as it is, as much as you are able. Unfortunately, though, we are not leaving it as it is; we are changing and manipulating things all the time, from our food, to our air, to our water, to our behavior; everything is so manipulated. The natural resting quality is no longer there. One thing that shocked me, in the first year that I came to the West, was the value that everyone placed on just being busy. You are praised here just for being busy. However, the praise should be the other way around; if you're not busy at any given moment, then wonderful! That doesn't mean that we do not do anything at all; we all do things. However, we won't go out of our way to just keep busy. Instead we will do whatever is necessary. And certainly we will not put work ahead of healthful things like sleep, as people are doing so much here in the West. Instead, go to sleep; get up fresh; don't do much; do a few things in a precise way. Don't waste your energy, and don't waste other people's energy. It all stems from this sense of leaving it as it is.

And when we are not able to leave it as it is, then we can simply pay attention to the breath. And this is an aspect that I very much want to emphasize here. It's very clear that if you cannot control your mind, then control your breath. Or when you cannot work with your mind, work with your breath. It's easy to work with your breath because the breath is more mechanical, in a sense. So why do you need to work with breath? Because in essence, breath is everything. The air is energy. And energy is everything as far as creation is concerned, as far as function is concerned. Space allows it, but energy creates it, energy maintains it, energy protects it. Energy is everything.

In these teachings the breath is referred to as the medicinal wind. Scientific research confirms this as it looks at the physical and psychological benefits of simply decreasing your breathing frequency and inhaling through the nose. Breathing this way activates your parasympathetic nervous system. And that breath brings you a deep sense of feeling safe, secure. If within yourself you feel you're in a safe place, that is the time they say you turn on the self-healing mechanisms in your body. When we slow the breath and breathe more deeply like this, it leads to our feeling much more relaxed and even more joyful. [TWR slowly and gently inhales through the nose, he holds it, and then he exhales, slowly and fully.] That's it! Instead of breathing twenty breaths per minute, maybe you can end up doing ten, seven, six or even five breaths per minute. It depends on your ease of doing so.

In this retreat we are receiving His Holiness's teachings of the Zhang Zhung masters on the Great Perfection. Basically these dzogchen teachings are saying that we are perfect, we are buddha, we are enlightened, we are complete. It is saying, this is who we are, right? The idea is that if your karmic wind, and your conceptual wind, and your emotional winds are not blowing strongly enough to interfere with your grounding quality and your connection to yourself and the connectivity with everything in your body, then you'll be fine. Right? That's the idea.

His Holiness's teachings point the way toward your using moments of intense vulnerability, such as when something big has triggered you and it puts you right into that stress response. Moments like, when I got the news about my child, or when I got the news about my losing my job. Okay, it's natural that you should have this response. We all have had it. For every single person there's some vulnerable area in which, when you are exposed to something, you feel vulnerable, you feel pain, you feel stress. But according to His Holiness's teaching, that is a good time to question yourself. Can I really feel this I who is stressed out? Someone is there who is feeling vulnerable, who feels a threat. It's a very good moment, a wonderful moment, the best moment, to really find out who that is. It's not always easy to feel vulnerable, and that's the beauty of the times when you are feeling vulnerable. Vulnerability is a beauty in the sense that you get to connect with an area of yourself that you otherwise wouldn't ever get to connect with. Then you see something there. [Rinpoche breathes a long slow out breath.] I see this identity there, feeling vulnerable, feeling a little fearful, and I am trying to allow it. I am trying to let it just be there. I am trying to breathe it out. You work like that on the deepest level.

There are two kinds of commitments that I would like you to take away from this retreat. One is to these precious teachings, to have as deep as possible a trust in the lineage and the supports of the tradition. That's on the one level, to go toward that and not compromise that. And second, there is this basic principle of the breath, that breathing properly results in a lot of healthful effects.

So can we also commit ourselves to using our breath to balance our emotions? To using our breath to control our thoughts? Using our breath to boost our immune system? Using our breath to enhance our awareness? Using our breath to reduce our blood pressure, our sugar level, and so much more? Can we all commit to changing our lives through changing our relationship with the breath? I think we can all do that, don't you? I've already done it myself.

(Editor's Note: During the retreat, Rinpoche spoke highly of James Nestor's book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, and encouraged us also to review his YouTube videos.)