Riding out the storm

Riding out the storm

 
It’s a challenging time, emotionally, to be a teenager, or an adult, or a child!

Zen Buddhist master, Thich Nhat Hanh, explains we should look at emotions as a kind of storm. He offers a simple practice for calming and steadying the mind so we can navigate these storms with ease.

The practice is to sit cross-legged or to lie down on your back and begin breathing into your belly. It’s helpful to place your hand on your belly and notice how your belly rises and falls with the breath when you take a deep breath. He writes:

Breathe deeply, maintaining full attention on your abdomen. Don’t think. Stop all your ruminating, and just focus on the breathing.

Thich Nhat Hanh uses the metaphor of a tree.

When trees get hit by a storm, the treetops are thrashed around and run the highest risk of being damaged. The trunk of the tree is more stable and solid; it has many roots reaching deep into the Earth. The treetops are like your thinking mind.

When a storm comes up in you, you get out of the treetop and go down to the trunk for safety. Your roots start down at your abdomen, slightly below the navel, at the energy point known as the tan tien in Chinese medicine. Put all your attention on that part of your belly, and breathe deeply. Don’t think about anything, and you’ll be safe while the storm of emotions is blowing.

Practice this every day for just five minutes, and after three weeks, you’ll handle your emotions successfully whenever they rise up.

It’s a good idea to teach belly breathing to the “tweens” and younger children as well as teenagers.

Thich mentions schoolteachers can save lives by teaching abdominal breathing to all of their students so they’ll be prepared “when the whirlwind of strong emotions starts churning inside them.”

For the babies—the pre-schoolers, you can tell them to put a stuffed animal on their tummy and notice how it rises and falls with the breath. What they’re learning is how to be in their body, how to take their attention to their breath and breathe deeply, and how to get out of “thinking,” which is the cause of suffering. They’re learning how to self-soothe and how to be in their center.

Know that taking your awareness to and breathing into your belly center is also a skillful practice for adults. Try it the next time you’re in a gnarly situation and see what happens. It will work best in a challenging situation if you have practiced it every day for five minutes so that it’s second nature in a challenging moment.

Next time you see someone doing Tai Chi, Qigong, or martial arts, notice how connected they are to the the belly center and to the ground. The masters of these practices grasp the power of this center.

We too can reclaim our connection to the ground, to empowerment, and to pure being by breathing into and bringing our awareness to the hara, the belly center. It is here that we find the calm “eye of the storm” in our own body-minds.