Neolithic Shamanism: Spirit Work in the Norse Tradition - Raven Kaldera 2012
Breath
The White World: Air
Raven: Breathing is how we pump ond, life force, around the body and out of it. We can blow it out deliberately with our breath, and suck it in with our breath as well. While one can do that without the aid of the breath, the breath is so useful that why would you ignore it when you have this wonderful built-in pump as part of your central nervous system? And because you have to breathe anyway, you might as well use it when you need it. There is a lot of amazing stuff out there about breath work from yogis who have been experimenting with it for centuries, but really all you have to do is sit and be aware of your breathing and how it moves your energy. Ideally you would do this on a regular basis. Do it while you sit on the bus, while you wait in the dentist’s office, while you’re in line at the DMV.
Galina: When I was first introduced to meditation, magic, and energy work by my spirit teachers (which seemed to happen all at once, one tumbling into the other), we began with breath. I was taught that breath is the foundation for all of those things. It’s the key, the easiest, most integral, and most accessible means of learning to link into and move energy—including one’s own personal energy. I learned all sorts of techniques based in breath. Eventually, this led me into magic, galdr (shaman-song), journey work, and many other techniques and skills essential to my work both as a shaman and a magician. It also helped me with my devotional practice. The key to stilling the mind (which is really the first thing one must learn, if you get right down to it) is breath, maintaining careful focus on your breathing. It’s the key to everything. So I still start my students off the same way I began, and that’s the first exercise that I’ll share with you, our readers, now.
Exercise: Breath Meditation
Find a comfortable position, sit down, and close your eyes. (We recommend doing this exercise in a seated position rather than lying down. It’s too easy to fall asleep otherwise, especially as you begin to relax.)
Begin to focus on your breath. Feel the gentle expansion of the rib cage as your lungs fill with breath and the easy release as the breath flows from you on the exhalation. Spend five or six minutes really allowing yourself to feel the rhythm and flow of the breath into and out of your lungs. Let this rhythm take on a life of its own and then feel or imagine that your breath is overflowing your lungs and moving throughout your body. Your entire body expands and contracts as you breathe—every atom, every cell, every bone, nerve, muscle, and tissue is inhaling and exhaling, gobbling up breath, soaking it up and taking part in its release. It’s as if you’re not breathing but rather being breathed.
As you continue focusing on this all-body breath, allow yourself to become aware of any places of tension, stress, tightness, or pain in your body. Feel or imagine that you are actually inhaling through the spots that hurt. As you inhale, the breath moves to those places and moves through them, teasing out the tightness, working its way into the knots, surrounding the pain, creating space, creating release. As you exhale, you have the opportunity to exhale some of that tension and pain. Breath can move everywhere. The muscles can soak its power up like a sponge. It can create release where there is tension, create space where there is tightness. It brings expansion, and it can surround, gather up, and move pain. Breath has currents just like water. Through this meditation exercise you are allowing those currents to move through your body, surrendering all those things (like tension) that your body does not need and allowing the breath to free you of them.
Keep up with this as long as you are able, or as long as you feel that you ought to be doing it. Then gently bring your attention back to the inhalation and exhalation, the expansion of the lungs, the gentle stretching of the intercostals. Focus on the feeling of the breath entering and leaving your nostrils, and when you are ready to end the exercise, exhale, using the power of the exhalation to ground yourself.