Breathing to Glastonbury and back...the best way to travel

I've just come back from Glastonbury, where my wife's doing a healing voice course with Jill Purce.

During the car journeys, I listened to two CDs about breathing - the first on the way down by Pema Chodron. the American Tibetan Buddhist nun, who does a fantastic job of making the ancient Himalayan wisdom accessible to curious western minds. Hers is called Good Medicine.

And another CD by another American,this time a medic, Dr Andrew Weil.

Both speakers, erudite and passionate, just reaffirmed the very essence and vitality of the breath...and how wonderful it is to use it as a fantastically powerful resource in my life.

Pema, if that's what you call her, was talking about Tonglen meditatition, as taught to her by guru Trungpa Rinpoche. In a way it is the essence of compassion, it is about using your breath to help and heal others from any ailment or predicament you can conceive of. You breathe in the negative, claustrophobic feeling on the inhale - you make your breath hot, dark and negatively charged and on the outbreath you transform it making it light, healing, positive and abundant.

This can be used personally. One of the processes she describes is helping yourself get through a negative patch by, first clocking that other people will have definitely experienced what it is you're experiencing. And then using the breathing technique to create an empathetic contact with that negative emotion and then using Tonglen to free yourself up from it. Finally, if you have the strength for it, you can take on this feeling from fellow sufferers around the world, like this: "Ok, as I am suffering this depression right now, I am prepared to bear this suffering for everybody else who is suffering the same thing right now."

A spectacular act of compassion, if you have the strength for it.

Weil's CD was aimed at the beginner meditator, but as I am learning this seems to be a subject that I am always beginning again at - after 35 years...

What I took from this was a sequence of breathing that he said was very effective at combatting compulsive patterns. I get very resentful and have always done so, but now understand that this is just passing the blame to someone else rather than dealing with it directly. So I'll be giving this a go and blogging about it...

First you put your tongue in what Weil calls the yogic position. You touch the back of your upper front teeth with the tip of you tongue and then keeping contact with your palette move it up past the first ridge and let it rest on the hard tissue there. Your tongue is now basically tucked back with the lower surface touching the palette.

Then you breathe in to the count of four, hold your breath to the count of seven and then breathe out to the count of eight around your yogically positioned tongue. You repeat this with four or eight times, no more no less. Try it and see what happens...