Mindfulness for Pain & Illness | Part 2 with Vidyamala Burch
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Welcome back to the mindfulness exercises podcast. I'm Sean Fargo. In this episode, just part two of our two-part series with Vijay Mala Birch, we're going to be hearing more about how mindfulness can alleviate chronic pain. She's going to be guiding us through a powerful teaching on the breath and body awareness in helping us to soften,

to let go of tension and tightness and resistance, and how whole body breathing can help us to regulate our emotions, to help us feel more grounded and present. It's not just breathing in and out through our nostrils, but actually we're going to be breathing with the whole body, which is quite powerful. This episode closes with a guided meditation.

called Five Bays of the Breath to help us reconnect with softness and gravity. Let's begin.

So we're going to move on now to look at breath, which is a powerful tool to help us find this sort of soft awareness in the body. Whole body breathing is, and whole body breathing is what we're going to go into. So it's not just the chest, but feeling breathing in the whole body. It's a really brilliant way to experience more fluidity and experience. And obviously we've already looked at that a little bit, this unwinding of the narrative of pain as a fixed and static thing.

And we realize how breathing is flowing and changing all the time. And that can help us see that everything else is flowing and changing all the time, mentally, emotionally, physically. It's a really good way to unwind reactivity. I'll say more about that in a moment. And when we're in any kind of pain, stress, fear, and so on, we almost always hold the breath.

So this means that people who are living with chronic pain often have habits of breath holding. And as soon as you hold your breath, you've got more tension and you've got more pain. So it escalates that secondary suffering spiral. And we can learn to release into this quality of a kindly open awareness. So let's just do a little exercise together. So if you make a fist with one hand, what's happened to your breathing? So probably what's happened is your breathing's

got inhibited or stopped just through that simple gesture. It's like, so the breathing starts to stop around that gesture. Okay. And now imagine breathing into the fist and what does the fist want to do? Wants to open. Yeah. So this is a fantastic little exercise that of course you can just start using in your life or with your

people you teach so the fist here represents any contracted state mentally emotionally or physically so as soon as we've got any kind of going on we're going to have breath holding it's so interesting and if we can learn to notice that and to breathe into that with a sort of intentional attitude then we're going to learn how to let go of that tendency to contract and breath hold yeah

And that can be life-changing. So what we're learning to do is to change our default setting from being someone who goes sort of contract, breath hold, tense, fight, to being somebody who just flows through life with much more openness.

I think this is probably one of the most transformative things for me is learning to not be a chronic breath holder in reaction to the pain. And then the other thing is we learn to live with gravity. We had a little bit of a taste of that earlier, but this is very powerful. That gravity is this amazing, mysterious force that...

holds us close to the earth. It's really incredible, isn't it? If it was stronger, we'd be stuck in one place. If it was lighter, we'd be floating off. So we live in this world where we're able to be close to the earth and yet to move. Now, when we've got pain, I think for many of us, you know, we don't want to be in the body.

So there's a kind of lifting, trying to lift out of the body very subtly, which means that we're resisting gravity, which is really, really tiring because you're resisting this force. So learning to rest into gravity is very powerful. So learning to flow with the breath and rest into gravity can be very powerful.

So we've got these four diaphragms and diaphragm means membrane between two spaces. The body's got lots of diaphragms. Very often we just, we think about the main thoracic diaphragm, but there's these other particular diaphragms that are also really good to be aware of in relation to breathing. So the first one is in the head, amazingly. So we've got this diaphragm.

diaphragm called the cranial diaphragm. So the brain is resting in a little cradle and the brain is mostly water. So it's very fluid, something like 78% water. And then the cradle it's resting in is also being influenced by the breath.

So rather than the brain feeling like a hard rock in a hard environment in the head, which is how it can feel for many people, brain is fluid and the environment is fluid. So you won't feel this moving, but it's just good to know that there is movement, even very, very subtle movement deep inside the head. And then we've got a diaphragm at the

back of the throat, back of the mouth top of the throat, which is also very interesting in terms of breathing. So if you make this noise, and the noise I'm making is at the back of the throat, so the diaphragm's kind of here around the glottis area. Many of us are quite blocked here, so we sort of carry a lot of tension in this area. But ideally there's an area that moves

very very subtly there's a kind of opening on the in-breath and a very gentle closing at the end of the out-breath so that this area is open that's the main point and then we have the main central diaphragm thoracic diaphragm that moves down in the body on the in-breath and back up in the body on the out-breath and then we've got the pelvic diaphragm so we have a pelvic floor at the bottom of the torso if we're sitting we can imagine that the pelvic floor is like a diamond shape the

back of the diamond is the anus and the front of the diamond is the pubic area. And the two sides of the diamond are the sitting bones, these bony protuberances in the buttocks. And although the pelvis is obviously rigid, within that diamond shape, it's soft tissue. And there can be a very, very, very subtle...

sort of echo of breathing in that area. Very, very subtle. And ideally, all these diaphragms work together. So there's a kind of opening phase on the in-breath

and then a draw-in-closed phase on the out-breath. And again, ideally, they're completely and utterly effortless. So we're not doing anything. It's not pelvic floor exercises. We're living in this fluid body, the soft body, and we're allowing this kind of opening phase on the in-breath as the air pours into the body, and then a very gentle settling phase on the out-breath. And they all work together. So there's

There's whole body breathing. And all the internal organs get a massage because we're allowing the diaphragms to move. Psoas muscle gets a massage. And look at the back of the body. So the back of the body is really engaged with breathing. It's not just a chest activity.

And back breathing is very, very good for calming. We can get a sense of how interconnected the whole body is and the whole body's getting a massage through the natural breath. All these muscles between the ribs, the intercostal muscles, abdominal muscles, and the whole body breathing. See if you can feel how the back's involved, the pelvic floor, the whole body is involved. And sometimes we call it 360 degree breathing. So rather than just being a little shallow thing in the chest, the whole body breathing.

has this quality. So we've got these four diaphragms, one beneath the brain, cervical, thoracic and the pelvic floor. So the brain one, as I said, you won't feel it, but I just like to imagine that it's a very fluid, soft world in there. And that straight away can soften some of the

the tight thinking. The cervical one, just for the purpose of experimentation, if you clench your teeth and notice what happens to your breathing when you clench your teeth. And when I clench my teeth, all my breathing freezes. If I purse my lips, my breathing contracts. Now I'd like you to do a big yawn and see what it's like at the end of the yawn. Oh,

At the end of the yawn, let your jaw stay soft and let your lips just come very lightly together. Let the tongue stay soft in the mouth. And what does your breathing feel like then? And I notice if I do that, my whole body feels softer. So we're seeing if we can learn to have this as our default setting with jaw soft, tongue soft.

breathing through the nose if we can, because that's got health benefits, but letting go of the tendency to block around the jaw that many of us have. Thoracic diaphragm, the key here is to see if we can let the belly stay soft. And so then the diaphragm can move in the body. And the pelvic floor, the key thing here is to see if we can let our bum be soft. It'd be quite difficult to feel it anatomically. So what I always say is just see if you can relax your bum.

And if you relax your bum, your pelvic floor will also soften a little bit. So one of the ways I teach this material is the five Bs of the breath. See if we can bring awareness and softness to these areas. And they all start with the letter B, which is soft.

helpful to remember. So the buttocks or the butt or the bum, depending on your vernacular, the belly. So that's the takeaway, the five Bs of the breath. So one of the ways to remember this is when in doubt, breathe out. Most of us, most of the time do breath holding. People with chronic pain certainly do breath holding. So if you don't know what to do with yourself, breathe out and let the next in breath take care of itself. You will breathe in again, but we inhibit the exhalation a lot of us when we've got difficulty.

Let's just move a little bit, jiggling maybe. A few deeper breaths and then when we're ready let's settle into stillness. We're just going to do a very brief 5Bs of the breath body scan just so you get a little taste. So dropping into stillness, let's see if we can give the body up to gravity with the quality of yielding without collapsing.

So resting into the chair, the floor, the bed, whatever it is that we're resting upon. We want to take a few deeper in-breaths, releasing on each out-breath, by all means doing so. Help us arrive and settle and then when we're ready, allowing the breathing to find its own rhythm. Now let's imagine awareness is like water and it's pouring out of the head all the way down through the body to the feet and the feet become full of awareness.

flowing inside the feet, allowing sensations into awareness and feeling into their fluid and changing nature. Got discomfort noticing any tendency to resist and seeing if we can release back into flow again with a kindly quality of awareness and allowing awareness to pour up inside the legs, flowing up through the lower legs, front, the back, the side.

the inside and the knees and the thighs, the feet and the legs become drenched with awareness. And seeing if we can rest inside rather than thinking about the legs and the abstract, resting inside temperature, sensation, contact with the chair, unpleasant, pleasant, knowing everything into awareness moment by moment, pause into awareness, pause out of awareness like a river,

Coming up to the buttocks, resting on the chair and let's see if we can let the buttocks be soft. Resting into the chair rather than perching on top of the chair. And as we soften in this area, you may find that our breathing drops a little deeper in the body quite naturally. It's a really felt quality of an echo of breathing in the pelvic floor. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But remember it's completely effortless and receptive like an echo.

we've got the bigger movements higher in the body and can we let them echo lower in the body like an ocean swell and allowing awareness to pour inside the belly, the whole soft front of the body between the pelvis at the bottom, base of the ribs at the top, thinking back to the video in this very natural swelling a little bit on the in-breath subsiding on the out-breath

not doing anything, we're allowing the central diaphragm to move down and the body compresses the organs a little bit, they get displaced outwards, the belly swells, the diaphragm releases back up inside the body and the organs drop back inside the body on the out-breath. Checking we're still allowing the buttocks to be soft. Coming up to the chest area, again there's an opening quality on the in-breath, subsiding quality on the out-breath. All the time

Checking that we're still yielding up into gravity. Soft buttocks, soft belly, soft chest. Now let's come into the back of the body. So come back down to the buttocks first of all and then allowing awareness to pour up inside the lower back. There's the breath and the length. And thinking back to the video and how breathing is showing up in the back of the body. Being curious.

So release air-calf breathing in the lower back, maybe the shape changes a little bit on the in-breath and the out-breath, maybe there's a broadening and a subsiding or maybe you don't feel anything, that's also fine of course. Being aware of the possibility of the lower back participating in breathing, effortless, receptive. Coming up to the middle back and the upper back, back of the ribs, the back of the lungs, the spine running up the middle, shoulder blades on either side.

Letting the hands be supported, gripping in the shoulders and allowing the upper back to be breathed. Resting our awareness inside the whole landscape of the upper back. Opening, subsiding, opening, subsiding. Perhaps considering how the lungs and the back of the ribs are as important to breathing as the front of the lungs and the front of the ribs, which is where we most commonly

The tenter breathing, the whole back of the body, the whole length, the whole breadth of being breathed. Unawareness coming inside the shoulders and then pouring down through the arms like water all the way to the fingers and the thumb, the hands supported, resting into gravity. Shoulders resting into gravity away from the midline of the body and yet we're alert, present, not collapsing.

Allowing awareness now to pour back up through the arms and the shoulders and to the neck. And coming to the vocal diaphragm, cervical diaphragm. Being aware of the area at the back of the mouth, top of the throat. Seeing if we can let the wind of the breath pour freely through this area on the way in and out of the body. Letting the jaw be soft, tongue soft, lips soft. And time checking that we're still resting down through the buttocks at the other end of the body.

Now imagining we're right inside the head. This will be imagined rather than felt, so we've got this watery brain resting in its fluid environment. There's an echo of breathing here as well. Very, very subtle. The eyes soft, and the whole body, all of awareness, gentle, fluid, kindly. The five Bs are the breath soft, the buttocks and the belly and the back of the body, back of the mouth and the brain.

your breathing is fluid, very good way to unwind resistance, gripping, contraction that habitually arises around discomfort, allowing everything to flow through each present moment like a rhythm. Now we're going to transition again, very interesting, to see if we can bring a tiny bit of movement in without gripping around breathing.

very often the first thing we do is we inhibit the breath and then we move into some kind of contracted state. So let's see if we can keep the breathing fluid, resting into gravity, opening the eyes when we're ready and just beginning to move a little bit, however we want to.