Or, whenever in-breath and out-breath fuse, at this instant touch the energy-less, energy-filled center.
- Instruction: at the fusion point – where breath is neither going in nor out, momentarily static – touch your center. The in-breath travels TO the center (the navel, not the head); the out-breath departs FROM it. That fusion point IS your center.
- ‘Energy-less’ = the center draws nothing from body/food fuel (that fuel energy can stop); ‘energy-filled’ = it is fed by the cosmic source, which never stops. The two terms are not contradictory.
- Children breathe all the way into the abdomen – it rises and falls; they live at the center, total in every act, present and overflowing. Civilized adults breathe shallow from the chest: off-center, fragmentary, unable to be total in anything.
- Prerequisite/pitfall: shallow chest breathing is the conditioned mechanism for suppressing sex (deep belly breath massages the sex center from within; fear of sex pulls the breath up into the chest). To do this technique you must let the breath descend deep to the belly – not hold it at chest level.
- Marker: the sudden bliss of a deep ‘Ah!’ breath in the hills is not from the hill station but from momentarily touching the center; this technique makes that contact deliberate.