The ‘essential’ breath is the free and natural breath that is innate for all of us. It is the easeful and unconditioned breath that we breathed as children, with boundless energy and imagination. However, the habitual patterns that we’ve all inevitably fallen in to through modern living, and perhaps through coping with chronic stress or underlying trauma, has led this essential breath to become bound by tension and to become distant to us.

This 20 minute breathwork practice is a reacquainting ourselves with this essential breath by consciously undoing tension in the body that withholds the breath, and by inquiring into the felt sensation of the breath. This is a practice to be returned to often and is perfect for the beginner an seasoned practitioner alike.

The breath has long been a go-to object of meditation across many different spiritual traditions. The breath is a particularly helpful tool for a number of reasons; it is always available to us, it is always happening in the present, and it has the capacity to calm the nervous system (and therefore the mind’s activity) among many more.

This simple meditation on the breath helps you to cultivate concentration, clarity and calm, by paying attention to the breath moving in and out at the tip of the nose and noticing the mind’s tendencies to distract us from the present moment. The more we can cultivate the ability to remain attentive to a single point or object, such as the breath, the more adept we become at experiencing the present moment and the more directly we perceive the world around us.