embodying happiness – ChrisCorrigan has been blogging Pentecost for the last week or so. Fascinating stuff (yawn) that I thought I’d quote here, but now it seems that I’ve already started my Pentecost blogging in a different way, yesterday, breathing peace. Amazing to me how the same ideas are running around the world just now — in so many different languages and forms. Pentecost, again, I think. (yawn)
Chris is blogging Pentecost, interweaving various views, practices, images… and I’m blogging breathing and spirit dissolving into body… and then news by email yesterday of the first Zapchen yawn-a-thon, yawning (yawn) being all about breathing and well-being. Meanwhile, Euan Semple and Jack Ricchiuto are blogging the possibility of choosing happiness and well-being BEFORE we get everything we think we want and require to make us happy.
The first practice of Zapchen is yawning. Julie Henderson points out in her book Embodying Well-Being (yawn) (how to feel as good as you can in spite of everything) that yawning is one of the easiest, best things you can do for yourself. It…
Yawning supports our embodying the “spiritual limberness” with which Chris concludes his thoughts on Pentecost AND it lets us experience directly and immediately the happy alternative reality that Jack and Euan are suggesting. If “happiness is choice,” as Jack suggests, then yawning is happiness as practice, until it becomes happiness as ground and body. (yaaaaawn)
- relaxes your throat, palate, upper neck, and the base of your brain
- helps balance the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which helps keep brain and spine clean and flexible
- helps you ‘come down out of your head’ (yawn)
- increases the production of saliva and so improves digestion and enhances flavor
- increases production of serotonin, the currently trendy neurotransmitter that tends to balance mood, calming when hyper, brightening when gloomy
TRY IT? Yawn on every inbreath and say “ah” on every outbreath for five minutes. OR… Count how many times you can yawn in a row. See if you can get to 100, 108 or more. (aaaahhhhh…..)