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Don’t use force. Don’t try to change anything. Simply watch and sense.
    Next, put your hands over your navel. Can you sense any movement in your belly as you inhale and exhale? Now put your hands over the lower ribs on the front of your body. What movements can you discern on the inhalation? On the exhalation? Next, put your hands on your lower ribs on both sides of your body. What happens as you inhale? As you exhale? Now put your hands on each side of your lower back in the kidney area (just opposite your navel, around the second or third lumbar vertebra). Again, see if you can sense any movement as you inhale and exhale. Next, put your hands on your upper chest. Notice what happens as you breathe in and out. Be sure to include in your awareness any tensions and restrictions in your breathing. Give yourself at least two or three minutes in each position.
     
    3 Go deeper into your sensation
    Now, try the same practice again. But this time, let your attention go deeper into your sensation. As you sense the movements of your breathing, let yourself experience how your internal organs are influenced. Put your hands over the middle of your chest as you did earlier. Can you sense your diaphragm putting pressure on any of your organs as you inhale? Which ones? What happens when you exhale? Now put you hands over your navel. What happens in the area of your small intestine as you inhale and exhale? Next, put your hands over the lower ribs in the front of the body. Sense what happens in the area of your liver on the right side and your stomach and pancreas on the left. Continue on in this way following the same sequence as you did in the previous practice.
     
    4 Include your emotions
    Try the practice again. But this time include any sensations of warmth, coolness, dryness, or dampness in and around your organs. At the same time, take note of any emotions that may be present. Be careful not to dwell on them, analyze them, or judge them. Just include them in the field of your perception as you go on sensing yourself. It is as though you are taking inner snapshots of yourself through the wide-angle lens of your sensation—your inner organic awareness of yourself.

    This is a foundation practice—one that you can and should return to daily. Later, once you become more proficient at taking inner snapshots of yourselves in quiet circumstances, you may find yourself quite spontaneously taking these inner snapshots when you are with other people. But be patient. Learning how to observe, through sensation, the interrelationships of your breath, tissues, organs, and emotions is a crucial step in both self-healing and wholeness. It will not only help make you more aware of the unconscious attitudes that create stress in your life, but it will also begin to free you from these attitudes. Most of the practices discussed in future chapters will build on this practice of organic self-awareness, and will expand on the ideas put forward in this chapter.

3
    THE TAOIST VISION OF ENERGY AND BREATH
For the Taoist, the conscious cultivation
of breath offers a powerful way
not only to extract energies from the
outside world but also to regulate
the energetic pathways of our inner world,
helping to bring our body, mind,
and emotions into harmonious balance.

    In many traditional cultures, breath is envisioned as a direct manifestation of spirit. It is the subtle energy of the spirit that “enlivens” us, and we receive this subtle energy by breathing it in or having it breathed into us from above. Terms such as prana (India), pneuma (Greece), lung (Tibet), num (the Bush people of Kalahari), ruach (Hebrew), neyatoneyah (Lakota Sioux), baraka (Islam), and chi (China) are just a few of the many names of this higher life force upon which we are said to depend. And it is through our own authentic breath that we can consciously connect with this life force.
    Though Western science rejects any notion of a subtle energy or life force that animates