Listen with Intent – Week 3

Still continuing on the monthly intention of Listening Calmly, I decided to choose the most basic and useful of intents this week: Breathe.

If only I could learn to breathe.

Like taking a walk, taking a moment to breathe is a simple trick to get your body to pause long enough for your prefrontal cortex to come back online. And breathing is much less conspicuous. It can be done in a meeting. It can be done while on the phone or at a restaurant. It’s hard to walk away when you’re sitting at a coffee shop but it’s easy to take a moment and breathe.

I feel like if I could get better at breathing and choosing to breathe, the words that I say would be much kinder. The actions I take would be much less rushed and the mistakes I make would be much fewer.

All in all, seems like a plus-plus to me.

Like most new habits, breathing will also take time and practice (it seems silly to say that we need practice to learn to breathe since it’s something we do all the time anyway but this is more about deep breathing, or breathing at a particular time. Almost synonymous with pausing.)

So that’s the intent for this week.

I couldn’t find the lettering I used here, I will come back and link to it when I have. The sketch I used is from here. I used the image of a dandelion because it reminds me of letting out your breath to blow on it. Breathing out.

Listen with Intent is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.