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By Root 644 0

energy and diminish our inner and outer sense of spaciousness. Such psychological states can, if they become chronic, throw our entire system out of balance. Our experiences of ourselves can become so narrow that we lose any real sense of our own wholeness. Some great teachers, such as Buddha and Gurdjieff, use words such as attachment and identification to describe the process by which we lose touch with ourselves. When we continually “identify” ourselves with, or get swallowed up by, a particular image, idea, attitude, sensation, or emotional state, our awareness of ourselves, others, and our environment becomes extremely narrow. In addition, the circulation of energy in ourselves becomes disharmonious, and parts of ourselves do not receive the physical and psychological nutrition they need for health and well-being. What’s more, such identification reduces what Gurdjieff calls the “food of impressions” through which “nature transmits to us … the energy by which we live and move and have our being.”53 The flow of life, of energy, of impressions slows down, and we soon find ourselves exhausted—or even ill.

In my own history, it has become clear to me that my well-being has suffered most when my life seemed stale and devoid of movement, when it lacked new impressions of myself and the world, when it lacked organic satisfaction and meaning, or when there were simply too many impressions of one kind. At these times, I was caught, frozen, in a self-made prison of physical, emotional, and mental attitudes that excluded anything new from entering. It is clear not only experientially, but also scientifically, that the nervous system and brain need the constant but balanced stimulation of new impressions for both health and growth. As researchers Robert Ornstein and David Sobel point out: “The brain apparently has a need for a certain amount of stimulation and information to maintain its organization. When there is either too much or too little, instability results and disease may follow.”54

Nourishing the Brain and the Immune System

For most of us, the stimulation the brain needs arises mainly through our contact with the outside world, through social interaction, entertainment, study, travel, job challenges, and so on, and this stimulation helps, if it is not overly stressful, to keep the organism in balance and to nourish the immune system. Every sensory impression we take in influences us. Even the taste and smell of food can have a nourishing affect on the immune system. A recent Duke University study showed, for example, that enhancing foods with powdered flavors and odors gave elderly participants, all of whom had taste and smell deficits, significantly higher levels of B and T cells. These lymphocytes, which mature in the bone marrow, thymus gland, and other areas, are “the strike force that, most often, rids bodies of infection and disease.”55

New Flavors of Ourselves

The nourishment of the brain and the immune system through appropriate stimulation and information, however, is not dependent only on the perception of outer events. It can also occur through the perception of inner events, such as our ever-changing thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Self-observation and self-sensing enable us to experience new “flavors” of ourselves. They allow us to take in and metabolize direct impressions of our inner functions, attitudes, and energies. These impressions not only bring us a new sense of vitality, but they also begin to break down the confines of our self-image and give us a truer, more comprehensive sense of ourselves.

As we have seen, however, learning how to take in new impressions through self-sensing requires great inner relaxation. It also requires the ability to breathe into more of the whole of ourselves. Where our breath goes, our attention can also go. By learning how to breathe naturally—that is, by learning how to breathe vitality into every corner of our being—we not only promote the expansion of our inner consciousness, but we also stimulate the healthful, harmonious movement of substances and energies