Breathing Exercise and CISM Applications Last week's breathing exercise was a very eye- (and lung- ) opening experience for me, teaching me a new way to not only handle stress but to create a greater self-awareness of stress levels and other mental and physical goings-on. A large part of this new awareness was not simply that the meditation and breathing exercises helped me to actually become consciously aware of what was happening in my mental and physical state, but also in becoming aware that I could become aware of what was going on in my mental and physical states. That is, discovering how truly simple and in some ways easy it is to create a greater sense of internal and external self-awareness was somewhat shocking to me. I have always had a certain level of awareness in such matters, of course, as every human being does, but to be able to more sharply, directly,...

Approaching things in a largely intellectual manner as I do, I found it very helpful to my process to have some clear rationales and immensely practical goals in mind as I undertook the exercise. It did take me some time to let myself relax and stop internally commenting n what I was doing in order to appreciate the full benefits of the exercise, but once I did these benefits become incredibly clear and are something I will try to incorporate into my daily life. The more I practiced throughout the week, the easier this became,…