Ocean Breathing." You Create a rhythmic resonance between your physical breathing and the wave movement of the ocean. It becomes a form of "internal chi breathing" because your mind focuses the wave movement deep inside the core energy channels of the body.

1. Stand comfortably, feet shoulder width apart. Relax your breathing, smile and focus in on the center of your body at navel level.

2. Start to rock back and forth gently, inhaling as you rock forward onto balls of feet, exhaling as you rock backward onto heels.

3. As you inhale, lift your relaxed arms to the sides, as if they were waves. As you exhale, let your arms float down. Hands, never touch, but you can imagine they are pulsing around an imaginary ball of energy emanating from your navel.

4. As the wave pulsing feeling grows, feel it penetrating deeper inside your body, into inner dimensions, and then pulsing back out again. Feel the outer wave expanding beyond your body into the room and as far as you are able to feel it. Practice for as long as you feel comfortable. You will get both relaxed and energized by the process.

5. Afterwards, cover your navel with both hands, and focus inside on any subtle feelings of vibration, warmth, or pulsation, teaches us to actually understand and experience deeply what it is that we are already doing with each breath.

What is "internal chi breathing?" This involves understanding the relationship between physical breathing and our energy body breathing. Our energy body is just the sum total of all energy channels and all the body-mind's subtle energy functions that underlie our personality traits. Most people are not aware of this relationship because they are looking at the world as a solid physical world full of solid objects. They are not seeing everything as an energetic process. The deeper you get into the Chi Gung way of living, the more you begin to embody and experience the world as changing energy fields. Your own body and breath is no different. There is a relationship between an energy field and a physical process. The pattern in that energy field is what determines the pattern in your physical breathing; it is not the other way around. You can change your physical breathing pattern. In order to do that, you have already made a shift energetically. The energy field shift always precedes the shifting pattern of physical breathing.

When we focus on internal chi breathing, what we are doing is acknowledging that there is something subtler than just the air going in and out. You can call that chi field your mind, the matrix of your mind, or whatever you like. It is pulsating, it is vibrating, and breathing like everything else in this living universe. It has to move. If it stops moving, it's dead. If it stops pulsating, it's dead.

This doesn't mean that if you have very light physical breathing that you are about to die. It is possible to have very shallow physical breath but very deep chi breath. This is not the case for most people. Usually those that have very shallow breathing also have very shallow movement of energy. This is not a healthy condition. Organs start to feel starved for breath and all kinds of problems start to come up. Internal Chi Breathing cures those problems at the deepest level where they begin by unifying the physical breath and the subtle breath.