Your breathing connects you to everything in you and around you. Thoughts and feelings are also connected to your breathing.
With respect to thoughts, as your breathing slows down, the whirlwind of thoughts inside your head also begins to quiet down. Your mind will become calmer, allowing you to see things with more clarity. (This is not achieved by making your breath slow down. Rather, it happens naturally by allowing the space for your breath to do whatever it does, and watching it settle.)
With respect to feelings, as your breathing becomes more in the flow (allowing its natural rhythm to unfold), you yourself become more in the flow. As this happens, feelings may also begin to flow more and become “unstuck”. You may also find that as you get unstuck from past experiences, you can be more open to new feelings and new experiences, and feel more fully alive.
The more clearly you know what you think and feel, the richer and more meaningful your relationships can be with others as you share with more clarity. You can learn to take responsibility for your thoughts and feelings; not necessarily for having them, but for what you do with them.
Thoughts and feelings can sometimes seem overwhelming. It may help you to remember that thoughts and feelings are part of what you experience, but that thoughts, feelings and sensations are not you. You are much bigger than what you experience.
You have the ability to attend to the experience of different thoughts and feelings as they pass through. You are more than the thoughts, feelings and sensations that are experienced. You are the “seer” who watches the experience of thoughts, feelings and sensations come and go.
The idea is to be present as you watch your experience unfold, moment by moment. Try not to get caught up in the thoughts or feelings. When you do get caught, you simply notice that you’ve gotten caught, and then gently return your attention to the breath.
In practicing mindfulness, you’ve been learning to focus on the sensations of your breathing as well as other bodily sensations. At first, thoughts and feelings may have seemed like distractions from this task. But now you’re being invited to take more notice of them, in order to learn more about yourself, to heal yourself, and to grow. Do your best to stay focused in the present moment, being aware of your breathing as if connected to it by a thread.
From a mindfulness perspective, thoughts and feelings are not to be indulged in, getting stuck in them—but neither are they to be avoided. The idea is to be open to whatever presents itself to you in the present moment—including thoughts and feelings. Be open, as fully as you can in each moment, with nonjudgmental acceptance.
Part of the challenge of this practice is finding a balance between getting lost in thoughts and feelings versus ignoring them or distancing yourself from them. It’s as if you’re sitting on a riverbank and just watching the river flow by (with all the elements of the “stream of consciousness”). The idea is not to jump in and get swept away. Neither is it to turn your back and pretend it isn’t there (although both of these things happen very frequently in human experience). Instead, the idea is to just sit there and observe the experience. Stay open, as fully as you can in each moment, with non-judgmental acceptance.
Thoughts and feelings are also connected with each other. If you feel differently, you think differently; and if you think differently, you feel differently. Mindfulness helps with the integration of the whole person, and with the connection between thoughts and feelings. In so doing, mindfulness cultivates the integration between the head and the heart, and therefore facilitates the experience of wholeness.