Chapter 27. A Crystallization of Theory: Breathing and Primary Self-Enjoyment

It was this sudden new sense of relationship, of communion, with Susan, on this day, 8 January, that set me trying to formulate more precisely certain ideas that had been growing in my mind all these years, to do with the relationship between body and mind.

Thus, during the year 1959 I set about writing a small paper.1 Central to this formulation were, first, my own observations of the varying moment-to-moment internal perception of one's own body, including the effects of deliberately directing one's attention to the whole internal body awareness; and, second, the connection between this and both the creation of a work of art and the growth of a vital emotional involvement with the world around one, including one's patient.

When I first began, in 1926, trying to record my observations about the kind of attention that this whole body awareness requires, I had noticed the astonishing changes in the quality of one's perceptions, both of oneself and the world, that the deliberate use of a wide enveloping kind of inner stare rather than a narrow focus of attention brings. But now, in reviewing what I had learnt since then, I remembered something that had happened during that first summer holiday after Susan began to draw (1950), when she was in hospital and writing the many letters to me; something that I only now began to see the importance of. It was that one day, when settling down to paint a landscape, I had tried a deep breathing exercise with the intention of achieving a relaxed mood. What I had noticed was that, while turning my attention inwards, in order to keep the fixed rhythm by counting, which was part of the exercise, the outer world immediately became far more vividly there in its otherness and sheer ‘thusness’. So I had to face, not only the paradox that it can be by attending to the inner sensations that one can get more deeply related to the outer, but also that becoming deeply aware of the rhythm of one's own breathing could be the nodal point in that