Breathing and Awe

If you have downloaded the THR33 RINGS 3-Minute Deep Rest Reset, or, better still, taken a few minutes to try it, you may have noticed something a little unusual. For a practice intended to help you settle into a state of deep rest, there is surprisingly little emphasis placed on breathing technique. That is intentional.

There are countless breathing methods available today: box breathing, coherent breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, 4-7-8 breathing and many others. Many people find them useful, and there is good evidence that slower, more controlled breathing can influence the autonomic nervous system, support vagal activity and help the body shift away from a state of heightened alert towards recovery and restoration. If one of those methods works well for you, keep using it. The THR33 RINGS practice simply approaches the same territory from a different direction.

Rather than asking you to concentrate on the breath itself, the practice gives your attention somewhere else to go. The breathing is still there, of course, but it is allowed to recede into the background and do what it has always done: adapt. As the body settles, the breath may become slower, quieter or deeper without needing to be counted, forced or corrected. The intention is not to ignore breathing, but to stop making it the main event.

The breathing isn’t really the practice. The rhythmic exploration inward and outward is. As your awareness begins moving between those two directions, your breathing is simply allowed to follow. It will, naturally, as it always does, and it can adapt throughout the practice without your having to supervise every inhale and exhale.

That is where the work is. At first, it can feel surprisingly demanding. Every breath asks you to redirect your attention, first inward, then outward, over and over again. But in doing so, your mind has less opportunity to wander. Instead of thinking about your breathing, or yesterday, or tomorrow, your attention becomes absorbed in exploration itself. You are not trying to empty the mind. You are giving it a task substantial enough to occupy it.

With one breath, awareness turns inward.* You might begin with the obvious sensations of the body, then move deeper: towards the organs working beneath your awareness, the networks of nerves and blood vessels, the cells repairing, communicating and sustaining you, and the extraordinary physical processes that allow a living human being to exist at all. You do not need an encyclopaedic knowledge of anatomy or biology. You only need to recognise that these depths are there and allow your awareness to explore the idea of them.

With the next breath, awareness moves outward.* It travels into the room, beyond the walls, into the landscape, the weather, the living world and, if you choose, through the atmosphere and out into the wider universe. Again, you do not need to understand astrophysics or hold a perfectly detailed image in your mind. The exercise is not a test of knowledge or visualisation. It is an expansion of scale: an attempt to place your immediate experience inside a reality far larger than the concerns that usually occupy it.

At first, these seem like entirely different journeys. One appears microscopic, the other astronomical. One feels intimate and personal, the other distant and almost impossible to comprehend. Yet, with practice, something unexpected can begin to happen. The direction starts to matter less than the extent of the exploration. The deeper inward your awareness goes, the more complexity seems to open beneath it. The farther outward it travels, the more vastness seems to open beyond it. Both are effectively without practical limit.

That is not presented here as a scientific conclusion. It is an experiential observation. The deeper you look, the more there seems to be. The farther you look, the more there seems to be there too. Both explorations can ground you in different yet complementary ways: one in the reality of being embodied, the other in the reality of belonging to a world and universe that vastly exceed the ordinary boundaries of the self.

As this rhythm becomes more familiar, the two journeys can begin to feel less opposed. They do not become literally identical, and the practice does not require you to adopt a metaphysical belief about them. But they can begin to share the same character. Both reveal inexhaustible depth. Both interrupt the assumption that the familiar is simple. Both replace the feeling of being trapped inside a small circle of thought with a sense of participation in something larger. It can feel almost as though inward and outward are approaching the threshold of the same reality from opposite sides.

This is where awe can begin to emerge.

Psychologists commonly describe awe as a response to perceived vastness that challenges our existing mental framework. It is what can happen when a mountain range, a night sky, an ocean, a work of art or an unexpected act of human courage makes our usual way of organising the world feel temporarily too small. The mind has to accommodate something larger than it was prepared for. Attention expands, self-preoccupation can loosen and our perspective shifts.

We tend to associate awe with what lies outside us, but the route inward can be no less remarkable. Consider the complexity of a single living cell, the coordination of trillions of cells throughout the body, the electrical activity of the brain, the chemistry of emotion or the still-unresolved fact that subjective experience exists at all. These are also forms of vastness. They simply happen to be concealed by familiarity and hidden beneath the surface of everyday experience.

The THR33 RINGS practice deliberately alternates between these two forms of vastness. Inward. Outward. Again and again. This oscillation matters because it repeatedly interrupts the mind’s tendency to settle back into the same narrow concerns. Each change of direction is a small act of attentional agility. Over time, the movement can become smoother, the internal commentary quieter and the need to consciously control the process less pronounced.

Something physiological may be developing alongside that shift in attention. Slower, more settled breathing can support the parasympathetic processes associated with rest and recovery, while a reduction in rumination can soften the mental signals that keep the body braced for threat. The practice is not claiming that attention alone can cure illness or override every source of stress. It is a way of helping the system practise moving towards a more recoverable state.

Awe may deepen that shift. Research has linked experiences of awe with reduced self-focused thinking, broadened attention, greater feelings of connection and aspects of psychological wellbeing. Some studies have also explored associations between positive emotions, including awe, and physiological markers, though that research should be read with appropriate caution. The useful point here is simpler: awe appears capable of changing what the mind is doing, and that change can make deep rest feel more available.

Within this practice, awe is not another target to chase. Trying to force it would be like trying to force yourself to fall asleep: the effort can become the obstacle. Instead, the practice creates conditions in which awe is more likely to arise. It is an emergent property of sustained, oscillating expansive attention. When it does arise, the experience can deepen considerably.

This can create a positive feedback loop. Expansive attention encourages the breath to settle. A calmer breath supports a quieter nervous system. A quieter nervous system makes it easier to sustain expansive attention. As the sense of scale grows, awe becomes more likely; as awe reduces self-focused thinking, the body and mind can settle further. The practice begins to reinforce itself.

That is the reverse of a cycle many of us know too well. Stress narrows attention. Narrow attention feeds rumination. Rumination keeps the body tense. Bodily tension is then read as further evidence that something is wrong. Round and round it goes. The aim here is not to build a permanent shield against difficulty or pretend that life is always safe. It is to become more practised at changing state, recovering perspective and interrupting unnecessary escalation.

Regular movement and cardiovascular exercise can complement this work by supporting the physical systems involved in stress regulation and recovery. Sleep, time outdoors, social connection and appropriate medical care still matter. Deep rest is not a substitute for the foundations of health. It is one practice among them, and its value lies partly in how simply it can be repeated: three minutes, almost anywhere, with no equipment and no need to perform it perfectly.

Perhaps that is why this approach feels different from simply concentrating on the breath. The breath becomes the tide upon which awareness travels. It is not the object of the journey but the rhythm that carries it, first inward, then outward. Before long, it is no longer the breathing that occupies your attention, but the unfolding landscapes of inner and outer experience. The nervous system settles, attention expands, awe begins to emerge and, for a few moments at least, the world can feel simultaneously larger and more intimate than it did before.

So do not worry about controlling your breathing. Give your attention somewhere meaningful to go. Explore inward. Explore outward. Let your breathing look after itself. The body already knows how to breathe. Sometimes it just needs the mind to stop getting in the way.

Try it for three minutes each day. Try it for THR33 months. Make It Happen.

* The inward and outward movements of awareness are paired here with inhalation and exhalation because many people find that rhythm intuitive. If it feels more natural to explore outward on the inhalation and inward on the exhalation, reverse them. The important element is the rhythmic oscillation of awareness, not which direction is paired with each phase of the breath.

References

Keltner, D. & Haidt, J. (2003). “Approaching Awe: A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.

Stellar, J. E. et al. (2015). “Positive Affect and Markers of Inflammation: Discrete Positive Emotions Predict Lower Levels of Inflammatory Cytokines.” Emotion, 15(2), 129–133.

Monroy, M. & Keltner, D. (2023). Research and review work on awe, the “small self” and wellbeing.

Cedars-Sinai. “Stimulating the Vagus Nerve.” Healthy Living overview.