Somatic Vision

I work with the clinical version and do a peculiar observation. If I breathe deeply with the pacer, I'm in the green smoothness zone. I like slow breathing of 10sec. As soon as I go into a deeper state of relaxation, as during meditation or while lying down, doing the body scan exercise, my smoothness gets absolutely low. I must breathe unnaturally deep (especially the inhale) in order to achieve a good smoothness rating. The heart meditations with focus on breathing through the heart and solar plexus area bring the same bad result when I'm doing them with my natural slow regular breathing. Would it be better for my health if I would inhale deeper, as the alive feedback asks for?

Interestingly my husband, who is also an experienced meditator, gets the same bad smoothness results during deep meditation and relaxation. He can also improve his results by an reinforced breathing. These results are confusing, because they do not correspond with my sense of coherence.

We use smoothness difficulty level intermediate

Thanks for advice.
Araun

Hi Araun,

Deep meditation and deep relaxation would be better measured by skin conductance. These should go down and will spike up if you have many thoughts and distractions during your meditation. Smoothness / coherence is more of an alive state.

First of all, please change the difficulty back to standard. You don't want to have to breathe in such a way as you are forcing your breath. Focus on long slow exhales and don't think about the inhale so much.

People do naturally breathe in about a 10 second per breath rhythm, and have high smoothness/coherence but during very positive emotions (and also when oxygen is low as this is an efficient breathing speed for low oxygen environments). To achieve high smoothness you need to be basically relaxed, you can't be very nervous as this will result in heart rate increases during your exhale. In addition to being relaxed it helps to focus on appreciation, anything that creates emotional positivity, etc., and also you must be breathing in a slow and relaxed way. Breathing in a slow and rhythmic way also has its own benefits, so this is a useful practice, and not just to raise the smoothness in Alive.

When you are not paying attention to Alive and not breathing smoothly you should expect a much lower smoothness than when actively training with Alive. That said, you will still see increases and decreases based on your changing emotional states. For your purpose, e.g. measuring the depth of your meditation, use SCL.

Best,

Ryan