Breathing in the Moment

...a followup to "100,000 Shrines"

Photo Cliff Scholz

After my 100,000 Shrines post a couple weeks ago, I took a little time to consider how to make good on my promise to further elaborate on what’s going on when we live as though in every moment we are making an offering, and how our awareness of this might affect that dynamic.

Looking at this from a variety of angles, I decided that breathing was a good place to begin this discussion. To breathe consciously — to notice, pay attention to and feel the breath — is often super helpful in dropping more deeply into the moment so we can make our offerings from a deeper place within ourselves.

Skilled teachers and group facilitators who want to encourage us to move into a state of better clarity and receptivity will often suggest that we take a deep breath or two. You might even want to take a deep breath right now. It almost always helps.

Taking a deep breath, pausing for a moment to make that a priority, can help us relax a little. Most of us seem to feel better, clearer in our inner and outer connections and more present in the moment when we take a moment and breathe. As we relax, we open. As we open, we can receive more fully what’s there in the moment to feel, see, and learn, and then radiate from that place of connection or otherwise express ourselves more coherently.

I know, I know: Who has time to breathe these days?

But seriously, about twenty years ago I did a weekend retreat on breathing. Our teacher taught us a variety of breathing patterns so we could experience their effects, and shared about the importance of breathing practice in more theoretical terms as well. Mostly the message was, same thing I’m sharing here: notice the breath. At the time it sort of made sense, at least in abstract terms. But as I progressed in my practice I realized that I had understood very little of it. I still don’t make any claims to expertise. All I have is my experience. But the reason this is worth sharing is that even though I have been working with my own breathing for a while, I also know how easy it is to dismiss the breath, to put breathing in a mental category that gets labeled and filed and very likely forgotten about.

It took a long time for me to even start to realize that breathing doesn’t belong in a category, or perhaps more accurately: that putting things in categories is exactly the habit of mind that conscious breathing can help mitigate the effects of, so that we can live in better communion with life. I couldn’t even have articulated this twenty years ago. I didn’t get it.

So the topic of breathing presents a bit of a communication problem, mainly because we assume we know what it is. We’ve heard the word ‘breathing,’ we associate that word with something we do. What more is there?

Bottom line: because words are familiar labels and labels tend to categorize experiences, it's sometimes hard to get below that and actually talk about the subtler levels of this kind of stuff. That’s why my teacher could make statements about the breath that I could try to process mentally but still I wouldn’t understand much of what was said and I couldn’t translate it into my own experience, even with practice. Strangely, even in the midst of that, somehow or another the breath goes on. Just saying the word ‘breathe’ out loud requires the propulsion of the breath to bring it into being. Breathing is primary.

Now, I just passed about the 575-word mark in this essay. Hopefully I can write enough so that it might trigger the habit of mind that tells us that when someone talks for a while, maybe something is being said. That may be about the best I can do. That, and say the words ‘breath’ and ‘breathe’ enough times so that maybe my readers will consider taking a nice deep breath now and then rather than just thinking about it. Maybe even now.

And maybe this story will help. Starting in 2017, some fifteen years after the aforementioned weekend breath retreat, I noticed how important the sensation of air passing over the membranes of the respiratory tract really is. I was working with a new teacher by this time, though the learning was informal. And suddenly I sensed how nasal passages in particular are stimulated by the breath and, even more surprising, that the air passages can configure themselves in subtle ways that actively direct the breath into the body. It’s difficult to describe but definitely feels significant. The air passages through which we breathe are not like the ductwork in your house. They are alive and highly responsive to the incoming breath especially, in my experience. Essentially, what I realized and have been learning about since then is that we are actively shaping our inspiration at all times, shaping and reshaping pathways through which air flows into the body as we open ourselves to receive the breath that gives us life. That breath as we take it in then helps to shape, inform, and energize the living body.

Now, that’s a lot to take in, really, so it might help to breathe with it as I say it again in a different way. We are actively shaping ourselves around the air that flows into us as we breathe in and open to receive it. In turn, that breath then helps to shape, energize, and inform our bodies. The sensations of the breath can bring us into the moment we are emerging into — and here I mean all of these sensations, really, how the nose and other parts of the respiratory system shape the flow, how the muscles of the diaphragm and body all shift together, expanding and contracting, all in a coordinated way, to enable and allow this to happen, and so much else.

The idea of sharing about this is that I know it’s really easy to say, “Wow, it’s just breathing, right?” But there’s a lot going on there once we start letting go of our conditioning, and most importantly, we can feel better right now just by remembering to do it. I’m pretty sure that East Indian yogis and others have mapped all this out to a high degree of precision, and that’s all well and good, but we can also approach this very simply, and the subtleties will appear with time. Main thing is, when we take a deep breath or when we bring our awareness to our breath in any moment, we’re doing something amazing, more than we know. It’s worth paying attention to. And, we feel better.

So this is one way we can make offerings in the moment that come from a deeper place: breathe. It’s certainly not the only way to approach this, but it’s often a good place to start. Then, what follows such a beginning might for example be a thoughtful response instead of a reactive one. Or maybe we take an inspired action that solves problems. Or maybe what’s needed in the moment is compassionate listening. But even if nothing outwardly results other than someone contributing a calmer, clearer presence to the community, that’s really enough. That’s a wonderful offering.