Breathing
Is an act of taking,
That is defined by letting go.
Tell me — which is “the breath”?
The inhale? The exhale?
Or is it the pauses between them?
The moment of fullness,
Lungs pregnant with potential, metabolizing, actualizing…
Or that of emptiness?
Cleared out, vacant, still living, but expiring…
Before inevitably, perhaps begrudgingly, filling up with life,
Once again.
Breathe.
Witness the parabola of our being.
Ever oscillating between fullness and vacuity.
Rising, only to fall.
Falling, to rise once again.
Tell me — what, in this life, can we take,
That mustn’t eventually be let go?
You quite literally cannot continue living
If you don’t let go of whatever breath you take in.
Our body knows this.
We do it without having to form a conscious thought.
Even if you try to keep it for yourself,
At some point, you will be over-ruled
By that unseen force within.
Compelled to release, to suck back in, and go on living,
Despite any force of natural will.
We go on living.
We go on.
We go.
Breathe — let go.
Breathe. And….let go.
This is the practice of yoga. Those four words better explain what we’re doing on the mat than even the cleverest discourse I or any other writer might string together in hopes of touching the depth of meaning we tend to construct around something that is really quite simple.
Breathe. Let go.
Inhale. Exhale.
Take in. Release.
The breath is, of course, none of the things listed above (inhale, exhale, pause at the bottom, pause at the top), and yet it is also all of them at the same time — it is the totality that shows the sum is zero.
You might say: “Yes yes that’s quite poetic, why does it matter?”
It matters because the breath is, by definition, ever present as we move through life. We often act as if we could stop, analyze, and solve whatever equation is underlying our experience. Once we have it figured, then life will be easy, right?
Wrong. There is no absolute objectivity from that parabolic rhythm of life. We are analogous to it. We are always at the bleeding edge of experience. Whether we recognize it is up to us. I’d argue that most of us are completely out of touch with this reality underlying the composite experience of modern life. We’ve spent so long wrapped up in the compelling illusion of layered thought and sensory experiences that we’ve begun to believe that the nature of reality IS those things.
But the breath serves as a signpost guiding the way out of that sort-of Nietzsche-an trap. As we work to break the sometimes oppressive grip of Western rationality, seeking our feelings and intuition, we can end up riding down the other side of that parabola of being, ending up just as low, trapped, and blind as we were before.
The place to be is not on either side, up, down, left or right — it’s the “center”, the space where all of that oscillation occurs.
That’s where the breath always is, and it couldn’t be anywhere else.
As humans, we are perhaps somewhat unique in our ability as conscious beings to end up totally preoccupied with the past, the future, or any of the other non-present things that tend to occupy our attention one after the other. Yoga is, in essence, a practice of breaking that pattern and letting go of the things we truly aren’t, in embracing the things we actually are.
It starts with pulling the attention back to the breath, and to stay there with it, we must let go of the things we were holding on to beforehand.
You can’t fill a cup that’s already full.
So on the mat, the practice is often truly down to emptying out the contents of your consciousness by focusing the attention onto the object of the breath which guides us back into the present moment. And every time it slips off, building the resilience of this conscious attention by bringing it back to the breath again, which is already there, in the present, waiting for us to notice it.
Breathe, and let go.
You might recognize this song from my playlists. Felt right to include it on this piece. Flip on the captions or look up the lyrics.
Full video not for the faint of heart…neither is truly living though, really.