Breathe. And everything changes

To sit with oneself, in the centre of your life (picture depicts the Fearless Heart mudra)

‘When you find expectations high, just lower them.’ Ha!

A song lyric penned by my own youthful hand, in late teenhood. Inspired by the spirited cadence of a song, ‘Teach me how to breathe, I need to learn…’, very 90s pop style, the above opening lyric spinning out of me, carrying a similar melody.

Not that I had much of a clue at all about nervous system regulation or the myriad benefits of good breathing then. Just this inner river of words from the song. Then, my good friend Amy, a gregarious character I befriended early into the first year at university, was talking about expectations as we were walking along to lectures. Walking and talking. Saying swiftly and broadly in her tallness (her so tall, me not), ‘when people have all these expectations, I’m thinking, maybe you need to lower them!’.

We both roar with laughter.

True.

Let’s open with that when it comes to breathing. Because goodness there’s enough about it in the zeitgeist these days. Let go of expectations upon yourself to miraculously become at one with all things in the universe. Turning attention inwards is a turbulent affair. Universality is a truth indeed, then there’s the reality of our daily fabric. How can we remember to include exquisite care of our bodies, minds, spirits, legs, bones, blood, eye sockets and drool. All nestled into the living field of consciousness. No doubt discordance is a real and felt experience for many, the inside world so rarely neatly matching our outer one.

Yes. It is complex being a human. It’s good to remind each other of the ridiculous. That being confident in who we truly are often means sticking two fingers up to the established status quo and blazing a trail like road runner, to get the heck out of our own way. Remembering to stop for refreshment. Often.

Know this. I’ll stay in my lane, so you can get high on the trails and contours of yours. This is not a set of instructions for you to worry about how on earth to apply. This is a rallying song-note chiming out from the braid of experience and non-conformity, to crack open a crevasse in you.

Because connection to our breath is both highly practical and deeply sacred.

In Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages, these three three simple words:

Iccha, jnana, kriya.

Meaning?

Iccha: desire/will,

Jnana: knowledge

Kriya: action

We need to summon the will, the whiff of desire connected to a greater good, iccha, to gather and garner knowledge, jnana, like Goddess Saraswati, who rides her swan on the rivers of life, carrying a lute in one hand and books of knowledge in another. Saraswati is often depicted with four arms and hands, reminding us we can carry many ideas of who we are in the world. Stringed instruments and science books can be part of our journey. Music and science. Swans and rivers. Gods and goddesses. And that we need to act, kriya, from those ideas. Action is key for birthing visions to tangible form.

Otherwise, dreams lie in the graveyard of unfulfillment. Ah, another just died with a belly of regret. Ah, another expired without saying FU to the ones that needed to hear that resounding expletive, to be snapped out of some milky amnesia.

Breathing is all these things. The desire to deepen our breath to feel into the fullness of being alive. The gathering of knowledge through experience and study. Discourse and study being key to a broader and deeper understanding. The desire to travel into the sacred interior and prune a thorny notion of who we thought we were. To sow a seed of a ranunculi, a rose, a blousy peony, a bright dandelion in our interior garden. And then the willingness to take actions that build our body of understanding. To live the garden well.No flower can grow without the seed and in the absence of sunlight.

Breathe and everything changes, is a wild and often infuriating spiral rollercoaster into knowing yourself better. The shakti energies of iccha, jnana, kriya.

Shakti being the feminine principle of these energies, made more evocative and known to us humans through 10th Century Kashmiri Shaivism, the strong lineage of yoga for the householder. This has not much to do at all with a downward dog. We might express these teachings in a shape, yet the real yoga is in all the ways we live, breathe, move, eat, feel, connect, relate….you know. Our aliveness. Living well. Contributing in the ways we can.

Storytime

Sipping a beer on a pavement café in Lille on a hot summer’s day, two sips in, feeling the jovial beery buzz, I strike up a conversation with the couple who have sat down on the next table. They’re English, both retired teachers, one son is a doctor, the daughter a mental health worker. The universe often winks at me, sending people who have medics somewhere in their familial midst. (I’ve been around medics since early childhood and have worked with them in various capacities in adulthood. I used to want to be a doctor).

I notice her posture is significantly stooped, and quite lopsided. Having been speaking a little of what I spin and weave in the world, enjoying the breath chat to anyone interested, she shares her frustration with breathing. ‘I find it hard to breathe fully. I have a scoliosis and sitting up and focussing on breathing is very challenging.’ She sounds a bit cross.

I love this! She speaks honestly and expands on her unique and personal body. I suggest prone breathing might be useful, laying on the belly so more of the lung and diaphragm tissues, residing in the back body, can be accessed, without the strain of sitting up.

She gingerly asks, ‘is that ok?’. As if it wasn’t good enough that she couldn’t sit effortlessly upright and breathe.

Yes. It really is. Start where feels useful for you.

Everybody, every body, is different. We have different health landscapes, contexts, genetics, food habits, sleep patterns, accidents, illnesses and injuries along the way, the differences go on and on.

Creating safe harbour for someone, who may have spent decades having a certain relationship with the breath, is so important. The breath reveals so much. And muscles that may have taken years to tighten, to atrophy and clutch. Our fascinating fascia, the connective tissue, may have curled into strange and curious knots that are crying for relief and release. The unravelling takes many iterations. It’s a weave indeed to remember to let go of tension. To know that we can feel better.

The one commonality we all have, is, we breathe. That relationship with breath, can make or break the experience of any moment. Breath is a free resource. Learning to utilise it is a skill and ongoing journey. We’re not typically taught this from a young age.

It’s not a road to perfection, it’s a journey of revelation.

Being consistent with breathing yields exponential benefit. Videos and courses and podcasts are all around on this topic. The risk when anything becomes populist is it gets misunderstood and commercialised. Quick fixes become noisy and unattainable. This ongoing quandary we have now, of worsening public health, yet exponential rise in information being available. The discordant gaps widen, the deeply soothing feeling of congruence, gets increasingly diluted.

This for sure happened in yoga. In nutrition. In personal development. In the commerciality of it. The rise of social media made it all too noisy. Where’s the space for a deeper breath to emerge from that? Much of it has become so instructional and authoritative. Never to the core beauty though. The truth remains for all to benefit from.

Breathe, and everything changes.

Nuance, context, and paradox are part of the wider orchestra of the lives we live. Militant instructions of ‘do this, do that’ are another way of outside control. Yes, we need good guidance, like any child that thrives in a safe learning environment, has many good influences. There does need to be space for experimentation. For relaxing the expectation. For letting down the drawbridge of cynicism and defensiveness. Especially when we are adults who can become very fixed and gnarly in our views.

How many people do you know, breathe well? And how about yourself? And how, do you know that?

Aha. Question time.

Know this. At any moment, we can take a step back through the quiet repose of one breath and reset. It does need patience, space, exploration, time, commitment to a higher vision for yourself, and repetition.

Think of when you learned a new language. Did you go to one French lesson and were then fluent and understood all the idioms and intonation. No. It took time. Vocalising. Practice. Vocabulary. Confidence to communicate and hope you’d be understood. Making blunders along the way.

This is true for all of us, in all the days we rise out of bed and move into routines, relationships, purposes, mundanities. The language of the body and how we live in it.

With consistent practice, which also comes in many forms, many benefits can be reaped. And the layers and unravelling, continue infinitely. Meaning there is no end to this journey of discovery. Because breathing is living. No breath in this body = no life in this body. The space between is getting to know oneself better, in breathing.

How we breathe is a very good gauge of how we feel. The bio-metrics and psycho-physiology are what create thoughts and feelings. Breath is the sacred throughline, going way beyond a purely mechanistic understanding of respiration.

How we feel is a collection of iterations. A sum of many signs and signals, ionic exchanges, electrical impulses, hormonal cascades, movement in intra and extra cellular fluids up and down the osmolarity gradient.

The breath is managed by the autonomic nervous system so happens without our needing to think about it. When we consciously breathe, we are making a choice to be in the moment. Somatic is the conscious choice. Somatic is the feeling in the body. And of course, this means some moments are distressing, uncomfortable, maddening chaotic. Presence is a dynamic state.

What I have noticed, for myself and others, is true transformation can only ever come from being consistent. There are no magic bullets. Living is a consistent dedication to be in our ever-changing physicality, underpinned by the myriad threads of truth and divinity.

Perhaps we could call this the difference between embodied and disembodied living. Ease and disease. Can we live with being diseased and still be at ease. Yes. We can. It’s about what is infiltrating the many processes that make up a body and how the body interacts with environment. Inside and outside. The waves of congruence create a more harmonic resonance. This is important. Because likely that we have become so used to discordance, and then don’t know how to look in and feel. The air we breathe, the people we see, the landscapes we tread upon and across, remind us too of relationship.

Environment and ease.

Breath is life. To breathe well is to live well. This journey is a never ending one. Because in the human experience, every day might present a different challenge. And goodness knows we need reminders.

P.S - Need a breather? Check out my most popular podcast episode - 20 minutes of guided coherent breathing