Breathing to Move 1: Earth

I was in the library, glancing through the “New Nonfiction” shelf, passing time until the end of my son Jordan’s stage band rehearsal. “The Secret” caught my eye. Having heard so much about it, I took a look. I found it fascinating and troubling all at once. Sure we can embrace the power of our thoughts in creating our reality; we can ask for what we want and be grateful for what we have. Still, the teaching presumes that we know what we want. Do we?

Here, I find, is where our imagination is decidedly limited. We are so well trained to think and feel and act as if we are minds operating in and over bodies, that we have lost touch with our senses, with what we are feeling--with the movements that are making us. We rely on technology to tell us. We look around us and see what other people have and decide to want what they do. We are not alive to the creativity of our own bodily movement.

When we lose our senses, life loses its sense, for we no longer know who we are, where we are going, or what we want. What can we do?
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Traditions around the world recommend meditation as a practice for learning to listen to our inner selves. We sit quietly, focusing on an image, a sound, mantra, or the passing of our thoughts. We sift out the pressing concerns of the world to dial in to the deeper truths of our own being in the world.

However, if we are already living in our minds, such practices of meditation may reinforce the distance from our senses that is preventing us from knowing what is true for us in the first place. Sitting may stop the barrage of noise we experience in daily life, but do little to awaken our senses to new possibilities. For that, we need to move. We need practices that will bring our senses to life—not only the usual five, but also our sense of being a breathing, beating, becoming body, moving in space and time.

To sense is to move—an eye scans, an ear drum trembles, skin tingles. What we sense is itself moving—the waves of light and sound, frequencies of taste and touch, the brush and heft of weight. Thus, to bring our senses to life we must move our bodies in ways that exercise and awaken us to this movement of sensing and responding, and the constant flow of the elements into us, through us, becoming us.

When we can sense it, we can think it.
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In my explorations, I discovered a pattern of breathing that helps me bring sense to life. A pattern of four breaths came to me one day as I was swimming in a mountain lake. Each breath invites us to pay attention to a different element—earth, air, fire, water. Doing so, I swam as I never had before. I knew: my movement, breathing and attending, is making me into someone who can swim this way.

Since then I rely on the breaths daily to draw me into the present of whatever I am doing, and sift through the wisdom in sensations of pain, frustration, and despair. They are funding a new philosophy of bodily movement.

I share the first breath today, with others to follow in the weeks ahead.

Action:
To begin, just breathe. Pay attention to the air entering your nostrils. Feel the air pass through the back of your mouth, stream down your throat, and into your expanding chest. Every breath enters your heart, passes through your heart, and picks up whatever is there on the way to the rest of your body. Our sensations and desires, our feelings about them.

Sense your ribs lift and lower, your belly softly open and release.

Breathe in. Breath out. Take another breath into your bright white heart, and as you release the air out again, open your sensory awareness to notice the points where your body is connecting with the earth, or at least with the chair or floor that connects you and the earth. Where do you touch down?

Follow the movement of the air through your heart and into your body down to your points of contact with the ground. Rest your consciousness around those sites. If you are sitting, feel your sit bones pressing on the chair. Feel the chair pressing back. Feel your feet on the floor, or tucked under you. Feel one leg pressing across the other. Feel the small of your back against the chair.

Take a breath into your heart, and again, as you exhale, send the breath down to those points of contact. Imagine the points together, forming an image of your connection to the earth—of where you are. Breathe alive this matrix of sensory moments.
Feel the earth pressing up to keep you up.

Keep breathing. Sense flesh hanging loosely on bones like soft drapes. Empty all thinking, feeling, and sensing, hopes, fears, and expectations, wanting, judging, and yearning. Surrender it all into the ground. Stop holding yourself up. Feel the earth as your strength. Feel the earth in you as your strength. Feel this sensation of earth in you as your strength, enabling you to become who you are.

Know. There is not a moment in our lives when the body of the earth is not supporting us, holding us up, enabling us to stand and walk and breathe and be. The ground may shudder in an earthquake. It may fall away beneath us in quicksand. We may launch ourselves into the water; or propel ourselves high above the ground in elevator or airplane. But even so there is some point of contact where the forces of gravity pin us to the earth. Hold us up by holding us down.
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This breath is the first of four. When we ground down and release into the earth, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we open up a new sensory perspective of our movement in that moment.

Try it. When it comes to mind, practice the earth breath. Perhaps you are driving, or folding laundry, or walking to work, or shelving books. Perhaps you are talking with a friend or colleague, reading the paper, or playing a sport. Take a breath into your bright heart and release it into the shape of your contact with the ground. Where are you? Where is your strength? What is holding you up? What do you notice? What new thoughts can you think?

You are here, now—your breathing movement is making you into someone who can and does feel and think in this way. What do you want? What does the earth in you want?

Next week: Air