The Cycle of Breaths: Revealed

I have called upon the cycle three times now, to help us sort through our desires for food, sex, and spirit, so that we can discern what it is these desires are trying to teach us about how to move in ways that will synchronize our health and well being. Each time, I have given an example of how to use it, when to use it, but I have not explained how and why it works.

So why does it work? Why should bending my attention to four measly breaths have any effect at all?

We are so practical. So rational. We want concrete proof before we try a new thing. So we surf for the ratings, the reviews, the consumer reports. We don’t want to be had. We don’t want to waste our time. We want to be informed. We want more.

Me too. So here I am, speaking to the rationalist in me.

The cycle of breaths works. Why?

1. A breather. Most basically, it provides us with a time out. The sheer fact of pulling our attention away from what we are doing for a mere 60 seconds can give us the space we need to reconsider our initial impulses, our emotional habits, our ingrained patterns of sensation and response. Such time and space is crucial—not so that we can attain mastery over ourselves or our desires, but so that we can stay in touch with our freedom. We want to be free to sense and respond in the moment and to the moment in ways that coordinate all of who we are and have been with what is going on now. The cycle of breaths gives us a minute to breathe.

2. A paradigm for problem solving. As a breather, the cycle of breaths is far from unique. Anything that times us out could serve the same function. The cycle of breaths is unique, however, in how it occupies that time. It provides us with a paradigm for problem solving—that is, for solving the kinds of problems that arise with the eruption of a tangled, frustrated, or otherwise very intense sensation of desire.

The cycle of breaths does this by leading us through four different perspectives on whatever it is we are feeling. With each shift in perspective, we find a bit more wiggle room. It is like trying to untie a knot, when you turn it one way and pull, then another and then pull again. It is the shifting from one perspective to another that helps us find our freedom in the moment—not freedom from our desires, but freedom to discern what they are telling us.

This paradigm works something like this. (Earth) Find your ground; steady yourself in the moment. (Air) Open up the feeling, and explore its reach and depth. (Fire) Find where that desire connects with what is most real and true for you; clarify its and your fiery core. (Water) Release that truth, let it flow, and listen for impulses to move. Repeat as needed.

3. Elemental reminders. This paradigm, however, is not your average formula for solving problems. It doesn’t direct us to fixate on an object or a thing or even on a part of ourselves. As we cycle through the breaths, it is the fact of paying attention to a force—a creative, elemental force that is making us who we are—that trips open each perspective.

We are always pushing against and being pushed up by the ground. We are always filling and emptying ourselves with air. We are always simmering in our vital core, and we are always flowing with the fluids passing in and through us. We are these elemental movements whether or not we pay attention to their rhythms. They are who we are. But when we do pay attention to them, we inevitably enhance our experience of them; we can deepen our engagement with them, and we can use these forces as resources for helping us create ourselves anew in the moment.

How? This recreation is subtle but strong. Just remembering that we walk on earth can help us let go of extraneous burdens we may be carrying. Just remembering that we are breathing, can give us a felt sense of the movement in our lives. Just attuning to our fiery core can give us a sense of agency and possibility. Just feeling the flow of our own blood and breath and fire and feelings can help us affirm our capacity to create, to become, and to move in ways that will not recreate whatever discomfort we are feeling.

Practicing this cycle, then, is not about imagining what might be true, or pretending that what we want to be true already is so, or conjuring up visions of spirits and entities from a parallel world to grant us our desires. It is rather about tapping into and releasing the ever present, ongoing, creative potential inherent within our moving bodies.

4. A catalyst for sensory awareness. Of course, as I have been saying all along, the cycle of breaths helps us cultivate a sensory awareness of the movement that is making us. Here I add that it does so because of the three qualities listed above.

Yet there is more here too. For when we allow ourselves to feel our connection to the ground, our breathing, our fiery core, our creative flow, we are drawn into a different experience of ourselves, others, and the worlds. Our whole sense of being in the world shifts, and we find that we are no longer operating out of a mind over body perspective.

This effect is the most powerful, for it carries with it the most radical possibilities. It is also the one that can only be confirmed through practice. With this shift in experience, we have what we need to discern wisdom in our desires. We have the sensory awareness to recognize our desires, the space and time and paradigm for honoring them as containing wisdom, the sense of freedom and creativity that enables us to notice the impulses to move they represent. And at that point, it just happens. We are able to feel and receive impulses to move in ways that will not recreate our dissatisfaction.

At that point, it is a mystery. Just as we never really know why or how an idea pops into our mind, so we can never really grasp why or how an impulse to move does either. What we do know, is that when we cultivate this vulnerability something will happen, and that something will emerge from, as an expression of, the sensory awareness we are cultivating. We will move in love.
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At its best, religion works in similar ways. It is not a matter of right belief or doctrine. Religion works and we believe when the movements we make as a member provide us with the breather, the paradigms for problem solving, the elemental reminders, and the sensory awareness that empower us to participate consciously in the rhythms of our own bodily becoming, creating a world we love that loves us.

Next week: More on religion. Or, why, in creating ourselves, we create the world.