Breathing to Move 2: Air

It was a grey chill of a day here on the farm. A dull sky leaked icy drips. Grey stubble pecked through chunks of snow stubbornly bunched against the rain. The forest brown seemed spiky and unkempt. A creeping cold seeped into bones where it pooled in cooling reservoirs.

I went for a walk. With the right wrapping, there is never a reason not to, short of a blinding blizzard or hail by the handful. Then again, it wasn’t really a choice. I didn’t just want to go for a walk. I had to. In the open air. Several times a week at least. Why?

It is not about firing up muscle tissue and burning calories (as if my body were a machine to maintain). It is not about putting my body through its paces (as if it were a large pet). Nor is it about seeing the scenery, though I have had memorable viewing moments on such days (as when a grey shroud focused my attention down to a Queen Anne’s lace shriveled tightly around a gleaming tear drop, or when ashen trunks appeared before me, tracking skyward, their vertical rails receding into the mist).

The need to walk comes from somewhere else—from what walking awakens in me. The movement of walking, legs and arms, fingers to toes, shifts my experience. It releases me from the rooms of my mind, and into the sensory reaches of my bodily being. Something wakes up, and I know: I am not a mind living over and against a body. I am the movement that is making me.


How does this happen?

Walking I must breathe, more deeply than before. Oxygen rich pulses prod my senses to life. I start feeling what I am feeling. I notice the pain in my back. The ache in my shoulder. The cramp in my heart. As I notice, my breath follows my gaze, finding in that discomfort a span of awareness whose potential for enabling my walking I am about to discover. It is a call to move.

Breathing down into the earth (see last week’s Action), I feel the press of the ground on the soles of my feet, up through my legs, resisting me, releasing whatever discomfort I am feeling into the waves of my walking.

Swinging, landing, rolling through, with each step I breathe again. Into the earth and then, from that grounded place, I open up to the world around me. I breathe myself wide, out beyond the surfaces of skin, filling and spilling over the outline of my bodily self. I pass through my senses, uncurling them into a world rich with possibility. I come to life. Life comes to me. I smile.

What do I see and hear and smell and taste and touch?

I live in a rural place, known for its rolling meadows, forested hills, quiet ponds, and gurgling brooks. We moved here two years ago to live farther from the clamor of consumer culture, in closer contact with the rhythms of the natural world. Yet it soon became clear. Nature is far from the pastoral balm we imagine it to be. The natural world is brutally alive, hurling itself moment by moment into the future. It is constant birth and death and becoming. Unrelenting creativity.

This is what I sense as I walk: movement. The self-creating movement of all that is. There is no one sense for it—but it is all I sense, in every sense. Every day here is different. The very same spots and sights look, smell, taste, sound different than before. I am struck by these changes, and as my senses come to life, I notice more of them. The tracks in the snow, the matted clouds, the trees thinning day by day against the arc of hillside, preparing for the instant they will shade into auburn tones then explode in color.

I am shocked by this great green growing, even when locked in the grip of winter. And shocked once again by the blast of recognition that soon follows. I am a part of this great green growing. It is alive in me, in the movement of my senses, in the movement of my walking. My movement, walking-breathing-beating-attending, is making me.

Walking, awake to my movement, I find that I am no longer rearranging old ideas. New thoughts shoot up from below, from within. Every surface, organ, and limb is creating images, patterns of sensation and response--possibilities for thinking and feeling, understanding and acting that I did not have before my walk. Knotty problems loosen, threads unwind. I learn from them what that have to teach me about how to untie them. My movement is making me.

This is why I walk. I walk to know that I am part of this great growing green—and to know it not only in the sense of thinking that I am, but to know it in my sensory awareness, as I participate in it, thinking new thoughts, feeling new feelings, following the impulse to move in song or dance. I walk to find my freedom—to cultivate a sensory awareness of my ability to respond to the challenges in my life. I walk for this shift in experience. To know I am, becoming.

Without such movement, what we can imagine shrinks to an imitation of what we have already thought.

We cannot will such a shift; only invite it. And one way to do so, whatever we are doing, is by moving through the cycle of breaths. 

Action:
What kinds of activities do you do that bring your senses to life?
What kinds of movements awaken you to a heightened sense of your own possibility?

Whatever they are, experiment with the following breaths as a way to enrich your experience. 

Where the earth breath (last week) grounds you in the present, helps you drop your sensory wraps, and allows you to feel what you are feeling, the air breath opens up the sensory dimensions of yourself so that you have space to unfold what you are feeling and thinking, turn it over, examine it from different angles, allow it to grow into new shapes.

Try it. (Are you breathing?) Begin with an earth breath. When you breathe in, follow your breath in through your heart, flooding it with white light. As you exhale, let all tension, hope, fear, and effort you that are holding drop onto the ground. Release your sense of weight. Allow your limbs to hang loosely. You are plumbing for a deeper strength.

Breathe again. This time, sense air streaming into the nose and mouth, throat and chest, and rippling through your bodily core. As you exhale, imagine that air expanding to fill every cell of your bodily self. Every organ, fiber and fold is filling and spilling over with clear, clean, cleansing air. Feel how light you are. How empty. How full.

Breathing in, follow your breath into your heart, and out through your body to its edges. Allow an image to form of this length of skin, the surfaces where the air filling you spills over into space.

As you breathe out, imagine this skin as porous mesh, a translucent web of tissue connecting inner and outer, self and other, sense and world. As you breathe in and out again, allow this sense of skin to dissolve in currents of air passing through you. Sense how open and light you are. Free. All that exists are the soles of your feet, pressing down against the ground, and up against this light. Trust that ground to support the vulnerable expanse of skin. Watch what unfolds within.

Move back and forth between the breaths. What do you discover?

Next week: fire breath