Breath

And Miracles

“If you knew, as I do, the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing some of it.” - The Buddha (more or less)

Greetings all,

Today I find myself fascinated by the idea of breath and tension.

Most of the time, our basic way of physically interacting with the world is: “I tense my muscle and push the thing to make it move.”

Yet, when breathing, the diaphragm tenses to open the space where the lungs reside, and when that happens, the air simply rushes in to fill them. This is due, of course, to atmospheric pressure. The diaphragm doesn’t MAKE anything happen; it retreats to create space for a movement that its existence normally keeps at bay.

When the diaphragm relaxes, the air is pushed outwards into the world as well as, through the aerioli, inwards into the bloodstream. I imagine tiny molecular-sized openings in the capillaries of the aerioli where the flowing stream of mixed gases brushes up seductively against the blood cells, letting the exchange of goods happen naturally. An “open air marketplace,” if you will, where everything is free, and both sides need what the other one has.

So the breath is, first, a muscular contraction that creates a space to receive the new and facilitate its exchange, then, secondly, a relaxation where what remains, now mixed with the old, is pushed both outwardly and inwardly. The proper elements go in the proper direction because of the breath’s burning desire to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen.

If you doubt your breath has a burning desire, try stopping it for a moment or two…

But the only activity actually happening is opening to receive what is freely given, followed by a giving back of what is no longer needed. And to be more precise, what is received is something that other beings (trees) already have too much of.

It’s a beautiful system.

I am reminded of those admittedly somewhat sappy new-age memes showing a nebula and an eye, or a galaxy and a web of neurons, or a tree and a lung, with captions like “as within, so without,” or “as below so above,” or “the universe makes the same things everywhere.”

I am also reminded of the seaslug that somehow takes chloroplasts from the algae it eats to use for its own inner photosynthesis.

All this makes me dream of a tree growing within my own body, each branching airway of my lungs matched by one of its twisting limbs, an interface of exchange woven so deeply within my body that the giving and the receiving happen simultaneously, in perfect harmony.

But I fear that I’m too complex a life form for such implantation and synthesis. What works for single cells and sea slugs is sadly not an option for this so-called homo sapien.

Instead, I am going to have to rely on the perfect harmony that is life already is: the atmospheric pressure perfectly balanced to my diaphragm’s ability to hold it at bay while relaxed; the over-production of oxygen by the trees at a rate that balances my own over-production of carbon dioxide; the fact that all needs, if given their due acknowledgement and enough connection to the system as whole, seem to give rise to a natural fulfillment.

We truly live within a miracle. How blessed we are.

And the breath teaches us how to live within that miracle properly. We use the tension of our activity to create a lack, guaranteeing that it will one day be met and fed, if connected properly to the wider system as a whole. And then, once the lack has been filled to a relatively acceptable degree, we relax the tension and, by so doing, give what is no longer needed back to the system that is supporting us.

Beautiful.

Looked at this way, our current obsession with consumption (whether of food, goods, internet content, work hours, business profits, or any other addiction) seems absurd. We are currently engaged in a centuries-long game of tensing to inhale and inhale and inhale, and we and the whole planet are beginning to go rather blue in the face because of it.

It’s such a dumb idea: if breathing in gives us oxygen, this must mean we should always be breathing in as much as we can. Forget about that whole “breathing out” thing, that whole “relaxing” thing, that whole “giving back what we no longer need for the benefit of the whole” thing.

What’s going to become of our race of in-breathers? The coming return of our communal outbreath may be powerful, especially if we come to it of our own free will. It may even be a whole new kind of miracle. But if we instead tense ourselves into unconscious collapse, if we fail to be brave enough to allow that relaxed breathing out of what we no longer need, then I fear a lot of things may go unconscious with us.

Which is a pretty tragic way for this all to end up.

And while I’m tempted to say “Well, but who doesn’t like a good tragedy?” I also cannot deny the response: “The people to whom it happens.”

So, let’s all breathe together. Let’s focus on our outbreath and making it a conscious offering to the system as a whole. And as we do, let’s think about what other offerings we are overly-full of, offerings that others might find useful, and let us begin sending those offerings out into the world.

I know this newsletter is one of mine.

What’s yours?

All the best,
Ian Reclusado
of The Kind Knife

"If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would the stain of selfishness overcome their minds. Even if it were their last bite, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared, if there were someone to receive their gift. But because beings do not know, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they eat without having given. The stain of selfishness overcomes their minds." - The Buddha (exactly)