The Art of Being Breathed

“Our chest, rising and falling, knows that the strange verb “to be” means more simply “to breathe”; it knows that the maples and the birches are breathing, that the beaver pond inhales and exhales in its own way, as do the stones and the mountains and the pipes coursing water through the ground under the city.”

                                              -David Abram, Becoming Animal

All day, without thinking about it, you breathe.
All night, while you sleep, without trying, you breathe.
If you stop breathing, you stop being.

The longest any human has been known to hold their breath was twenty-four minutes and three seconds. Most people begin to lose brain cells after five minutes of oxygen deprivation. Each of your more-than-thirty-seven trillion bodily cells respires. The oxygen you inhale is the exhale of around three trillion trees. The carbon dioxide you exhale, along with over seven-and-a-half billion people, is the inhale of the trees. You don’t do any of this on purpose. You are being breathed.

When you’re in a state of deep relaxation, the experience of breath is effortless receptivity, the sense of being held, nurtured, loved into being. Have you ever felt this? If you haven’t, you might be in a pattern of chronic stress or trauma. If you are working hard to breathe, if your breath is labored, if your breath is stuck only in your upper chest or only down in your belly, if it’s not a dynamic, flowing, jelly-fish of undulation, you’re fighting your own nature, even if entirely unintentionally.

We are taught to fight it, sometimes from day one. Sit up before you’re ready, hurry and crawl, now sit still, don’t cry, stay in your desk, stop talking, don’t touch that, hold back who you are. All of these patterns cause you to hold your breath, to hold your diaphragm (the dome-shaped primary breathing muscle in the center of your torso) in a state of constantly-almost-but-not-quite-there-yet.

Anxiety is often accompanied by short, incomplete breaths. Depression is often accompanied by slow, incomplete breaths. Fear is often associated with entirely holding one’s breath. How much in the last couple of years have you felt anxious, depressed or afraid? How have you been breathing?

Supportive breath is not one more thing to add to your to-do list. Breath is something to receive. In a world full of scarcity mindset, this can seem impossible to even imagine. There’s an essential life-force that’s not only freely available, it doesn’t require you to work for it at all. Your innate intelligence knows how to receive it fully, with grace. It’s actually the first thing you did upon being born; you SCREAMED, you cried, you filled your lungs with the burning ache of life, the rush of oxygen that will sustain you forevermore, until your last exhale when you settle back into dust. Even if your birth story was a little touch-and-go, your being here is prove that you eventually got around to breathing.

Indigenous writer and teacher Martín Prechtel writes about the grief inherent in this first breath, the loss of the watery sanctuary of the womb and the ever-present rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat. Breath is one of the deepest ways to process grief. When we let it flow, our lungs instinctively heave, moving breath through in great, undulating waves until we are again at one with the world, giving our cries as thanks for the brief and harrowing trip we’re on in human form. Breath is our divine guide.

Sit with your back against a tree. Don’t try to do anything, just feel. The longer you sit there, the greater grows the invitation to breathe with the Earth, with the tree.

Lay on your back and place your hands on your lower ribs. Don’t try to change anything, just feel your breath. Your body is wise. Your nervous system knows how to self-reflect and self-correct. Just notice how your breath is moving your hands, a little or a lot, and say, “Thank you body, for receiving breath.”

Have you lost faith in yourself, in your life, in the way that life supports you to be here? Return to your breath. Without thinking, without force, without any conscious productivity, you are being breathed. It may not be a perfect pattern, it may feel like work, feel uneven, feel slow like a tortoise or fast like a hare, but the fact remains that if you are reading this, you are breathing. If you have faith in nothing else, have faith in that