by Richard Dance

Created on: February 17, 2007   Last Updated: May 11, 2007

Just Breathe

It was the first thing you ever did on your own. It will be the last thing you ever do. It's what you instinctively begin any new project with, and what you do when you finish a big project. It's what automatically happens when someone asks you a deep question, and is your first natural reaction to an unexpected surprise.
It is something you do best with eyes closed and brain turned off for eight hours, silently preparing for another 16 hours of eyes opened and brain turned on, when you probably don't do it so well.

Its pattern or tempo changes with your mood, reminding you to accept change. You usually take it for granted, only becoming aware of it when it isn't working.
It is your most intimate connection with plants, exchanging vital substances that you both require to stay live. It is integral to the process of getting nutrients to and removing wastes from every cell in your body.

It is what allows a veteran singer to be heard in the back row of a concert hall with no microphone. It makes flutes simulate soaring birds and saxophones purr like big cats, which in turn makes slow dancers groove as one.

It is how you complete your orgasm. With some training, you can use it to send your sexual energy to other than the usual places. In creation myths it is what God uses to jumpstart the whole world.

The Taoists call it chi, the Hindus and Buddhists prana, and the Sufis nafs. In the West our word "spirit" is from the Latin spirare, "to breathe." Breathing is basic to life and fundamental to meditation practice, simply because it is so immediately noticed.

Sitting still in meditation, we become very aware of our breathing, which continues to move. This gives us the experience of stillness and movement together, like the inner edge of a wheel rotating around the stationary axle, or the winds that swirl around the calm eye of a hurricane.

It is good to feel pairs of opposites at the same time. The paradox of simultaneous stillness and movement in breathing meditation teaches us about the phenomenon called becoming, which has to do with the present moment.
The past is what has happened and is no longer associated with movement. The future is what is anticipated, also unrelated to movement. Movement has only to do with whatever is present and continually becoming. In breathing meditation we are in the moving present moment, that mysterious non-time and non-place, so subtle and powerful that great world teachers likened it to the spiritual dimension itself. And here it sits in the world of linear time that the logical mind thinks is running from future to past! We are simply fooling ourselves if we believe movement flows in from the future and is then added to the past.

Socrates told us that wisdom is "perception of motion" from a point of stillness. When we understand and accept paradoxeslike stillness in movement-our life attitude, our worldview, becomes less sophomoric, more sophisticated.

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