And so, Breathe…

Twenty years ago my mother was dying of cancer. One night I was staying with her at my childhood home and I’m in her bedroom trying to calm her down and get her to understand her tablet regimen. Every time I’d get to the end of explaining the sequence of pills she needed to take, she would become agitated and confused and ask me to explain again. I was exhausted and at my wits end. Eventually, after quite some time, I realised that explanations wouldn’t help; she needed a practical tool to calm down, so I got her to focus on her breath. Really simple: inhale; exhale, repeat. It worked, and after a little while, she was settled enough for me to be able to go back to bed and sleep.

At the time I wasn’t practising yoga but I had read about breathing meditation in the books of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher. After Mam died, the black hole of grief sucked me into sleeplessness on many nights and focusing on my breath (breathing in I am calm; breathing out I am safe) was one of the only ways I could stop the terror of loss and get some rest. Later, as a yoga student and teacher, I came to understand that breathing deeply is a centering practice, and that using the breath is alchemical and transformative.

Not only does your breath have the capacity to shift your brain wave; it alters your nervous system to bring about quiescence and ease.

I’ve been practising yoga almost daily now for over eighteen years. Sometimes my practice feels easy and flowing and friendly. Other days it’s disjointed and cumbersome and my body hurts. But if I stick with it, whether the process has felt heavy and slow, or light and happy, at some point I get to the same place, I come home to myself. And that’s why yoga is magic. Because it delivers me to a place of wholeness and integration, a place where the wrinkles are ironed out and I can breathe smoothly. A place where I can name my feelings and accept them, and in the naming and accepting; feel whole.

soothing unease

This morning though, I woke up agitated and upset. My jaw was tight and tension radiated throughout my body. Since I’ve just started my period I decided to meditate rather than do my usual physical practice. I’m not going to pretend that I dropped right into one-pointed consciousness, in fact, I don’t even know if that’s possible, but sin scéal eile, as we say in Irish. My mind was all over the place, my breathing was shallow and my jaw was coiled. I had to force myself to stay present with sensation, rather than get caught up in thoughts, memories, projections and unprocessed hurts.

After a few minutes, I remembered to slow my breath down. As my awareness anchored in the flow of my breath the rhythmic movement created entrainment, pacifying my system. Not too long after that my whole body softened and I started to cry and as the tears (and snot) rolled down my face I began to feel much, much better. Like the day is possible, freedom and expansion are possible and I can be at ease.

One of the hardest things about difficult emotions is that they can make us feel apart from ourselves. I know something is wrong but I can’t figure out exactly what it is, won’t really let myself feel it. Although I’m a ball of tension and I can describe the events that have led up to this ongoing moment of unease, I can’t quite identify what I’m feeling. And this inability makes me feel estranged from myself, which compounds my overall negative state.

And so the cycle escalates. Not my highest vibe!

The freedom that yoga practice gives, while it’s not an instant fix-all, is a portal to self-knowledge, and from this place of feeling integrated and connected I can figure out what’s going inside and what to do about it.

Sometimes the answer is to accept and move on, other times it tells me to make an appointment with my therapist or talk to a friend. Sometimes it’s ‘do more practice’, and not infrequently it’s ‘fuck it, let’s pour a glass of wine and listen to some tunes’!

The self-knowledge that yoga yields comes from slowing down and observing yourself. Yoga is often translated as ‘union’ and the primary union is with ourselves, the teaching being that when we integrate our own being, integration with others is possible. It’s hard to be integrated when you feel agitated and ungrounded. This is one of the reasons why breath is so central to yoga practice, be it meditation or physical practice. Breath is the great pacifier, think of all the times you’ve heard ‘just take a breath.’ We don’t need to practice yoga to know the importance of the breath for our wellbeing, we are intrinsically aware that it is the very life force itself.

Expanding your field of awareness to include your breath causes your breath to slow down and your mind to feel a little more spacious. Soon you start to feel calmer and tuned in to your internal environment. More at home in your being. Our yogi ancestors understood that this feeling of integration and undifferentiated presence was the goal of all practice and that is why attention to the breath is so central to yoga. The breath is the elixir, the portal to the sanctum santorum within.

the true meaning of yoga

Another way to think of what ‘yoga’ means is: yoga is happening when you get to experience yourself as beyond the noise in your head, the constant stream of thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories and sensations that holds you captive and causes feelings of separation and alienation. The place in yourself that is beyond all those ever-changing fluctuations is a place of wholeness and integration. It’s the yogi’s true nature, expansive and part of the great cosmic tapestry.

The truth is you don’t have to have a formal yoga practice to get to this place. It’s who you are when you come home to yourself. All the other stuff is distraction. You might get there by simply gazing at the sea, watching the movement of the tide. Or maybe you bake, and the complete absorption you find in your craft drops you into total oneness with the act of kneading dough. Maybe it’s running, or painting. Whatever it is, it’s that thing that makes you YOU, that lights you up and makes you shine.

Below is a practice for dropping in and unifying, please enjoy…

Wherever, wherever you feel carried away,

Rejoicing in every breath,

There, there is your mediation hall.

Cherish these times of absorption ---

Rocking the baby in the silence of the night,

Pouring water into a crystal glass,

Tending the logs in a crackling fire,

Sharing a meal with a circle of friends.

Embrace the pleasures and know,

“This is my true body.”

Nowhere is more holy than this.