Breath as Love

Someone who had been reading Breath Taking emailed me, saying they were really enjoying a certain page, p. 135. Turns out I needed to read this, myself. I write this stuff because I need to stay close to it. I write about what gives me life. This morning, meditating, I kept coming back to this simple way of experiencing the breath, and throughout the day, at odd moments, I am resting in this awareness.

Breath is a relationship, and when conscious, it can be a love relationship. Breath is an intimate exchange between the self and the world, tender, life-sustaining, a bodily embrace. With every inhale, your receive the touch of breath, you draw it into your body and it becomes part of you. What could be more intimate?

When you bring consciousness to breath, you also become aware of your obstacles to love, and you have a chance to work them through. Breath awareness thus gives you a chance to expand your capacity for loving. So much of loving is paying attention, cherishing, truly listening, really taking the other person inside, and not being defensive. You can learn much about all this by paying attention to the flow of breath.

Attention is love, says the poet Marge Piercy. It also seems that when we truly pay attention, we tend to fall in love. Love is a state of heightened appreciation, a condition in which we do not take the other for granted, we cherish them. Appreciation is to give value, and in love we give infinite value to the beloved.

Breath is the movement of love, the interpenetration of bodies Ü your body and the body of the Earth. When you love someone, you want them to be close, to be part of your life. They are in your heart. You want to hold them in your arms, tenderly. You may even want to share a breath with them. All this is happening between you and the planet with every breath, for all breaths are shared breaths. To take a deep breath is the same existential state as to receive love; you open up wide, you are moved, you receive the other, you take the beloved into you and make them part of your essence.

The part of your body that receives the breath is the area around the heart. When your lungs fill with the incoming air, your heart center is being caressed, stimulated, and nourished. You are bringing more circulation, more activity into the heart center. So all the issues of the heart are getting massaged as well. When your emotional heart is sore, bruised, you will feel it. If you have experienced pain in relationship, that hurt will be brought into awareness to be healed. Breath is the most gentle ointment of healing imaginable. Each breath encourages you to let go of fear, to let go into life, to allow more circulation between yourself and the world.

Breath is a tender embrace. The air holds you, even now, and you hold the air. Nothing stands still, everything flows in a delightful rhythm. There is an intimacy to breath that is almost terrifying. There is a substance that surrounds the Earth, an atmosphere of 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen, and we are totally dependent upon a continual supply of it. As a gift, breath comes inside your body and circulates through your blood, and becomes part of your cells. Then it flows out, purifying you.

Don’t be surprised that as you open to breath you experience all the issues of relationship: fear of intimacy, sorrow, “can I trust?” “Can I let go?” “Do I have to be on guard?” “Can I receive?” Can I open my heart to receive? Can I be generous with myself? Can I give?” There are issues of dependency and interdependency. We are more dependent upon breath than we have ever been on any human being. We are dependent upon the entire ecosystem. Truly facing this dependency is terrifying, as well as ecstatic. And there is no other way to awaken to the vastness of it al than to face the fear. Some day you will have to face it; why not now?

When you or I breathe out, we exhale carbon dioxide which the plants of the world inhale. They exhale oxygen that we inhale. This is a profound symbiotic intimacy.

When we breathe, we are in a bodily embrace with the world of air, which is shared by all the other living things on Earth. To breathe in is to receive love from the world, and be given life for another few minutes. To breathe out is to give love to the world, to give your essence.

You are being asked with each inbreath to be generous to yourself. To feed on life more generously, so that you can, in return, give more back. Breathing fully is one of the little ways to be generous to yourself you can engage in. Life is generous to us, and receiving its abundance is the least we can do.

Breath is the most intimate relationship you have. You receive something into your body, it mixes with your essence, and then it is given back. The movement of receiving and giving is a direct and immediate relationship with life - a concrete relationship with spirit and vitality.

When you breathe in, a wave of that primordial fusion flows into your body. Your lungs are a temple, sanctuary, a wide-open expanse of nature designed for this meeting. The lungs are more than a shoreline to receive the waves.

Breath is an intimate relationship with other human beings. All the issues of love are here Ü can I receive love and can I give it? Do I feel worthy to receive fully from life? How much sensation can I tolerate?

Experience Breath as Love

Explore this while walking, lying down, sitting – any time you can give over to your inner experience.

Receive Love

Welcome the air into your body as you inhale. Be there at the gateways the nostrils and the mouth, to greet the incoming stream of air. Be there to meet, to rendezvous, with the life-giving flow. This sounds so simple, and it is and it is the most profound meditation practice there is.

As you get the sense of greeting at the gateways, then allow your entire body to welcome the in-breath. Embrace it, and let yourself be changed by the inbreath. Allow yourself to be stretched inside, renewed, refreshed. We are changed by being loved. We have to expand to receive the generosity.

This is a paradox, because we have to embrace generosity, we have to allow that quality to live in ourselves in order to accept it from the world as breath. On the inhale, focus on receiving, receiving love, receiving this gift from life, and on your capacity to be filled with love. Soak up the love and let it fill your whole being. Receive breath as encouragement to you from the universe to go on living.

As you breathe in, realize that the world is giving you life for another few minutes. Receive this loving gift from life, and let it permeate you deeply. The love may feel one moment like food, the next a massage, then radiance, then tenderness, then a teaching.

Give Love

With each exhalation, the breath flows from your heart and belly out into the world. As the air flows, imbue it with your love. Consciously give yourself to this exhalation motion, and let the outbreath carry your love. Imagine that your love flows out to touch all the people you care about. Experiment and find out how generous that flow can be.

The Balance of Giving and Receiving

As you breathe in, track the motion of the air from your nostrils to your heart and belly. As you breath out, attend to the flow of air from your belly and heart area to your nostrils and on out into space. Breathing in, you receive the air; breathing out, you give it forth.

Take delight in the balance of receiving and giving. There is an exquisite sensation to this fine equilibrium. Put your attention on the balanced breath, on both sides. Are the inhalation and exhalation equal in depth, length, and the turns of each? Can you give in to the revelation of each? When the inbreath and the outbreath are equal there arises in the heart a sensation of freedom. Life is in balance. We all carry around with us an ache or longing, or the memory of an ache or longing, from when love was out of balance. When we allow it, breath will permeate this ache and heal it.

Breath reminds us, every couple of seconds, that we can’t breathe out more than we have breathed in, and we can’t breath in unless we have first breathed out. Breath is a teacher of balance, because the rhythm of it is so rapid, every few seconds. When love is working, notice that as you receive love, you have more to give. And as you give love, you prepare yourself to receive. It’s a play of opposites.

When in relationships we sense an imbalance, it is sometimes because we may feel that we are giving too much and not receiving enough, or we may feel guilty that we are receiving but not giving. In love relationships, this is often a problem. We can hurt just as much from having love to give that is not received as we do from wanting to receive. When there is balance, or balance of giving and receiving is restored, it is exquisite.

When you are breathing, you can bathe in the feeling of balance. You can cultivate your capacity to alternately receive and to give, with equal portions. Be aware that you are receiving as much as you give. If you tend to take, be aware you are giving as much as you take. If you find you have a lot of pain about giving, receiving, or both, spend some more time exploring these issues through breath, and perhaps with your friends. Go over these issues:

How do you feel about receiving?

How do you feel about giving?

Do you have trouble accepting a gift? Do you have trouble really giving? Both issues are reflected in the capacity to take a full breath or to exhale completely and let go.

(*There may be some slight differences between what is here and what's on the page in the book. This is from the unedited manuscript I submitted.)