Breath As Life & Reality

What if this is the breath? Life and reality.

There are philosophies that say it is so but this is not a learned awareness, perhaps it is more accurately unlearned.

In a practical sense, breath is life. It is our exchange with the environment around us but also our interconnection, our interrelation, a feeling and sensory physical lens through which we experience our reality...how is your experience in a moment vastly different if the breath is shallow or erratic vs. calm and long and relaxed?

There are many variations of possibility here. It also seems that many aspects of our modern day experience distort our breathing patterns...phones, t.v, processed foods, posture, unresolved emotional states and more. We have so much opportunity to move in a direction of wholeness and presence in our lives through our breath.

What does this mean? Opportunity for more balance and vitality as well as better physical health and slowing down. It is also about the opportunity for less stress, anxiety, worry, tension and contraction...and this list of possibilities ( more of or less of) is longer still.

In the book Radical Wholeness by Philip Shepherd, it is posited that our reality cannot be objectively known because it is essentially a system of relationships and ever-changing processes, but it can be a felt experience-this resonates with me so deeply. Our whole body has an intelligence but our Western, learned orientation is in the mind and tends to be separate from the body to varying degrees...our breath is not only a pulse of this whole body intelligence but a core part of the felt experience (subtly or not so subtly) in every moment.

We can always come back into balance through awareness and breath work techniques and we can shift learned patterns over time. In addition to this, we can entrain with and achieve coherence with our environment and with others and this is where a sense of more love and less separation also emerges; just wow!

My dogs respond to tone and posture, and overall energy that includes the patterns of the breath as well as what it transmits...they are eager to feel safe in a space of coherence and to respond and relate in this space. So much can be exchanged and felt between loved ones and any individuals who come into coherence and resonance of breath with each other. When we have been shifted out of balance and then find our way back to the breath and to the moment ourselves, honoring the intelligence of our whole system, the felt experience of our lives and reality is unmatched, incredible.

There is a creative spiral here that is never-ending in it's potential and it is also a part of the times we are in. I look forward to having you join me, or feeling your presence, in the discovery!