Blog #2: Breathing: The Destroyer of Inner and Outer Space

"Open up space in your abdomen. Use the power of your mind."

These words are uttered from the meditation leader's mouth. They travel thousands of miles west to east across North America and by the power of Zoom's audio/video processing they emerge from my speakers. These calm words – a command nonetheless – spark a reaction of neurons in my head. Eyes closed, I can feel his words enter my flesh and become my own: my core relaxes and opens like a tent.

There's more room inside my body. There's another room inside my body. I know it's a new place because when my mind steps inside I'm no longer hearing the sweltering breeze rustling the tree outside. No, the rustling is happening inside my gut, as if I am a great blue whale that swallowed a canopy, each rustle is pressure on my organs. Wind sneaks through the window-screen, up my t-shirt, caressing every one of my tens of thousands of belly hairs – My belly! My gut! My belly is the planetary surface for microbes whom I'll never see nor understand! My belly hairs – Tim Burton redwoods forever and ever!

My thinking continued in a similar vein until the meditation's end.

I'm continually astonished by how pranayama (breath-work) can function not only as a tool for relaxation, but as a vehicle for traversing unknown mental-states; how the steady breath can allow the mind to delve into new psychosomatic territory. The mind experiences this phenomena all the time, like when it's absorbed in a great book, movie, or conversation. The quality of this state is always the same: extra-sensory contact with an imaginary world, always corresponding with a full and easy breath. But what pranayama teaches is how the breath can be used to consciously enliven life's mundane affairs; how commuting on the subway, buying a latte at Dunkin' Donuts, or sitting at a desk in silence can be as profound periods of self-exploration as reading your favorite page-turning novel.

To elucidate on this claim, here is a quote from Paulo Coelho's novel The Alchemist:

"The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon."

It's from a parable told within the narrative, about a young boy who journeys to a castle in the desert which contains an endless quantity of artworks and treasures. The archetypal wise man who lives here hands the boy a spoonful of oil, telling him not to spill it as he explores. Naturally, the boy gawks at everything and spills it all without thinking. The boy is given the task again, and this time he succeeds in not spilling it, but to do so he only focuses on the spoon and pays no mind to the sights.

I love how this parable externalizes the boy's mind; the oil in the spoon a metaphor for inner equilibrium; the awesome palace a metaphor for the limitless beauty and depth in the outer world. The argument is that to enjoy it as such, we cannot neglect one for the other. Lack inner equilibrium and consciousness morphs into a rush of data and meaning that can never be absorbed enough to be enjoyed. Lack awareness of the outer world and consciousness mutates into a sludge of worry and self-absorption that pushes all possibility out to the periphery.

To code colors onto these two states of consciousness: the former is like a frenzy of sharp primaries, the latter like a static white that truth-told is grey. Neither is close to the full spectrum of life.

When I find myself stuck on one side or the other, I'm often reminded of another quote from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, 3:

"Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn."

Like a mathematical formula, it argues that if one of these two variables is missing, then the whole problem of happiness is unsolvable.

How does this relate to pranayama? To breathing? Because the reality of the breath is more than a life-force; it is the ever-present mediator between the inner and outer worlds. Breathing in, the fabric of the room fills my body, and I see that the eggshell white wall is not as drab and pointless as I presume – in fact – it's a surface as unknowable and mysterious as the Moon's. Just as mysterious as these hands in front of me! All their fleshy potential, the same as James Baldwin's or Plato's or the first stone-cutting humans... And their equal capacity for burning, murder, endless distraction... Breathing out, my worries are released from my tense shoulder blades and disperse up above my head: "Your friend will never love you again", "You have no idea what you're doing", "Your efforts writing this blog are in vain! Vain!" – and I remember: these worries have never belonged to me alone. They are all weightless fragments, the ceaseless reminders of my own human soul. And behind all this chatter is the ever-present silence in my body: my lungs oscillating, my brain neuro-networking, my heart beating along, and me doing nothing to keep them going. Nothing, nothing at all.

I breathe in, holding it steady without thinking or trying. I breath out, knowing no distinction between the palace within and the palace without. The next great art is always one thought away. What else is there to think?

I breath in–