The Art of Breathing for All.
{Photo via Pinterest}
By Samantha Bronson
My breath is a gift.
I inhale deeply and allow every glorious breath to sing to each pore, follicle, cell of my body. I feel the air in the room fill my lungs until they overflow with a sigh of gratitude. I allow breath to consume me in rapture before letting it fade away again.
I walk outdoors and feel thankful for the oxygen-giving plants that surround me in my neighborhood, for all their life-giving and life-affirming properties as well.
Guidelines for living:
Take a deep breath. Ponder the space in your belly, chest, and then throat; allow them to ease into opening and then contract.
Draw energy from the earth with every inhale and project it to the sky — exhaling down, down, down, exhaling negativity to the soil — a container for the wounds of the living.
My favorite definition of breath (noun) is as follows: “an exhalation of air by a person or animal that can be seen, smelled, or heard.”
Breathing utilizes our senses. We can see it in children’s pictures scrawled in dewy drops of condensation. We can feel it during a warm embrace. We can hear the heavy exhale of relief as yogi masters release their worries.
Breath is the Bringer of Life, life-giving and life-affirming: oxygen that fortifies red blood cells with vitality, white blood cells with protectivity, organs with strength.
Did you know that when a mama and baby sleep snuggled up next to each other, her breath regulates that of her baby’s? She breathes calm safety, billowing resilience and helping her baby develop his nervous system. It is a fact that our organs need oxygen to function and preserve our life.
When they don’t receive the oxygen they need, they limit their function, the most intellectual move they could make in order to preserve what function they have with what’s available.
They wait, they hope for suitable levels of oxygen to return.
What happens when our organs are slowly deprived from oxygen? When we, so accustomed to shallow breaths, never give ourselves the gift of a full, pregnant breath? When shallow breath after shallow breath merely reaches our chests, never quite descending into our bellies? When breaths barely graze our throats, leaving us gasping for more?
We panic, feel anxious and hyperventilate. We suffer from stress, health issues and premature aging.
The Warrior that battles illnesses, the fountain of youth, the source of strength and resilience of our earthly bodies, is this breath. It is our connection to ourselves, and it is supplied to us by trees, and plants, and food — the many gifts of life.
We unfortunately live in a breathless society.
Addicted to the caffeinated, sugared, stressed adrenaline rush of shallow breathing, we sometimes feed off of disembodiment. We disconnect from our emotions and our surroundings. We push our spirit out in front of us and leave our bodies empty — abandoned.
Fast, shallow breaths cause higher cortisol levels, feeding into a burn-out loop that is common in Western society.
Shallow breath, anxiety, stress, running on empty while overextending ourselves through multiple projects that keep us even more stimulated. We disconnect from ourselves — from our breath, from our food, from animals, from plants. We exist in a bubble far away from that which sustains us.
We live in a breathless society, sometimes valuing cold concrete cities over lush foliage and edible foods. We segregate the source of our livelihood to industrial agriculture and factory farms managed by people other than us.
Some people may never have had the experience of gritty soil beneath their fingertips, have never had the gift of growing seedling to fruit. Some people may have never had the gift of a home, slow-cooked meal, as their access is limited to convenience stores and fast food restaurants.
Some may have never tasted the delicious vibrancy of freshly harvested organic vegetables or had the experience of cooking these for their families.
How can we shift our culture?
How can we help these practices become widespread and commonplace? How can we co-create a society in which we value our breath, and our being, and each other?
Deep breathing and connection to our source — the Earth — is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves and to others, each day.
In doing this, we give ourselves the gift of our life, our happiness, and our well-being.
*****
Samantha is a daydreaming rainbow-chasing pixie who believes in the spirit of cooperative living and connection to others and the earth. She has studied herbalism, permaculture, generational trauma, and cultural anthropology, and is inspired by the work being done around healing ourselves and our relationship to each other by connecting to our bodies and the Earth. She is a healer, an intuitive, a tarot card reader, as well as mama to a beautiful one-year-old small human. Passions include homesteading (nut milks, fermented foods, and gluten-free baked goods), aromatherapy, meditation, and of course… hugs!
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